Mark Devenport: USA looks in dire need of a peace process

He may have been a classic snake oil salesman (literally recommending phoney Covid remedies to the American people). However the 45th President inserted himself into our inner consciousness more effectively than any other world leader.

The saga of Trump’s bully-boy tactics alternating with fragile narcissism, plus its sub-plot featuring First Lady Melania, became compulsive viewing.

True, there will almost certainly be a follow up series. Filmed mainly around the Florida Mar-a-Lago resort, it may feature some compelling courtroom drama. If the box set was available right now on Netflix, I am sure many of us would binge watch it immediately.

But it will never have quite the same frisson, knowing the central character no longer has the option of hitting either his tweet button or his nuclear button.

Once the sound of the Biden inauguration, with its Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, and Garth Brooks vocals, fades into the memory, “Sleepy Joe” (as ex President Trump dismissively called him) will find it hard to compete in any ratings war with his predecessor.

This might be no bad thing. A President who doesn’t contradict his medical experts when they accurately describe the reality of the pandemic should contribute to public confidence.

Internationally, the USA’s allies will welcome the return to a calmer, more collegiate approach, with Biden signing Washington back up to the Paris climate change accord and reversing the decision to leave the World Health Organisation. Instead of threatening the future of the NATO alliance, the 46th President is reassuring the USA’s traditional friends that “America has your back”.

Some in President Biden’s camp make no secret of their distaste for Boris Johnson, who they view as a “mini-Trump”. Despite that, as the Prime Minister prepares to welcome Joe Biden to a G7 summit in Cornwall this June, his aides will at least comfort themselves that they can engage in detailed preparation work with their US counterparts without the fear that all their efforts will be binned at the last minute by an irascible leader.

Biden is the epitome of a Washington insider, and the Democratic Party’s control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate (albeit by a wafer-thin margin) provides him with the potential to get things done. That said, the scale of the task facing the 78-year-old president cannot be minimised. He may lean heavily on his Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Biden must put the USA on a road to recovery from the twin health and economic crises caused by coronavirus. He also needs to address the internal divide between America’s warring camps, a divide so clearly on display during the “Black Lives Matter” protests and this month’s attack on Congress by far-right Trump supporters.

Biden’s in-tray combines the economic challenges which confronted Franklin Delano Roosevelt tackling the Great Depression in the 1930s with the necessity for national reconciliation which Abraham Lincoln addressed in the final stages of the US Civil War of the 1860s. In his second inaugural address Lincoln pledged to “bind up the nation’s wounds”; a task he would barely commence before being struck down by an assassin’s bullet.

Defenders of democracy were rightly horrified by the assault on the Capitol building on January 6 which led to the deaths of a police officer and four Trump supporters.

However, the conduct of any inquiry and impeachment sparked by the riot could be fraught with difficulty. Many Democrats want the book thrown at the former president for inciting the mob. But the new president won’t want this to overshadow his efforts to tackle the pandemic or to stymie his attempts to reach out to moderate US Republicans.

As an Irish American who quoted James Joyce on the eve of his inauguration, Joe Biden won’t forget his Mayo and Louth roots or his long term support for the peace process.

Having already secured their objective of preventing a hardening of the economic border on the island of Ireland, it will be interesting to discover how much interest President Biden and his Secretary of State Anthony Blinken take in the detailed outworking of the Brexit protocol (Blinken’s Irish-American wife, Evan Ryan, is a senior official within the new White House team).

In contrast to the 1990s, when I joined a crowd of nearly 300,000 people watching Bill Clinton’s inauguration at the Capitol building, the US political role here is likely to remain peripheral.

In the 2020s, it is America which looks in dire need of a peace process. Perhaps we could provide them with some advice.

> Mark Devenport was a BBC news journalist from his training days in 1984 to late last year, when he quit his the post as the corporation’s NI political editor – a role he held for 19 years

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this story on our website. While I have your attention, I also have an important request to make of you.

With the coronavirus lockdown having a major impact on many of our advertisers — and consequently the revenue we receive — we are more reliant than ever on you taking out a digital subscription.

Subscribe to newsletter.co.uk and enjoy unlimited access to the best Northern Ireland and UK news and information online and on our app. With a digital subscription, you can read more than 5 articles, see fewer ads, enjoy faster load times, and get access to exclusive newsletters and content.

Visit https://www.newsletter.co.uk/subscriptions now to sign up.

Our journalism costs money and we rely on advertising, print and digital revenues to help to support them. By supporting us, we are able to support you in providing trusted, fact-checked content for this website.

Alistair Bushe

Editor