Susan B. Glasser
Modi’s visit has called attention to his autocratic leanings at home and served as a reminder of the trade-offs inherent in Biden’s foreign policy.
Just before 2 p.m. on Thursday, President Joe Biden and the visiting Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, stepped before a crowd of journalists in the White House’s East Room for one of the rituals of an official state visit to Washington: the press conference. The event was presented in the official schedule merely as an opportunity to “take questions”—apparently because of Modi’s persistent refusal to actually hold a press conference—and the questions, in the end, were also limited to just one U.S. and one Indian journalist. Both leaders swatted away the inevitable queries about India’s democratic backsliding with canned riffs about the shared importance of “democratic values,” as Biden somewhat gingerly put it, and the democracy that “runs in our veins,” as Modi sanctimoniously explained.
The choreographed exchange seemed most newsworthy in underscoring Biden’s willingness to suffer whatever embarrassment it entailed in the name of geostrategic positioning. Modi’s visit has, predictably, called attention to his autocratic leanings at home and served as a reminder of the trade-offs inherent in Biden’s foreign policy. The former U.S. diplomat Aaron David Miller called Biden’s embrace of Modi and the human-rights-abusing Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom Biden visited last year despite having vowed as a candidate to shun and isolate him, “a head-exploding hypocritical pivot.” Other criticisms, including from members of Biden’s own party, who planned to skip a scheduled Modi address to a joint session of Congress, have been equally scathing. Administration officials, meanwhile, are left to wonder just how exactly they are supposed to help Ukraine win the war or successfully contain China without forging closer ties with India.
As a practical matter, though, it’s far from clear whether the accommodations to Modi were worth it. In his White House remarks, Modi offered no sign of softening on the matter of support for Ukraine. He did not even acknowledge that it was Russia that started the war. He definitely did not sound like he had signed up for charter membership in Biden’s oft-cited alliance of democracies versus autocracies at this dangerous inflection point in world history.
The increasingly perilous state of America’s own democracy, of course, is another complicating factor for Biden’s global doctrine of good guys vs. bad guys. Biden’s leading rival for 2024, Donald Trump, is an avowed Modi admirer, and the final foreign trip of his Presidency was to India, where he appeared at a rally of more than a hundred thousand people and praised the “tough” Modi as “a man I am proud to call my true friend.” Flash forward three years later, and both Trump and Trumpism remain the biggest threats to Biden’s Presidency. America is not as far away as it might seem from a Modi-style strongman of its own back in the Oval Office.
If Biden’s foreign-policy hypocrisy was the inescapable context for his brief press-conference-that-wasn’t-a-press conference with Modi, an awkward moment at the end served to underscore the week’s other biggest story here in Washington: the announcement, on Tuesday, that a years-long federal investigation into Biden’s troubled son Hunter had concluded with a plea deal on two misdemeanor tax-evasion charges for which he will pay fines and serve no prison time. This must have come as a relief to the President, ending the uncertainty about whether charges would be brought before the 2024 election. The sordid long-running saga has been such an embarrassment to Biden, involving the public airing of his only surviving son’s descent into crack-cocaine addiction, affair with his dead brother’s wife, and business schemes involving more than a million dollars in payments from an array of foreign interests during his father’s tenure as Vice-President.
But while Hunter’s legal jeopardy may now be coming to an end—though a statement by the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney in Delaware who oversaw the investigation said it remains “ongoing”—the political attacks have only intensified in the days since the deal was announced.
For years, Trump, along with his hallelujah chorus of enablers on Capitol Hill and in the right-wing media, have feasted on Hunter Biden’s missteps. They will not stop now. If anything, they have escalated their attacks, which are no longer confined to what Trump calls the “Biden crime family” but now amount to an indictment of the entire Department of Justice and F.B.I. for prosecuting Trump while letting the President’s own son go free.
This is hardly the first time an American President has been humiliated by an errant family member, of course. Hunter Biden looks to be another sad case in a long history of problem children in America’s first families. Richard Nixon’s brother was also something of an influence peddler, and George H. W. Bush’s son Neil ended up in hot water over a savings-and-loan scheme. Bill Clinton’s half brother Roger served time in federal prison for distributing cocaine. And Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has been accused of leveraging his position in Trump’s White House to raise billions of dollars from the Saudis for his private-equity fund.
The difference between all those cases and the Republican attacks today is the straightforward nature of their assault on the American system of justice itself. Trump, who has just been indicted by a federal grand jury on far more serious felony charges than the misdemeanors that Hunter Biden has agreed to plead guilty to, called the plea arrangement proof that Biden’s Department of Justice is “corrupt” and “our system is BROKEN!” Echoing Trump, some of his Republican Presidential opponents are now running on explicit promises to fire the director of the F.B.I. and assert Presidential control over the Justice Department. Millions of Americans are likely to support them in this, just as they backed Trump in his lies about the “rigged” 2020 election and other attacks on the foundations of our constitutional system.
“What’s your response to Republican complaints that your son got special treatment?” a reporter shouted out as Biden and Modi left the stage. “Do we have a two-tier system of justice, Mr. President?” another added.
At that moment, Biden was surely just as glad as Modi not to have agreed to take more than a single American reporter’s questions. He did not answer. Now, perhaps, is not the time for moralizing lectures to our allies about the virtues of American democracy. ♦
An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified a member of the Nixon family.
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