Joe biden

Friday

Daniel DePetris

Biden’s backhanded bid to kill Nord Stream 2

Washington, D.C. is universally known as a town divided, a place where compromise and dialogue are often sacrificed at the altar of competing agendas. But on one issue, at least, there is consensus: the 764-mile Nord Stream 2 pipeline that will pump Russian natural gas into Germany is a project that must be stopped. And the United States needs to use all of the economic and diplomatic tools at its disposal to do it. In both congressional testimony and in meetings with Nato allies, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has reiterated the official U.S. view that Nord Stream 2 is ‘a bad deal’ for Europe, a potential cash windfall

Wednesday

Arabella Byrne

How to solve Joe Biden’s dog problem

Pity poor Major Biden, First Dog of the United States, FDOTUS for short. Thrust first from the lowly surroundings of a shelter in Delaware then on to the porticoes of the Biden HQ and finally the White House, he appears to be experiencing teething problems as he adapts to his new life. And teeth are, quite literally, the problem. Prone to biting, the German Shepherd has now been found guilty of two biting incidents having first injured a member of the Secret Service and now a White House staffer whilst out on one of his walks. But this is not all. Major is also suspected of pooing outside the Palm

Tuesday

Steerpike

Watch: Biden bagpipes blunder

President Biden makes much of his links to the Emerald Isle, in no small part perhaps because 35 million of his countrymen view themselves as Irish American and live disproportionately in swing states.  Biden, who proudly describes himself as ‘five eights’ Irish once responded to a British journalist ‘BBC? I’m Irish’ and was clearly keen to remind Americans of his links this week for St Patrick’s Day. His POTUS account tweeted a video of him greeting a bagpiper in the White House with the caption ‘They really know how to make an Irishman feel special at the White House.’ While no doubt intended in the best spirit, Mr S cannot help but

Friday

Steerpike

Watch: Joe Biden’s trip to Atlanta

To slip once may be regarded as a misfortune; twice looks like carelessness. But three times? Well that looks like US President Joe Biden going up the stairs to board Air Force One… Biden was getting on Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews today, as he heads to Atlanta following the massage parlour shooting this week. The Commander-in-Chief and leader of the free world rounded off his trip with a tasteful salute. Style it out Joe, no one saw. Did Vladimir Putin — a ‘killer’, according to Biden this week — slather the steps with Russian oil? We know he would stop at nothing. Hopefully the Democrats can find some

Wednesday

Steerpike

Is Biden turning on Brussels?

The Joe Biden administration, headed up by a proud son of Ireland, has spent St Patrick’s Day briefing reporters in Washington that it will not be taking a side in the latest Irish border dispute. The new President spoke with the Irish Taoiseach on Wednesday in celebration of the two countries’ history — just as the EU prepares to take the UK to court over the border row.  Perhaps Micheál Martin was planning on lightly nudging Biden to remind him of the more recent past. Six months ago, the Democratic challenger to Trump blasted Boris Johnson for putting the Good Friday Agreement at risk, saying that he couldn’t allow it to become a

Friday

James Forsyth

Boris, Biden and the era of big government

Bill Clinton’s declaration that ‘the era of big government is over’ summed up the late 1990s political zeitgeist. Centre-left political parties could win if they accepted the small state model bequeathed by the Thatcher-Reagan consensus. Now things feel very different, as I say in the Times today. The stimulus Joe Biden signed into law is huge, $1.9 trillion (£1.4 trillion): three times larger than the financial hole created by Covid. Here there has been nothing as dramatic. But it is still telling that Boris Johnson is insistent that the public finances won’t be brought back into order by ‘austerity cuts’. Big government appears to be back. Politics is going to become

Wednesday

Daniel DePetris

Russian sanctions are futile

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden promised to approach Russia and its irascible President Vladimir Putin with a new sense of toughness and purpose. Now calling the shots in the White House, President Biden appears to have made good on that promise — at least symbolically. On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced several sets of sanctions against Moscow for last summer’s attempted assassination of the Russian activist Alexei Navalny, a plot that involved the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. The sanctions, taken in concert with the European Union’s own measures, included asset freezes and travel bans on seven Russian officials deemed responsible for the poisoning, imprisonment, and prosecution of Navalny.

