Joe Biden’s approach to international issues increasingly resembles George W. Bush’s disastrous foreign policy. One key tendency in common is that both men view complex world affairs in dangerously simplistic terms as an existential struggle between good and evil. In Bush’s case, the bitter fruit of that perspective became apparent with the seemingly endless armed crusades to impose western values in such alien settings as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. In Biden’s case, that attitude was apparent with his administration’s ongoing attempt to portray the Russia-Ukraine war as a stark struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, between the rule of law and the law of the jungle. That approach should have lacked credibility from the outset, since Ukraine is a corrupt autocracy, not a democracy, but administration policymakers keep pushing the thesis.

Biden Revives Axis of Evil Propaganda Ploy