| The United States is such an important country: Whatever they decide affects us so much that it’s almost like the whole world should be allowed to vote in US elections. With these provocative words, I started an opinion piece written exactly twenty years ago. The year was 2004 and the US presidential election was looming. There was a risk that George W. Bush was going to be re-elected, and I considered him a very bad president of the United States who inflicted a lot of damage worldwide. Unfortunately ‘Dubya’ was re-elected and the only good thing that followed was that amid his unpopularity, the Democrats got stronger, regained control of the Congress in 2006 and paved the way for the election of Barrack Obama in 2009. This time around, I don’t see Joe Biden as a bad president. His worst mistake, in my view, was the catastrophic way in which the US withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021. I agree with analysts who believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin interpreted this withdrawal as a carte blanche to invade Ukraine. We try to imagine how Putin thinks. I have little doubt that Putin saw the withdrawal from Afghanistan as a confirmation of the Kremlin analysis which concluded that under Joe Biden, the US is no longer the global policeman and that it will lose interest in Europe and focus on the China challenge only. Of course, I’m not trying to suggest Biden is responsible for Russia invading Ukraine. The only responsible man is Putin. And Putin actually made a big mistake in assuming that the US and the collective West would react to the invasion as mildly as they did to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Today the elephant in the room is Donald Trump. For all his shortcomings, he still has a competitive edge against Biden, who looks increasingly frail and absent-minded. Another four years of Trump are likely to completely reshuffle world affairs, largely to the benefit of Putin and to the detriment of Ukraine. Trump calls Biden “Sleeping Joe”. Isn’t it a political suicide that Biden himself admitted that he almost fell asleep during the debate? | 
