Biden reveals Irish PM’s rebuke on Covid has him worried about waning US influence

Clara Hill
·3 min read
(AP)
(AP)
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President Joe Biden opened up about his concern about the US’s waning influence thanks to the COVID-19 crisis he inherited, and his politics being shaped by his Irish-American background.

Mr Biden revealed what Ireland’s taoiseach, Michael Martin told him following his election about the international view of America had shifted in the aftermath of former President Donald Trump’s woeful handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and how other nations were beginning to take their previous place.

“We’re kind of at a place where the rest of the world is beginning to look to China,” Biden said. “The most devastating comment made after I was elected — it wasn’t so much about me — but it was by the Irish taoiseach saying that ‘Well, America can’t lead. They can’t even get their arms around Covid,’” he said to The New York Times’ David Brooks.

His predecessor Donald Trump has been widely considered to have been neglectful in his strategy of tackling coronavirus through spreading misinformation, discouraging face coverings and allowing cases to soar. When he left office on 20 January, the death toll was 400,000. At the time, a spokesperson for the Methodist Hospital of Southern California told AP “We need to follow the science,” and the death toll was “shameful” and it could have been prevented.

The Biden administration has since rolled out a successful vaccine programme, despite it currently stalling due to levels of vaccine hesitancy. Currently, over 178 million people in the US population have had been fully inoculated according to The New York Times. The levels of jabs have caused the CDC to drop their advice for fully vaccinated people to wear face coverings inside.

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However, despite this bounce back, the new administration still has a lot to do to increase their international standing, one of the defining policy areas of Mr Biden’s political career.

In his tenure as a Senator, foreign policy was something he dedicated a lot of his work to, chairing the Foreign Relations Committee and arguing for US intervention in places like Bosnia in the 1990s.

“We’ve gotten to a point where I think our economic competence has a gigantic impact on our international influence and capacity,” he told Brooks.

When asked where he got his worldview from, the commander-in-chief spoke about the influence of his father, a man who lost his management role after the Second World War and how integral his Irish roots were to him, and how in relation to other white diasporas, Irish people were “second class” and how he wanted to restore “dignity” to working people.

He touched upon other matters, such as the disconnect he had with the progressive wing of his party consisting of figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashid Tlaib, who fight for universal healthcare and other more social democratic policies.

He told Brooks ‘The progressives don’t like me because I’m not prepared to take on what I would say and they would say is a socialist agenda.”

However, despite this Brooks highlighted that President Biden had become more radical as his political career went on and the programmes he was putting forward were worth trillions of dollars, compared to previous initiatives when he was President Obama’s Vice President.

When questioned about this shift, President Biden said, “I think circumstances have changed drastically. We’re at a genuine inflection point in history,” meaning the impact that coronavirus has had on the world, affecting all facets of life, including the encroaching “Chinese superstate” as Brooks calls it.

Brooks concluded that Mr Biden hadn’t changed, his ambitions had just increased in scope.

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