The Inauguration ceremonies of Joe Biden were impressive. Powerful, coordinated, dignified and on message. His speech, the stunning poem, the music and the vocals all spoke of healing and unity in the face of monumental challenge. There was no glossing over the stark fact that America is divided as never in living memory or maybe even since 1861. That alone is enough, but to add to that, there is a pandemic which has killed already more Americans than all its external wars. It is still raging.
Then there is climate change with its unprecedented weather events and a summer when much of California was continuously on fire. To this inventory we have to add the shattered pieces of America’s international standing and you perhaps have the grimmest to do list of any incoming administration since that of Abraham Lincoln.
So can President Biden heal and restore? If by that we mean can he put back an America which bestrides the world and can he make the Union whole? The Answer is no. But he can and will repair and renew. That will seem to most just as good. It will not be but he will be the best he, or anyone else, could do. For there always have been two Americas. The structural flaw of the architecture was to try and make them one.
Meanwhile the rest of the world will breathe a sigh of relief that America now has a fully qualified and functional government which seeks to globally reengage and domestically clean up the wreckage of the most incompetent administration in its history. This is good. But it will also be sad.
Because the rest of the world is growing up fast and as it does, so the magic of America as a shining light of good example, like that of Father Christmas to the teenager, has faded. Instead America will be judged piece by piece, issue by issue, on what it actually does to, and for, the world at large.
And especially on what it does to itself. As for global leadership? That has gone. And it will stay very gone, until the all of the United States together demonstrate convincingly that they themselves can, in unity, be led.