With China actively encroaching on Taiwanese territory, France attempting to undermine U.S. support in Europe, and the Pentagon currently dealing with what appears to be one of the worst secret intel leaks in recent years, Biden is busy having fun on his four-day trip to Ireland.
Of course, fun is not supposedly the aim of the President’s excursion. Ostensibly, the near week-long visit is aimed at commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, a peace deal between pro-British and pro-Republican factions in UK-controlled Northern Ireland that put an end to a bloody conflict lasting decades.
It is a deal worth commemorating. The U.S. played a leading role under Bill Clinton in getting both warring parties to the negotiating table, with Democrats in particular valuing the agreement as one of the few positive legacies left by the 42nd President during his otherwise scandal-prone time in the White House. In this context, it makes sense that Biden saw fit to make the trip to the region.
But Biden is not spending four days in Northern Ireland. He barely spent one.
Having shaken hands with the British Prime Minister and waxed lyrical about peace on Wednesday, Biden quickly high-tailed it south to spend the rest of his time touring the territory of the independent Irish state, speaking to the country’s politicians and spending time with his — rather famous — Irish relatives.
Such a trip has already come at the expense of American influence abroad. Compared to previous one and two-day stints on the island undertaken by Presidents Trump and Obama, the length of the stay is considerable, rivalled only by Biden’s trips to major international summits held in the UK, Germany and Indonesia.
Unlike such summits however, Biden is not meeting leaders in charge of the world’s greatest economies or nuclear weapons stockpiles. No, he is meeting politicians in a country with a smaller population than a number of American counties, let alone entire states. Ireland, though not a bad country, is not a key American ally by any metric, with even the electoral influence of Irish Americans at home waning in recent years amid the country’s demographic shift.
In this context, the length of the stay seems to be a consequence of Biden’s ancestral sentimentality rather than a need to fulfil an American domestic or geopolitical interest.
This disproportionate stay has not gone unnoticed internationally. A number of politicians in the UK — an objectively far more important ally to the United States — have seen the trip as an outright snub, especially in the face of the “anti-British” President’s refusal to even take a single day out of his schedule to attend the coronation of King Charles next month. With such perceptions only appearing to worsen as Biden’s Ireland adventure continues, it risks causing real damage to American foreign policy abroad.
The value of the trip to Americans back home is also highly suspect. Far from welcoming the President, some prominent talking heads in the Irish media have lambasted the President as having a backwards view of the island. The country’s single most prominent opinion piece writer, Fintan O’Toole, has lashed out at Biden’s prominent public identification with his Irish Catholic heritage, saying that the island is now actively shedding such an identity.
O’Toole is not wrong. With a comparatively massive tech sector, housing crisis, migrant crisis and push for hardline sexual politics, Ireland appears to desperately want to be Europe’s cool-climate California. With Irish politicians keen to push for militant progressivism both at home and abroad, U.S. voters run the risk of the trip further enforcing Biden’s own progressive crusades back home.