The central fact about the democratic world today is that it is leaderless.
Twenty-five years ago, we had the confident presences of Bill Clinton, Helmut Kohl and Tony Blair – and Alan Greenspan. Now we have a failing American president, a timorous German chancellor, a British prime minister about to skulk out of office in ignominy and a chairman of the Federal Reserve who last year flubbed the most important decision of his career. Elsewhere: the resignation of Italy’s prime minister, a caretaker government in Israel, the assassination of Japan’s dominant political figure.
This is bad in normal times. It is catastrophic in bad ones. We are stumbling, half-blind, into four distinct but mutually reinforcing crises, each compounding the other.
The first crisis is one of international credibility. The war in Ukraine is not merely a crisis unto itself. It is a symptom of a crisis, which began with a withdrawal from Afghanistan that telegraphed incompetence and weakness and whose consequences were easily predictable. Beyond Ukraine, in which President Joe Biden has committed enough support to prevent outright defeat but not to secure a clear victory, there is an imminent nuclear crisis with Iran and another looming crisis over Taiwan, in which he alternates between challenging Beijing and trying to mollify it.
The second crisis is one of economic credibility. This is distinct from a normal economic crisis, which can happen for reasons leaders do not control. The credibility crisis occurs when leaders make confident predictions, in the face of abundant contrary evidence, that turn out to be catastrophically wrong. Insisting that inflation was “temporary,” as Biden did last year, was one such prediction. His insistence on Monday that “God willing, I don’t think we’re going to see a recession” may be the next.