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07-02-2024
WASHINGTON/ MOSCOW/ PARIS: US President Joe Biden confused his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron with France’s long-dead former leader François Mitterrand, in a speech that went viral in video footage Monday, January 5. Addressing a campaign event in Las Vegas on Sunday, the 81-year-old US leader described Macron’s reaction to a speech at a G7 meeting in 2020. As well as getting Macron’s name wrong, he misstated the country he leads.
“And Mitterrand, from Germany, I mean, from France looked at me and said, said ‘You know, what, why, how long you back for?'” Biden said. Mitterrand was French president from 1981 to 1995, and died in 1996. In the White House transcript published later, Mitterand’s name is crossed out, and Macron’s added in square brackets.
In April last year, a White House transcript also corrected Biden when he confused New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team with the Black and Tans, a British military force notorious for its involvement in the Irish War of Independence. The transcript of his speech, given in a pub in Ireland, crossed out “Black and Tans” and inserted “All Blacks.”
Biden’s predecessor and probable opponent in the November presidential election, Donald Trump, made a similar gaffe last month, confusing his party rival Nikki Haley with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Trump, 77, had falsely said Haley was in charge of security during the violent assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, prompting her to question his mental fitness during a campaign speech.
Following Trump’s gaffe, Biden also took the opportunity to make a dig at his potential presidential rival. “I don’t agree with Nikki Haley on everything, but we agree on this much: She is not Nancy Pelosi,” he had written in a post on X.
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Donald Trump can rejoice. Following his victory in the New Hampshire primary on January 23, he is more than ever the likely Republican candidate for the November 5 presidential election. The former president is already focusing his attacks on Joe Biden in a field where the champion of “America first” was not necessarily expected to do so: foreign policy.
In his view, the two wars in which the United States is indirectly involved in Ukraine and in the Middle East are proof of the incompetence of the Democratic president and of the “adults” in the room, meaning the experts who surrounded Trump in his early days in the White House until he decided to free himself from them to rely on what he sees as his own indisputable instincts as a statesman.
This stance overlooks Trump’s own diplomatic legacy, particularly in the Middle East, where he had a considerable influence on his country’s strategic choices, with results that appear particularly questionable today. This applies first and foremost to what was long considered a turning point: the unconditional normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and two Gulf States, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Morocco joined in after having obtained Trump’s recognition of its sovereignty over Western Sahara, in a purely transactional deal. (Int’l News Desk)
