President Joe Biden gave what could have been his last big foreign speech at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. He said that the world is more chaotic now, but he also sounded hopeful.
During his speech, Biden used the famous poem “Things Fall Apart” by the Irish author William Butler Yeats. He agreed that things had gone badly in the last four years, but he fought against pessimism:
“In 1919, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote about a world in which “things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere chaos is loosed upon the world.”
“Some people might say those words describe the world in 2024 as well as 1919. But I see a very important difference.”
“The center has held in our time. People and leaders from all over the world and all political parties have come together. We closed the book on the worst outbreak in a hundred years this year. We set COVID free from its grip on our lives. We stood up for the U.N. Charter and made sure that Ukraine would stay a free country. My country put more money into clean energy and the environment than any other country in history.”
Biden only got a few things done while a lot of problems popped up since he took office in 2021: the war between Russia and Ukraine, the wars in the Middle East, the rise of a potentially hostile China, the chaos of people moving from poor countries to developed ones, and political instability in the Sahel in Africa as the U.S. has given up ground to Russia and China.
He ended by talking about how important democracy was: “I’ve made the protection of democracy the core cause of my presidency,” he said. He said this as he was leaving office because of an undemocratic change of power at the top of his party.
