BORIS JOHNSON: Biden’s right. America is the last, best hope of Earth against the continuum of evil now ranged against freedom and democracy

Joe Biden last night made one of the most important speeches we have heard from the Oval Office for years.

It was speech that could only have come from that desk, and a message that could not have been broadcast from any other capital but Washington DC.

It was a speech in which the Commander-in-Chief of the United States acknowledged what I believe is the reality, that in spite of all its faults, all its anguished ­introspection, all its absurdities, America is still the world’s greatest power and the last, best hope of Earth.

In accepting the responsibilities that go with that role, the president channelled his heroic wartime Democrat predecessor Franklin D. Roosevelt. ‘American ­leadership is what holds the world together,’ he said.

He set out to explain why American leadership matters, and why, in ­Roosevelt’s phrase, the U.S. must once again be the arsenal of democracy.

His intended audience was not the ­people of the world, but the people — and above all the taxpayers — of America. It is absolutely crucial that he should win this argument.

There are some voices now in American politics — on Capitol Hill and elsewhere — who say that the price of this global leadership is now too high, and that ­America cannot bear the cost of ­supporting both Israel and Ukraine, and that in the face of the bestial attacks by Hamas, the time has come to cut funding for Ukraine.

President Biden took on these complaints, and turned them round — by rejecting the very notion of a choice. He made the essential point: that Hamas and Putin are engaged in the same basic project.

Both are out to destroy the democracy next door; both are using terroristic ­methods. In this analysis, the president is surely right.

The Hamas killers indulged in hideous savagery as they swept through southern Israel, of a kind I hope I do not need to describe; and so did Putin’s troops in the invasion of Ukraine. Torture, rape, the abduction of children — there is no moral difference between the techniques of terror used by Hamas and Putin’s troops.

But the similarities go further. It is no accident that Putin’s Russia has still not condemned the ­October 7 massacres, and it is no surprise that Putin has a close, friendly and strategic relationship with Hamas’s most important sponsors, Syria and Iran.

And whose drones are now being used to cause indiscriminate ­casualties in Ukraine? Iran’s — and Putin is taking them as fast as the Iranian factories can make them. Whose cash finances all those rockets being fired at Israel, whether by Hamas or Hezbollah? Iran.

There is a continuum of evil in which the assault on Western ­values and democracy is being mounted by what is effectively the same gang. Biden’s point to the American people is that we must stand up to that gang now, to save more pain later.

Let Putin win in Ukraine, and you endanger the Baltic states, Poland, the whole post-war ­settlement in Europe.

Let Hamas succeed in driving Israel to all-out war, and you risk the whole of the Middle East going up in flames. Make this defence commitment now, he argued, and you save money down the line.

You make it less likely that ­America will be called upon to intervene again, with truly ­catastrophic expense. Stand up to Putin, stand up to Hamas, and you will deter further acts of aggression around the world — and he was clearly indicating the risk of the Chinese attacking ­Taiwan. And when he said it was cheap, there was this extra sense: that he was supporting Israel and Ukraine without sending a single U.S. soldier to fight.

By the way, he said, don’t forget that the spending he is now ­asking Congress to authorise, both for Ukraine and Israel, will drive jobs in factories making missiles and artillery shells across the U.S.

In making this speech to the American people, Biden was doing something fantastically important — something I have been hoping to see for months: back-selling the American intervention to the ­people who fund it.

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