Conrad Black: An ‘unusually successful president’ may be swindled out of victory

The charge that Trump has botched the COVID crisis, like the fatuous claims that he is a racist and misogynist, is bunk. He inherited a decrepit health crisis response system that required all tests to be made by appointment in hospitals and sent to Atlanta for evaluation. There were acute shortages of everything that was needed. He managed swiftly through all that and advanced the timetable for a vaccine, which is the only serious defence, by over a year. Meanwhile, America’s economic performance has been the best in the world — twice as strong as Canada’s, and 60 per cent better even than Japan or Germany. The U.S GDP rebounded in the third quarter at the astonishing annual rate of 33 per cent.

Only a Trump victory will prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear military power within five years and North Korea from resuming its missile tests over Japan and South Korea. It is unlikely that Biden would maintain a firm but not belligerent economic and strategic containment strategy towards China, co-ordinated with India, Japan, South Korea, and other key allies in south and east Asia and Australasia. The Democrats are committed to giving the PLO and Hamas a veto over any resolution of their conflict with Israel, and since they do not accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, that will ensure continued stagnation, attrition and terrorism, financed by a newly re-enabled Iran. The Trump two-state strategy with strong economic incentives is steadily lining up the support of the Arab world. Biden would reassume the self-flagellating Paris Climate Accord, and the $100 trillion Green Terror — the Green New Deal assault on the petroleum industry and a bone-cracking rise in electricity costs after closing gas-fired electricity plants. This administration has protected the environment, but not by disemploying millions of people.