The left is hopeless at choosing heroes, says Allister Heath in The Daily Telegraph. Joe Biden was meant to be the anti-Trump, “saviour of western multilateralism”, while Emmanuel Macron was the poster boy for European centrism who would rescue the continent from the descent into populist turmoil. Both have turned out to be “calamitously bad” – “accidental presidents” who fancy themselves as technocratic administrators but are really “shockingly incompetent”. Both are “hypocritical semi-nationalists” who believe in their own nations’ sovereignty but nobody else’s, and both are presiding over the accelerating economic, social and moral declines of their countries.
Most unfortunately, both are also staunchly anti-British. Since Brexit, Macron has treated the UK as an “enemy to be contained”, while Biden is making a trade deal “impossible”. It’s no surprise the world has stopped following the US blindly. Every foreign policy decision it has made since the Cold War has “failed disastrously”, while France loves nothing more than making “deals with despots”. The dream of a European defence no longer reliant on America will be ruinous. It will finish off Nato and tear the EU apart. The left hailed Macron and Biden as defenders of the liberal international order. Both men have already done more to trash it than anything Trump concocted.