Joe biden

‘I wonder what he meant by that,’ King Louis Philippe of France supposedly remarked on the death of the conspiratorial politician Talleyrand. Whenever a person behaves in ways we had not anticipated, it is a Darwinian and often useful human instinct to suspect a rational motive, and seek it out. So it’s unsurprising that in the world of commentary a whole industry has now arisen in search of an ‘explanation’ of Donald Trump’s various démarches concerning, for instance, Gaza, Greenland and Canada. And now he’s trying to wreck world trade. Academic economists have been hauled from their ivory towers, business journalists from their statistical charts, public opinion pollsters from their

With just over 60 days left in office, Joe Biden’s White House has significantly escalated the Ukraine war it had tried so hard to contain by authorising the use of US-supplied medium-range ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems) and antipersonnel mines against targets inside Russia. Biden’s U-turn breaks a long-standing convention on US presidential transitions that lame-duck presidents aren’t supposed to make major foreign policy changes – especially not ones that severely constrain the stated policies of their elected successor. The immediate result has been a direct Russian threat to the US embassy in Kyiv and what German defence minister Boris Pistorius has called ‘sabotage’ of undersea internet cables in the

He is once again imposing constraints on Ukraine’s ability to go for the win

For months, Kyiv has been asking for permission to use ATACMS — capable of firing long-range missiles up to 186 miles

His last address to the UN showed his distinct lack of clarity on foreign affairs, something that has in many ways defined his presidency