Joe Biden officially announced his run for a second term as president on Tuesday — but can he win re-election after the chaos of his first term?
Biden's Twitter account posted a campaign video, ironically beginning with footage of the January 6 2021 protest against his confirmation as president at the US Capitol building.
The 80-year-old White House resident had already effectively announced his bid for a second term in a TV interview on Easter Monday — while claiming he was not ready to do so.
Biden must overcome a number of hurdles to make it through the Democratic primary and presidential election races, including new revelations that his campaign advisor Antony Blinken — since rewarded with leadership of the State Department — orchestrated a campaign to discredit the evidence of influence-peddling on his son Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop.
He face a re-run of the 2020 election against his Republican predecessor Donald Trump if he survives a challenge in the Democratic Party primaries from Robert Kennedy Jr, the heir to the Boston political dynasty.
Economic Jitters
Trump boasted of record stock-market index highs under his leadership, although opponents accused him of taking false credit.
Biden has more brazenly tried to claim inflation, caused by his administration's sanctions on Russia, is "falling" simply because it is not rising as fast as at first. His Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen claimed last July that the shrinking US economy was in "transition" and not recession.
Economist, professor and consultant Mark Frost told Sputnik that he "gave up a long time ago trying to get into Biden's mind" because "I don't know that Biden knows now."
The academic said he would never have considered voting Republican previously, "but something happened to the Democrats and they've lost their mind."
"Roughly 85 per cent of the entire government budget is either Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or interest on the national debt," Frost pointed out, saying the only solution was to increase tax revenue. "And this administration, I think it's safe to say, has been the stagnation administration."
Worse still, the economist warned that the US dollar was heading for a crash as major economies outside the Western G7 axis switch to using their own currencies for international trade.
"The United States has a privileged position in the world because we can print money and get away with it to a certain extent because the dollar is still the reserve currency," Frost stressed. "There's there's a number of scenarios by which the dollar can stop being the world's reserve currency," he noted. "Roughly 60 per cent of the entire demand for the dollar is outside the United States. That would completely devastate everything."
Crime Wave
From street muggings to drug trafficking and illegal immigration, the Biden administration has failed to get a grip on law and order.
In the first year after Biden took office, crime rates in Democrat-run New York City soared by 44 per cent.
Last August, Los Angeles Police Department detective Jamie McBride warned tourists not to visit the city because the force "can't protect you."
Further up the Pacific coast in San Francisco, one of the wealthiest urban centres in the US, the streets are crowded with homeless drug addicts and hate crime against the city's historical Asian community has risen almost sixfold. More than half a million residents moved out of the city between April and July 2022.
Even the federal capital Washington DC has seen crime spike by 25 per cent overal in the past year, with murders up by over a third.
New Adventures Overseas
Biden has also broken the promise of his old boss Barack Obama to extricate the US from overseas wars.
He delayed the withdrawal from Afghanistan agreed between Trump and the Taliban* with disastrous results, including the deaths of 13 US servicemen and women and over 100 Afghan civilians at Kabul airport.
Biden then armed Ukraine — with which he has a close family connection — and incited the far-right Kiev regime to prepare a military offensive against the independent Donbass republics and Crimea, forcing Russia to launch its military operation in February 2022.
The US has since spent tens of billions pumping more arms to Ukraine and its Nazi militias to prolong the conflict and bloodshed in the hope of "weakening" Russia. If the well-advertised Ukrainian counter-offensive goes ahead and fails, the White House would be left looking impotent with no options to escalate that would not lead to war between the nuclear-armed states.
But not content with that, the Biden administration is trying to provoke war with China over Taiwan, which Washington still officially recognises as a breakaway province under its 'one China policy', and has already launched a new trade war.
Beijing's response has been to strengthen already close diplomatic, economic and military ties with Moscow and to propose a peace framework for Ukraine which demands an end to Washington's "Cold-War mentality" and tactics of unilateral sanctions.
Now the US is losing influence across the Middle East, with China brokering the normalisation of relations between Saudi Arabia — once Washington's staunchest regional ally after Israel — and US bogeyman Iran. That has promised an end to the war with Iran's ally Yemen.
And on Tuesday NATO member Turkey's defense minister Hulusi Akar took part in four-way talks with his Russian, Syrian and Iranian counterparts in Moscow, aimed at ending the 12-year conflict in Syria in which the US armed anti-government sectarian terrorists.
In the latest humiliation, the US was forced into a Vietnam-style helicopter evacuation of its embassy in Sudan after clashes between various military factions broke out in the country.
* The Taliban is under UN sanctions for terrorist activities.