BORIS JOHNSON: Biden’s right. America is the last, best hope of Earth against the continuum of evil now ranged against freedom and democracy
Joe Biden last night made one of the most important speeches we have heard from the Oval Office for years.
It was speech that could only have come from that desk, and a message that could not have been broadcast from any other capital but Washington DC.
It was a speech in which the Commander-in-Chief of the United States acknowledged what I believe is the reality, that in spite of all its faults, all its anguished introspection, all its absurdities, America is still the world’s greatest power and the last, best hope of earth.
In accepting the responsibilities that go with that role, the President channelled his heroic wartime Democrat predecessor Franklin D Roosevelt. “American leadership is what holds the world together,” he said.
He set out to explain why American leadership matters, and why, in Roosevelt’s phrase, the US must once again be the arsenal of democracy.
Boris Johnson has described Joe Biden’s address last night as ‘one of the most important speeches we have heard from the Oval Office for years’
His intended audience was not the people of the world, but the people – and above all the taxpayers – of America.
It is absolutely crucial that he should win this argument. There are some voices now in American politics – on Capitol Hill and elsewhere – who say that the price of this global leadership is now too high, and that America cannot bear the cost of supporting both Israel and Ukraine, and that in the face of the bestial attacks by Hamas, the time has come to cut funding for Ukraine.
President Biden took on these complaints, and turned them round – by rejecting the very notion of a choice. He made the essential point: that Hamas and Putin are engaged in the same basic project. Both are out to destroy the democracy next door; both are using terroristic methods.
In this analysis, the President is surely right.
The Hamas killers indulged in hideous savagery as they swept through southern Israel, of a kind I hope I do not need to describe; and so did Putin’s troops in the invasion of Ukraine. Torture, rape, the abduction of children – there is no moral difference between the techniques of terror used by Hamas and Putin’s troops.
America is still the world’s greatest power and the last, best hope of earth, Mr Johnson writes
But the similarities go further. It is no accident that Putin’s Russia has still not condemned the October 7 massacres, and it is no surprise that Putin has a close, friendly and strategic relationship with Hamas’s most important sponsors, Syria and Iran.
And whose drones are now being used to cause indiscriminate casualties in Ukraine? Iran’s – and Putin is taking them as fast as the Iranian factories can make them.
Whose cash finances all those rockets being fired at Israel, whether by Hamas or Hizbollah? Iran.
There is a continuum of evil, in which the assault on Western values and democracy is being mounted by what is effectively the same gang. Biden’s point to the American people is that we must stand up to that gang now, to save more pain later.
Let Putin win in Ukraine, and you endanger the Baltic states, Poland, the whole post-war settlement in Europe.
Let Hamas succeed in driving Israel to all-out war, and you risk the whole of the Middle East going up in flames. Make this defence commitment now, he argued, and you save money down the line. You make it less likely that America will be called upon to intervene again, with truly catastrophic expense.
Stand up to Putin, stand up to Hamas, and you will deter further acts of aggression around the world – and he was clearly indicating the risk of the Chinese attacking Taiwan. And when he said it was cheap, there was this extra sense: that he was supporting Israel and Ukraine without sending a single US solider to fight.
By the way, he said, don’t forget that the spending he is now asking Congress to authorise, both for Ukraine and Israel, will drive jobs in factories making missiles and artillery shells across the US.
In making this speech to the American people, Biden was doing something fantastically important – something I have been hoping to see for months: back-selling the American intervention to the people who fund it.
Hamas and Putin are engaged in the same basic project, says Mr Johnson. Both are out to destroy the democracy next door; both are using terroristic methods
I am proud of the role the UK has played in helping the Ukrainians. I accept that we and other European partners must show our American friends that we will do more. We will certainly have to shoulder more of the burden of rebuilding Ukraine.
But the UK and the whole European effort is dwarfed by America’s commitment; and it is the US munitions – with the ATACMs (Army Tactical Missile Systems) now arriving in Ukraine – that really hold out the prospect of delivering Ukrainian victory.
Everything has depended, and continues to depend, on American leadership, and so it is utterly vital to explain the meaning of that leadership to the American public – and to explain the difference between the Western liberal democracies and the coalition of evil that is now ranged against us.
Perhaps the best bits of the speech were about our values, about how we should reject all forms of hate and discrimination – whether anti-semitism or Islamophobia, and how important it was that Israel should not be blinded by rage into any disastrous or counter-productive act of retribution.
Those passages were important because these values – freedom, tolerance, democracy – are exactly what distinguish Israel from Hamas. They are what set apart Volodomyr Zelenskyy’s Ukraine from Putin’s Russia.
It is frankly incredible, and appalling, that some UK broadcasters have seemed to equate Hamas and Israel – to treat them as two belligerents; just as some countries spent far too long after the 2014 invasion of the Crimean Peninsula seemingly treating Russia and Ukraine as two equal parties to a quarrel, rather than seeing Putin’s invasion for what it was – a vicious attack by an autocracy on a nascent democracy.
I say to anyone thinking of joining pro-Palestinian protests this weekend: do you really want to suggest, by your actions, that the Israelis are the same as Hamas? Would you dream of suggesting that the Ukrainians are as guilty as Putin’s thugs?
Armed Palestinian terrorist kidnapped a man during the Supernova music festival, near Kibbutz Reim in the Negev desert in southern Israel
There is no moral equivalence between the two sides in this conflict, and it has been sickening to see how quickly some in the media jumped – wrongly – to blame Israel for the explosion at the hospital.
I will not claim that Biden’s speech was an oratorical tour de force, but he made the right moral distinctions, and his central message is correct.
In the last year I have spent a lot of time travelling, and though the world is changing fast it is striking that the rising powers – China and India – are also ancient centres of mass population, while the US, with its vastly higher productivity and per capita GDP is still relatively unpopulated.
The US is still in its infancy as a world power, and therefore likely to remain, for our lifetimes and beyond, the global hegemon – as Biden put it, “the essential nation”.
All human organisations need a leader. The global comity of nations is no exception; and since the UK can no longer realistically play that role, I would much rather have the US as leader than any of the other current candidates, and so would many others around the world.
It was good to hear a US President assert that leadership. Let’s help the right team win.
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