On the face of it, President Biden and outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson could not seem to be more different. The Oxford-educated Johnson, a former star journalist, has made a living due to his felicity with the English language, long an enemy of the syntax-mangling Biden. Whereas Biden is famously tribal and family-oriented — perhaps to his detriment in the case of his scandal-plagued son, Hunter — Johnson’s life has amounted to a series of romantic adventures. The American president, a lifelong politician, worked his way up the greasy pole of U.S. politics glacially, but Johnson shot to the top of the British political firmament like a supernova, only to crash just as spectacularly.
No, on the surface, it’s hard to think of two major Western leaders with such disparate biographies.
But this is to miss the dangerous commonalities between the two men regarding policy. The problems and dangers confronting their countries are frighteningly similar. For this structural, underlying reason, it is likely that Biden will be shown the door in two years’ time, just as Johnson was unedifyingly ousted this past week.
The policy similarities between the United States and the United Kingdom are striking. First, the two governments’ central banks — the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England — have both utterly lost the plot, printing more money than they ought to, setting free the beast of inflation. With double-digit inflation likely to occur in both countries soon, the consequent cost-of-living crisis that is brewing will be the bane of people’s lives, serving as a misery tax on the lower and middle classes. In both cases, given the banks’ independence, neither Biden nor Johnson, who remains as interim prime minister, could do much except haplessly cheerlead about their economies from the sidelines — even as everyone knows the governing establishments have ineptly driven the two economies into a ditch.
Second, compounding the first error, Biden and Johnson have chosen to increase government spending like a pair of drunken sailors. In Johnson’s case, ignoring the glorious fiscal record of Margaret Thatcher, he has championed ever-higher spending, while increasing the U.K.’s tax burden to levels not seen since the Labour governments of Harold Wilson in the 1960s and 1970s. Biden, in the damning verdict of former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, has fiscally poured gasoline on a roaring fire, passing “emergency” spending bills totaling trillions of dollars as the U.S. economy bounced back from the pandemic. As such, this marked increase in federal spending was bound to spur inflation. If the Fed and the Bank of England are complicit in reigniting inflation, Biden and Johnson have served as willing accomplices.
Third, neither leader has used his mandate to increase productivity in his country by deregulating the economy. Given the policy gift of “Getting Brexit Done,” Johnson did not use his newfound policy freedom to make the U.K. a more competitive, deregulated country, able to better the regulatory practices of the next-door, sclerotic European Union. Instead, bored by economics, Johnson chose to swan around international conferences, far more interested in what was happening to Ukrainians than to his own hard-pressed people. Likewise, Biden often has seemed more worried about Kyiv than Kansas City. A captive of the far left of his Democratic Party, Biden has done his level best to increase U.S. government regulation, certainly never seeing a lighter touch as an answer to the brewing economic storm that confronts him.
Fourth, both leaders have seemed clueless in grappling with the global energy crisis brought to a head by the Russo-Ukrainian war. In Biden’s case, he has nonsensically spurned the great gift of the U.S. shale revolution, wherein through a technical revolution (fracking), in terms of natural gas and oil, America had dramatically morphed from global energy mendicant to energy superpower. Instead, Biden has throttled the Keystone pipeline with Canada and forbidden the drilling for energy on federal land. Such energy self-harm has had obvious deleterious consequences, but the president has blamed energy companies for his basic misunderstanding of economics and the energy market.
Johnson, blithely thinking that the U.K.’s limited direct dependence on Russian energy would shield his country from the coming energy crisis, forgot to factor in the basic fact that the energy market is global in nature and that if prices in nearby Europe were to stratospherically rise (as they have), energy prices in Britain inevitably would follow. While Biden’s energy policy has made things immeasurably worse for America, Johnson’s non-policy has put his country behind the energy eight ball.
There is a final, gratifying, political commonality between the two. As happened in the stagflation-ridden 1970s — when President Jimmy Carter and Prime Minister James Callaghan were swept from power for failing to deal with these very same problems — it is overwhelmingly likely that both Johnson and Biden will soon find themselves out the door. Because of their failure to come to grips with the problems of their people, both will end up on the ash heap of history.
Dr. John C. Hulsman is president and managing partner of John C. Hulsman Enterprises, a global political-risk consulting firm headquartered in London, Milan and Bavaria. A life member of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, he is a contributing editor for Aspenia, the flagship foreign policy journal of The Aspen Institute, Italy. Follow him on Twitter @JohnHulsman1.