Friday

Daniel DePetris

What the Khashoggi murder report means for US-Saudi relations

Today, after pressure from senior US lawmakers and staring at an impending statutory deadline, the Biden administration authorised the release of a declassified intelligence report on one of the most grisly state-sanctioned murders in recent history. The killing of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi may have occurred 16 months ago, but the murder has hung around the US-Saudi relationship like a wet blanket. The US intelligence community’s assessment that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the heir to the throne, was intricately involved in Khashoggi’s death was a bombshell heard around the world. And yet media reactions notwithstanding, MbS’s role in Khashoggi’s demise was hardly a surprise. This

Wednesday

Oliver Wiseman

Biden’s vaccine drive is too slow

I’m hooked on vaccine data. Barely an hour at my desk goes by without hitting refresh on a website telling me how many doses of Covid-19 vaccines have gone into arms around the world. A good day in either the US, where I live, or the UK, where I’m from, brings a frisson of excitement not dissimilar to what I imagine a gambling addict feels when his number hits. Slow progress sends me into a sulk. Either way, I need my fix. The cause of my addiction is not complicated: I am fed up of this wretched pandemic. And the more aggressive the vaccination drive, the sooner it is over.

Thursday

Francis Pike

China vs America: the struggle for south-east Asia

Is Antony Blinken, President Joe Biden’s secretary of state, preparing to abandon Barack Obama’s powder-puff Asian foreign policies? It is now widely agreed that Obama, under whom Blinken served as deputy secretary of state, ceded to China uncontested control of the South China Sea. Obama’s so-called ‘pivot to Asia’ was all talk and no trousers. Blinken, who believes that diplomacy must be ‘supplemented by deterrence’, may be about to implement a more aggressive foreign policy in south-east Asia and elsewhere. In his first speech as general secretary of the Communist party in 2012, Xi Jinping made his intentions clear. He stated his commitment to ‘accepting the baton of history and

Monday

Matthew Lynn

Biden’s rift with Brussels is only set to grow

It was meant to be a special relationship. After the tumultuous Trump years, President Biden was planning to reset relations with the European Union, Inherently liberal, rules-based, and engaged with climate change, it would be a natural ally, and far more so than a UK still tainted by Brexit. The Biden team were no doubt looking forward to working closely with officials in Brussels, Paris, and Berlin to repair the damage of the last four years and put the world on a more rational course.  But hold on. It is not going according to plan. There are already reports that the White House is growing increasingly frustrated with the EU.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Britain will prove more Biden-friendly than the EU

This is a crucial year for the UK’s two most important relationships. The Anglo-American alliance, our strongest diplomatic and security partnership, now needs to adjust to a new president in the White House. Meanwhile we are also starting our new relationship with the EU. The question is: can the two sides move on from the wrangling of the Brexit negotiation? To great relief in British diplomatic circles, the new US administration and the UK have got off to a good start. Joe Biden has shown that he is keen to move on from the Donald Trump era. Small as it may seem, the fact that Boris Johnson received the new

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The big tech bullies

I was in the kitchen preparing the family’s dinner when the inauguration of Joe Biden was on TV, so I caught only mysterious fragments of his speech, over the noise of the blender and stuff. ‘I want an hour — an hour — with my own teen wolf,’ Joe seemed to say at one point. And then: ‘America, America, I give to you my vest.’ I raced through to the living room when someone announced that Garth Crooks was going to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ — good choice, Joe, I thought. Garth seems to have lost a little weight and indeed colour, but he did a decent job. It all went

Wednesday

Theo Hobson

Is America now a Catholic country?

