Biden ‘sleepwalking into disaster': Experts

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US President Joe Biden's policies toward Russia, China, and Iran, among other countries, have the US on the verge of disaster as he begins the second half of his first term, experts told Sputnik.
 
Biden reached the midpoint of his presidency earlier today, a period in which the White House has claimed economic successes while critics have slammed him for record-high inflation, the border crisis, and a foreign policy that has escalated tensions with both Russia and China.
 
"I think he's done better than some of us expected, but he's still sleepwalking into disaster," political commentator and US constitutional historian Dan Lazare told Sputnik. 
 
Like all US presidents, Biden was the victim of forces beyond his control, Lazare cautioned. He said that Biden entered the White House promising to be a big-spending FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] and thus succeeded in pushing through his $1.9-trillion American Rescue Plan less than two months after taking office. However, it backfired due to mounting inflationary pressures, which it undoubtedly helped aggravate.
 
Lazare acknowledged that the "rapid and humiliating Taliban conquest of Afghanistan" in July 2021, during Biden's first year in office, was a disaster that nearly everyone in Washington contributed to over the previous 40 years.
 
"Instead of fiddling while Rome burned, he flipped burgers while Kabul collapsed. The result was the worst foreign-policy setback since Vietnam from an imperial point of view," he said. 
 
The Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed in November 2022, put new strains on the Atlantic Alliance, according to Lazare. "[The act] has left Europeans unnerved due to its outrageously protectionist industrial policies," he added.

Dangers of Ukraine

The Biden administration announced on Thursday another $2.5 billion in military aid to Ukraine, bringing the total to around $27.5 billion since Biden took office. According to Lazare, the United States is on the verge of a world war.
 
He stressed that Biden looks pretty good "shepherding one military aid package after another through Congress," warning that the longer the conflict goes on the more apparent it becomes that NATO's "aggressively expansionist policies are leading to another 1914."
 
Lazare predicted that Biden's failure to pursue any serious means of resolving the conflict would exacerbate it, adding that "just as the Entente more or less maneuvered Austro-Hungary into going to war against crazy little Serbia, the Atlantic Alliance maneuvered Russia into going to war against Ukraine by engaging in actions that were increasingly provocative and confrontational," he said. 
 
Biden risks going down in history alongside disastrous UK leader Herbert Henry Asquith, who led his country into a disastrous world war with Germany in 1914, according to Lazare.

Read next: Poll: Biden receives 'failing grade' in leadership and management

"I think history will, thus, end up looking at Biden the same way it looks at Asquith, the UK prime minister who thought he could get away with playing with fire in the Balkans. Once again, short-sighted imperial ambitions are plunging the world into catastrophe," he said. 
 
Lazare believed that despite all this, the US media had covered Biden sympathetically so far in contrast to their unrelenting attacks on his predecessor. He added that Joe Biden may be a "B- president so far, but I'm sure his report card will be bristling with F's before too long."

Feckless mediocrity 

Retired Ambassador Chas Freeman, who served as the Democratic Clinton administration's assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, noted that the Foreign Policy had assembled 20 analysts who had nothing but praise for Biden's diplomatic performance.
 
Freeman told Sputnik that no oriental potentate employing praise singers could ask for more, but the Biden administration didn't produce a 'foreign policy for the middle class', only one for what he described as feckless mediocrity."
 
He added that Biden has also recklessly sparked conflict and crises with major superpowers. 
 
"Biden and his team have catalyzed and subsequently escalated a dangerous proxy war between the United States, Western Europe, and Russia in Ukraine [and] escalated tensions with China amidst rising concern about the possibility of a war over the status of Taiwan," Freeman said. 
 
He also abandoned diplomatic efforts to limit Iran's nuclear weapons development, which has brought Russia, China, and Iran together, according to Freeman.
 
Furthermore, Biden has increased protectionism and rejected the World Trade Organization's "rules-based order," causing friction with US allies in both Europe and Asia, he claims.
 
According to Freeman, Biden's erratic policies had also resulted in a visible reduction in US influence in the Middle East, including a rift with Saudi Arabia and a failure to counter the replacement of apartheid in "Israel" with renewed ethnic cleansing.