Joe Biden may have saved us from World War III
US President Joe Biden may have just saved the world from World War III with China, and it only took three hours.
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Joe Biden may have just saved the planet from World War 3.
Now that you’ve got back up off the floor, here’s the really shocking part: It could actually be true.
The US President’s three-hour tete-a-tete with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week may well go down in history as the moment a potential global crisis was averted.
It has also put to shame all the China appeasers who effectively suggested the Asian superpower should be able to do whatever it wants because — gosh! — who could stop them anyway?
As it turns out, one man could. A man who often struggles to finish his sentences but who nonetheless has the answer to the most important question of all: You and what army?
After four years of erratic and isolationist foreign policy under Trump, Biden did something incredibly simple but equally courageous. He told Xi — who has effectively appointed himself dictator for life — that the US would not tolerate any Chinese invasion or hostile takeover of Taiwan.
And, despite years of increasingly belligerent sabre-rattling, when presented with a clear American line, China simply copped it sweet. Xi might be power mad and paranoid but he is clearly not crazy, which is very good news for the globe.
Because prior to the presidential powwow the globe was in a very precarious position. How precarious? In fact, it was in an almost identical position to the one it was in at the outbreak of the First World War.
And this is not the sensationalist take of a tabloid columnist. This is the opinion of Cambridge University historian Christopher Clark, author of the acclaimed book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.
Speaking to BBC History Magazine in 2012, Clark breached his own golden rule — and that of most historians — of not over-likening history to the present. There were simply too many similarities between the year WWI broke out and now to ignore.
“The parallels between 1914 and now do give one pause for thought,” he said. “And among these is the fact that until the late 1980s the world was governed by a system that’s sometimes called bipolar stability. These two hyperpowers, nuclear armed, disciplined if you like the global system.”
In other words the post-WWII twin strength of the US and the Soviet Union kept the other at bay and thus maintained a world order in which global conflict was avoided. Clark’s next five words are terrifying.
“That’s no longer the case,” he said.
“We’re now in a world — we’re just starting to understand what it means — which is multipolar in character, with supposedly declining empires. There’s a lot of talk of the declining reach of the United States, a lot of talk of the rise of China.
“So we have declining empires and rising powers, just as we did in 1914. We have numerous regional conflicts which seem to be getting worse rather than better and I think there are many lessons from 1914.”
Chief among these is whether once more a regional conflict could spiral into a continental or global conflict without world leaders realising the looming catastrophe and “sleepwalking” into it — hence the title of his book.
When the US and USSR were in a permanent face-off it was clear any escalation would result in mutually assured destruction, which is why the Korean and Vietnamese wars never turned into global conflicts despite each side being backed by the opposing superpowers.
With the USSR fallen, the US in decline and China on the rise, Clark argued, the stability produced by this binary tension had disappeared, which meant leaders had to be extremely watchful.
“Above all concerning vigilance over the mechanisms by which regional conflicts can start to effect superregional broader relations between world powers,” he said.
“And that is something that is certainly not impossible over the next decade or so and a problem that has to be watched very closely.”
Next year it will be exactly a decade since Clark issued that warning, a decade in which the US has withdrawn from Syria and Afghanistan with great ignominy and somehow got into a weird-arse slanging match with North Korea that everyone seems to have agreed never to speak of again.
But with the new AUKUS security pact the US has reasserted itself in the Pacific and its squaring up to China on the issue of Taiwan is now hard evidence of this. The fact China so quickly and willingly blinked is also evidence that it worked.
Now, once more, there are two nuclear superpowers from East and West locked in a perpetual arm wrestle and — hopefully — keeping each other in check. And they are in open dialogue. The bipolar stability that was lost might just have returned.
And it is all because Biden held the line on Taiwan and showed that America was not yet a spent force ready to hang up its boots and put on its slippers.
Not bad for a bloke who appears at times to be suffering major cognitive decline. Biden may not have the brains but at least he’s got the balls.
Originally published as Joe Biden may have saved us from World War III
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