‘It’s like being in church’, said my teenage son. It was a bit — two bursts of prayer, a religious song, a long sermon, and a general air of community-reverence, inclusive piety. We were watching Biden’s inauguration last week, grateful for a mid-afternoon break from other screens. These are quasi-religious events — I knew that. But this time it seemed more pointedly religious than ever. Let’s get back to the true faith, after a spell of gold-plated idolatry. And, if you knew how to spy the signs, this ceremony reflected the new man’s Roman Catholicism — a Jesuit leading the prayers, a quote from Saint Augustine, songs from an Italian-American

Thursday

Katy Balls

Is Boris Johnson woke?

Is Boris Johnson woke? That’s a question the Prime Minister’s spokesperson struggled to answer today in a lobby briefing. Instead of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, they responded by saying Johnson was committed to levelling up all communities. The reason for the question in the first place relates to an interview shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy gave to the Guardian in which she asserted that new US president Joe Biden was ‘woke’ (that may come as news to him, given he was confused what the term meant during his presidential campaign).   This, in turn, led to the Prime Minister being asked whether he agreed that Biden was woke – to which Johnson looked lost for words. Eventually he embarked

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Amanda Gorman was let down by a terrible poem

Congratulations to Amanda Gorman, who is, at 22, the youngest ever poet for the inauguration of a US president. She stole the show with her style and poise – fabulous look, tremendous assurance. The pundits are united in their view that a Star Is Born; Michelle Obama has given her imprimatur; ditto Oprah. Trouble is the actual poem. Amanda was given the theme of America United. The Hill We Climb is the result. Without pretending to be in the FR and Queenie Leavis league when it comes to literary sensibility, I couldn’t make sense of it. I mean, I got bits of it, I got the sentiment, I got the

Debbie Hayton

Biden’s trans rights agenda is bad news for women and girls

Joe Biden has wasted little time grabbing rights from women and girls across America. On day one, he signed an Executive Order on ‘Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation’. This is being hailed as a pivotal moment for transgender rights. But it’s nothing of the sort.  The mention of ‘Gender Identity’ alone is enough to raise the alarm about the consequences of this proposal. Gender identity might be a popular concept right now, but it isn’t even clear what it means. Put simply, it’s a concept which refers to a person’s individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth. All too

Jonathan Saxty

What Brexit Britain can really expect from Biden

Joe Biden is both an exceptionally lucky and unlucky politician. It would have been easy to write off the former vice president a few years ago. Yet here he is, the oldest person to assume the office, albeit becoming president at perhaps the country’s (and entire planet’s) darkest hour since World War II. So what can we really expect from him? And is his arrival really bad news for Brexit Britain? Unlike Trump, Biden is less keen to talk up the ‘special relationship’ with Britain. But this might not be all bad news for Britain after Brexit. Biden has said little about Britain’s departure from the EU, but he has been clear

Tim Stanley

The banal presidency is back

One era ends; another begins. As J-Lo sang her patriotic wine bar set at Joe Biden’s inaugural in Washington DC, the outgoing president and his outgoing wife landed in Florida, Melania looking happy for the first time in four years because it was finally all over. Donald Trump’s refusal to attend the inauguration reminded me of Gore Vidal’s description of Richard Nixon’s sulk after Watergate: ‘He was simply acting out his Big Loser nature, and, in the process, he turned being a Big Loser into a perfect triumph by managing to lose the presidency in a way bigger and more original than anyone else had ever lost it before.’ For the

Steerpike Steerpike

Boris’s woke nightmare

Labour’s shadow Foreign Secretary, Lisa Nandy, opened a Pandora’s box yesterday in an interview with the Guardian, in which she praised the new US President Joe Biden for being a ‘woke guy’ and, according to the paper, appeared to suggest that those defending the Parliament square statue of Churchill were comparable to white supremacists marching in America. Mr S imagines that isn’t quite the strategy the party had in mind to win back Red Wall towns lost in 2019. Nonetheless, it appeared to be Boris Johnson who was struggling most with the idea of a ‘woke’ US President yesterday. In an interview with Sky News, the PM was asked if