When September draws to a close, President Joe Biden will have drawn the curtains down on two things he has presided over in his tenure at the Oval Office: the meeting of the leaders of the Quad in Delaware; and an address to the United Nations General Assembly.

In New York, President Biden argued that some things are more important than staying in power and that the world had a responsibility to tackle the challenges it faced.

In the name of security, Quad leaders said: “We strongly oppose any destabilising or unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo by force or coercion…We seek a region where no country dominates and no country is dominated — one where all countries are free from coercion, and can exercise their agency to determine their futures,” a message that indirectly spoke of the goings-on in the South Pacific, including the South China Seas. All of this without mentioning China!

Bigger catastrophe

The larger goings-on internationally are a different cup of tea, especially the war in the Ukraine which is in its third year, and the world is getting ready to observe October 7 as the first anniversary of the Hamas terror attacks on Israel and the bloody reprisals that are going on — that has left some 40,000 Palestinians dead and thousands injured in a small piece of land called Gaza without food, water and other basic amenities.

Worse, West Asia is looking at a bigger catastrophe with the ongoing Israeli escalations in Lebanon against the Hizbollah that is said to have left about 600 dead. Leaders in the region and elsewhere have been quite scornful of the fashion in which the Biden administration has responded to what is seen as an ongoing criminal genocide in the Gaza, a troubling scene that has certainly dented agendas and legacies.

Generally and in the context of alliance politics, the loud debate on “footing the bill” and ensuring to putting an end to free loaders, Republicans like Donald Trump have tried to up the ante claiming they had been instrumental in forcing NATO, for instance, to fork out more.

But the fact that allies in Europe and Asia have always been sharing in tangible and intangible ways are quite well known but deliberately glossed over in heated campaign rhetoric. It is maintained that America’s share of costs of collective defence in Europe and Asia may be “disproportionate” but not “lopsided”.

American taxpayers have spent some $175 billion over the Ukrainian conflict that includes military, economic, humanitarian assistance and helping nations bordering the war zone. Trump may say that if he were elected on November 5, he could end the war in a day.

This would remind some of the campaign of 1968 when Nixon put forth his “secret plan” to end the Vietnam war that finally ended only in 1975 but not before a widening spectre involving Laos and Cambodia.

Foreign policy hardly matters in Presidential elections except perhaps in one or two instances in recent memory: like the Vietnam war and the Iran hostage situation of 1979. But the thinking this time around is that given the tight race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris —seen as next only to the John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon of 1960 — West Asia, especially Gaza and now the prospect of a larger war in the region, could be a factor in a battleground state like Michigan that has a large population of Arab Americans.

Conflicts raging in the world are unsettling the international system and global players have a duty to find ways to bring normality.

But the task has to be equally spread minus selfish political compulsions, failing which Biden’s final address to the UN General Assembly will go down as an overview of fifty years to a freshers’ world history class.

The writer is a senior journalist who has reported from Washington DC on North America and United Nations

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