How Joe Biden's Hubris Could Lead to a Multipolar World

In 1997 then Senator Joe Biden, the ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations committee publically laughed about and mocked the complaints of Russian politicians about their security concerns over the eastward expansion of NATO towards Russian borders, running rough shod over promises made to Gorbachev just a few years earlier that NATO wouldn’t move one inch to east if the Soviet Union withdrew military forces from Eastern Europe.

Well 26 years later, President Joe Biden isn’t laughing dismissively anymore about Russia’s warnings not to expand NATO eastward, nor about the Sino-Russian strategic partnership, nor about the growing Russian-Iranian partnership, nor about the geopolitical gravity gathering about all three together.

One of the foremost axioms of realist international relations and foreign policy is that of the need for geopolitical balancing to keep any one potential rival from growing too strong as well the eternal principle of “divide and conquer”. Any idiot understands this.

Henry Kissinger knew that well. As Secretary of State under Nixon, he exploited the Sino-Soviet split to advance US geopolitical interests and weaken the Soviet Union. He advised President Nixon, “that the United States, as it sought to profit from the enmity between Moscow and Beijing”, needed “to play this balance-of-power game totally unemotionally. Right now, we need the Chinese to correct the Russians and to discipline the Russians.” But in the future, it would be the other way around. “In 20 years your successor, if he’s as wise as you, will wind up leaning towards the Russians against the Chinese.”

Well the US its political elite, like Joe Biden, suffering from a fatal conceit of hubris resulting from the supremacist ideology of “American Exceptionalism” and reluctant to give up the heady unipolar moment of hegemony in the 1990’s forgot or ignored these most basic of geopolitical maxims and came to believe that the US need not and should not balance or compromise with any great power or potential rival that does not recognize US Hegemony.

But it is under President Joe Biden that this hubris and its geopolitical consequences have finally reached their peak and culmination.
It has been Biden’s explicit national security strategy and aggressive foreign policy since he took office to simultaneously poke and provoke and confront Russia, China, and Iran all at once, in their own backyards, cloaked under the puerile Manichaean rhetoric that it is he that will lead the “democratic world” to confront the “Autocratic” one. Talk about your messianic fantasies.

Well, 2 years in how’s that going for you now, Joe? Good luck in your (very) senior year, as you say.

Russia and China now have an ironclad, strong, “no limits” political, military and economic partnership “stronger than any alliance” and Iran has burgeoning strategic partnerships with both AND has joined Russia and China in a free trade agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union and in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which many in the West view as a Eurasian rival alliance and counter to NATO.

Russia, China, and Iran all have very different political and economic systems, diverging national interests, faiths, history and culture. But it is overweening US hubris and antagonism that has pushed them all together so concretely in a mutual defensive geopolitical posture, each having the other’s backs.

The Biden administration is reduced to impotently and publicly threatening China and Iran over their support for Russia in its confrontation with the West to prevent NATO from expanding eastwards into Ukraine. Sanctions, hybrid warfare, and color revolutions no longer have significant effect as punishment for the US Hegemon to force compliance.

Too late, the US foreign policy blob and commentariat are starting to ask in increasingly shrill and worried tones if the US is suffering from imperial overstretch from trying to play global hegemon and if they can really take on Russia, and China and Iran (and others) all at the same time in their own backyards – and at last coming to the only logical conclusion that no, they cannot.

Increasingly it is being acknowledged that the Russia-Chinese-Iranian defensive alliance is becoming the nucleus and foundation of an alternative world order to that of US-led Western Hegemony… that it is giving birth to a multipolar world order.

And its all happening under President Joe Biden’s watch and as a result of his hubris and aggressive policies. Karma gets the last laugh, Joe.