There is an argument for continuing the convention of referring to the president of the United States as the most powerful person in the world. The dollar has not quite yet been replaced as the world’s international reserve currency and Bretton Woods still, creaking and cracking, holds.
China is now the manufacturer of the world and its brands are no longer laughable worldwide. The United States has just sustained massive damage to its soft power from its support for Gaza genocide.
But China still plays the long game, relying on trade, investment and loans to increase its economic reach. It does not depend on military force or covert regime change to secure access to economic resources.
The more direct American methods work in the short term. Israel is benefiting from the Arab regimes of the Gulf — Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia — all being dependent on U.S. military and security service support to protect them from their own populations.
The U.S. is still prepared to project direct military power and fight wars overseas to maintain its influence. China now has greater military capability than the U.S., but sees no advantage in using it.
As China Waits
Train station in Shangqiu, China, 2022. Photo: Windmemories / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0.
Chinese leaders look with disdain at the crazed and sustained violence of the NATO states this last quarter century, and see the West losing, not gaining, global influence. That China is steadily gaining such influence, nobody seeks to deny.
But the U.S. has succeeded, by defying international law, in physically enabling the genocide in Gaza. They will in the next week install a puppet government in Venezuela and quickly move to strip that country’s vast oil wealth into the hands of the U.S. oil giants.
Short-term American crudity can succeed a little while longer, as the Chinese watch their trillions of dollar reserves build, and bide their time. So for now I think we can still go along with the cliché that the U.S. president is the most powerful man in the world.
Except obviously he isn’t. The fact that Joe Biden wakes up in the morning and has to be reminded to remove his pajamas is no longer hidden. That Biden’s mental faculties declined past normal operation some time ago has been extremely obvious, yet denied by the media and the political establishment even when it was obvious to everybody.
There is a parallel to F. D. Roosevelt. The myth is not true that his paralysis was hidden from the American public, though it was minimised in PR output. But what is certainly true is that when he stood for re-election for his fourth term in 1944, his extremely poor health, including heart failure, was hidden and directly lied about. He died after five months in office.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan aboard Air Force One with Biden on March 13, 2023, en route to North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego. Photo: White House / Adam Schultz.
We seem to live in a strange age where politics relies more than ever on the big lie technique, even as social media makes the exposure of such lies inevitable. My interpretation is that the permanent state of cognitive dissonance and bewilderment of a population that does not know what to believe any more, is a state which power likes to see in the population.
As the radical fall in turnout in the U.K. general election showed, the bewilderment and distrust simply leads populations to disengage.
So now we know that Biden is not running anything much, who is? Certainly not Kamala Harris, who has been completely sidelined as vice president and given only poisoned-chalice briefs like border control. Her function till now, other than the obvious box-ticking of having her on the ballot, was as a lightning rod for public dissatisfaction.
Being president of the United States is a big job. I have no doubt that Biden has enough faculty to make some broad calls, without absorbing a great deal of detail on policy or information on recent events. His career long support for Israel has determined policy; how much he really understands about what is happening in Gaza is a different question.
Most important is that Kamala Harris is absolutely tainted with the active genocide support of the administration; the supply of weapons and direct military assistance to Israel are all on her too.
How does the U.S. operate?
Well, according to my sources, the most powerful man in Washington, and effectively de facto president, is Jake Sullivan. His official position is national security advisor but I am told his work covers far more than this, including domestic policy questions, and he is the person who does the detailed work which Biden cannot do.
Which makes it interesting how seldom he appears in the news — which he does primarily when visiting foreign leaders.
Sullivan has the classic Atlanticist background, as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford to supplement his Yale education. He is fanatically pro-NATO and anti-Russian, unquestioningly Zionist and was the architect of the destruction of Libya as senior policy adviser to Hillary Clinton.
Given the obvious inadequacy of Biden, the studied disinterest of the media in analysing how his administration actually functions tells us a very good deal about self-censorship and media ownership.
Main photo: Plaque on the back of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet Room chair, Oct. 19, 2021 © White House / Adam Schultz.
Source: Consortium News.
