By Loukis Skaliotis
“Maybe the world isn’t ending after all. Or at least, not yet anyway.”
The above would be a good summary of US President Biden’s (now former president, depending on when you read this), speech last Wednesday, his last from the Oval Office.
Before I elaborate, I need to come clean that the opening sentence above is not mine. It is one I stole from an article by Barney Ronay in the Guardian last Thursday, when he describes how Arsenal beat Tottenham in the previous night’s premiere league football game in London. While that article was about Arsenal’s (yes, to the dismay of many readers, I happen to be an Arsenal supporter), survival in the race to the top of the premiership, this article will tackle once again the risks of survival of democracy in the US.
The above opening sentence would have been a fitting description of Biden’s message to America and the world beyond. A message that said, essentially, all is not lost, but effort must be made to avert the risks to American democracy.
What was stark in his speech was that he did not mention Donald Trump in any way. He rather warned of the changes in American society which effectively put Trump in power. He emphasised how a small group of tech billionaires have immense power over US politics, through the control of social media, and lamented the loss of free journalism, and the consequent inability to hold power to account by exposing corruption and abuse.
“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” he said.
Back on December 12, I was writing in the Sunday Mail about the fact that “the idea that character matters” was something that was being eroded in US society. I expressed my resignation that perhaps this was leading the US on the path to autocracy. This loss of democracy, described by Biden more accurately as oligarchy, is very worrying and Europe in particular should be preparing how to address it. We have to remember after all, that “when America sneezes, the world catches a cold”.
In Cyprus, we did not pay much attention to what Biden said and the goings on in the US. We may not have appreciated how, when the financial crisis hit the US in 2007-8, we ended up with a huge economic crisis here in Cyprus in 2013.
Instead, our focus was on the immense significance of the US-Cyprus strategic defence partnership, which was announced the same day as Biden’s farewell speech. To quote my fellow columnist Patroclos, our “delusions of grandeur” were in full display.
I for one, was not aware that our major problem in Cyprus was the inability to buy arms from the US. Perhaps now that we can buy F-35 airplanes on the cheap, we will not have the need to develop our own defence industry. (For the conspiracy theorists among us, maybe it was this danger that our defence industry posed to the military industrial complex of the US, that triggered the strategic partnership. The timing cannot be a coincidence).
Biden, for his part departed with the last action of his administration being the ceasefire in Gaza, assuming it holds. The debate has started whether this was the achievement of the outgoing administration, or of Trump. Despite his advancing years, Biden heard perfectly well as he was walking away, when a journalist shouted whether the success of reaching a Gaza ceasefire was his or Trump’s. “Is this a joke?” he quipped. Yet, for all the painstaking diplomatic activity and attention to detail that was necessary in getting to this agreement, it would not have been possible without Netanyahu’s acceptance, which was probably his gift to Trump.
I am sure this will feature prominently in Trump’s inauguration speech tomorrow. After all, humility is not his forte. That requires character.
Loukis Skaliotis is an economist
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