Mary Dejevsky

Is Joe Biden’s administration fit for the 2020s?

Joe Biden (Photo: Getty)

Joe Biden’s Cabinet nominees have been warmly received by the massed ranks of anti-Trumpists in Washington. But the warmth stateside is nothing compared with the rave notices the incoming administration is receiving in much of Europe. There is particular delight in the UK, where the special Boris-Donald relationship evaporated within seconds of Biden’s election victory.

The enthusiasm derives partly from a sense that, as some have put it, the adults are back in the room. The image of Trump as ‘toddler-in-chief’ was projected on to his whole volatile administration. Now the line-up announced by the incoming President looks and sounds serious, sober and a lot more like US administrations are supposed to be.

Mostly, though, the enthusiasm on this side of the Atlantic reflects the fact that the UK and France in particular are welcoming the return of many friends, and what is assumed will be a more congenial mindset. The Biden Cabinet – assuming his nominees receive the necessary Senate confirmation –will be stuffed with familiar faces, not just from the Obama administration, when Biden was Vice-President, but from the years of Bill Clinton and even George Bush.

Those times were, of course, very different from now – and not just because of the way the trauma of Donald Trump’s departure may or may not be changing America. At 78, Joe Biden is older not just than the outgoing President, but the two Presidents, Obama and George W. Bush, before him. He was born before the end of the second world war. He is a child of the Cold War, and like most university-educated white, East-coast Americans of that vintage, his orientation is towards Europe. He had already served 15 years in the US Senate when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed.

Barack Obama chose him as his running mate in part as a counterweight to his own inexperience, Pacific outlook and ethnic heritage.







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