Joe Biden Buried the Global Order in Gaza, It’s China’s World Now

During Donald Trump’s presidency, you couldn’t swing a dead cat in Washington D.C. without hitting a Very Serious person lamenting his destruction of the so-called global order. All these critiques levied at him were empirically true, as Trump’s war against the “deep state,” his embrace of dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, and his opposition to international bodies like the United Nations and NATO did a staggering amount of damage to the civil service and world order set up by the United States in the wake of World War II.

Trump never could have totally destroyed the United States’s global reputation his first time around. No matter how bad it got, the rest of the world could call him an anomaly in the last 125-ish years of American global hegemony. The entire point of the systems set up in the wake of Hitler and Mussolini’s defeat was supposedly to prevent and withstand the crimes of one man.

Joe Biden was going to bring normalcy back into the global realm. Gone were the days of mass civil service defections in defiance of a leader staggeringly out of touch, and a new, more humane presidency was supposed to reestablish the rules-based international order.

So how’s that going?

Per a senior G7 diplomat to the Financial Times.

“We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South,” said one senior G7 diplomat. “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost . . . Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”

Veteran State Department official Stacy Gilbert quit today because the Biden administration is “twisting the facts” to make a “patently, demonstrably, quantifiably false” assertion around Israel’s clear blocking of humanitarian aid to Gaza, as she told The Huffington Post in the first interview since she resigned.

Josh Paul, a former State Department official who worked in arms transfers and resigned in protest over Biden’s Israel policy last year, told Jen Kirby for Splinter that “it would take more than stopping one shipment of arms,” but that there are clear pressure points the Biden administration could use that other presidents have that he is not. Paul continued:

“It would take a concerted change of policy for several months. But, at the end of the day, Israel is reliant on U.S. arms, and if nothing else, if there were to be pauses that lasted a week or more, Israel would have to start thinking about where its priorities lie – whether it wants to start tapping into its strategic reserves that it needs for, for example, a Lebanon contingency, or whether it can just continue raining hell on Gaza.”

Is it also hollowing out the civil service if you force everyone with a conscience to quit, or can only Trump do that?

Donald Trump unmoored America’s global reputation and the legitimacy of the international institutions which suit our interests along with it. Then Joe Biden knocked it clear off its foundation, and it is currently mirroring his cockamamie failed Gaza pier’s slow ascent to the bottom of the sea.

The Age of China

Asia in general is better poised to be the dominant power this century regardless of whatever is happening in the western world. The continent is on track to surpass fifty percent of the planet’s GDP and fuel forty percent of global consumption by 2040. As the primary power in the globe’s ascendant region, China just has to not screw this up and they can coast to true global hegemon status.

China’s leaders have an inherent advantage over the United States, in that their bizarre communist-capitalist fever dream of an authoritarian political and economic system allows them to plan on the scale of decades, while our doofuses are resigned to two-to-four-year election cycles, plus our economic interests jump around from quarter to quarter. China also don’t carry the hubris and baggage that comes with a collapsing empire, and just based on their evolutionary timeline of this iteration of the state of China, are better positioned to succeed in the future against a country still clinging on to the past.

One of the ironies of Trump’s presidency was that his basic instinct to critique all United States institutions all the time no matter what actually landed on a lot of salient points. Dmitri Alperovich, a geopolitics and cybersecurity expert, told Jen Kirby for Splinter that “Donald Trump was also the person that put China front and center in U.S. politics, and really deserves credit for unifying the debate across the political spectrum, that China is a threat and needs to be confronted.”

China has long been investing in the Global South, fully understanding that decades of American malfeasance and indifference have eroded trust with the sole global hegemon, and there is a power vacuum wide enough to drive 3,400 miles of President Xi Jinping’s ambitions through.

Now China is wedging themselves in the middle of the fissure dividing the world between countries who do, or at least can pretend, to have a moral compass versus the stewards of the decaying and depraved western order.

The countries in green have recognized Palestinian statehood. pic.twitter.com/36FDIFr7AS

— Kurt Andersen (@KBAndersen) May 22, 2024

Today, Xi Jinping called for a peace conference to resolve the Israel-Palestine issue and end “tremendous suffering” in Gaza. Last June, they inked a “strategic partnership” with the Palestinian Authority, and voted in favor of a Palestinian state at the United Nations last month in defiance of the American veto. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi asserted that “a prompt admission of Palestine into the United Nations is a move to rectify a prolonged historical injustice.”

The blindingly obvious A/B test failed by the Biden administration in their support of Ukrainians under Russian assault, but reinforcement of Israel’s attack on Palestine, has practically rolled out the red carpet for China in a region tortured by the United States for the last half-century.

China is undermining the United States’s global influence by mimicking the values of the western order. It’s not like they’re some moral actor here either, they fail this rudimentary A/B test too. They have very carefully supported their border ally-ish Russia in their imperialist assault on Ukraine’s civilian population, and their U.N. representative also said that making Palestinian statehood a “prerequisite” for direct negotiations between Palestine and Israel is “putting the cart before the horse.”

On the global stage, there is no morality, just power, pawns and self-interest. The United States told a really good story coming out of a half-century of war and economic collapse. Being the only power who did not fight a world war on our own territory provided us with the economic and manufacturing might to help rebuild the (northern) world and gain the immense soft power that came along with it.

There never was a rules-based international order, just an American-based one.

This fall of our stature on the international stage started long before Trump and Biden, but they provided the one-two punch to knock America’s soft power down a peg for good. The fall of the United States’s international legitimacy has created a power vacuum for another hegemon to step into, and a country currently encircling Taiwan and executing its own ethnic cleansing campaign against the Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims is more than happy to take this opportunity to mold the 21st century in its own image.