Every visit to Ireland by a US president is also a visit to America. It is intended to beam messages back to the homeland.
In Joe Biden’s case, there are two particular signals he hopes to have sent back across the Atlantic to prospective voters in next year’s presidential election, in which he will almost certainly seek a second term. Crudely, they are about one very explicit subject – peace – and one that goes unstated: abortion.
It’s important to keep in mind that Biden’s visit is a much smaller story in the US than it is in Ireland. It’s interesting – but not all that interesting. That’s partly because it is an almost routine affair: in June it will be 60 years since John F Kennedy’s Irish visit. The trip to the Ould Sod is now encoded within the grammar of the American presidency.
But it’s also, more specifically, because another president continues to suck up the oxygen. The Donald Trump reality TV show is still ratings gold. His lurid ghost train is much bigger box office than Biden’s sentimental journey.
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This is true even in the liberal media. On Thursday, for example, the New York Times gave a full page to the sitting president’s events in Ireland. It gave the same space to the continuing saga of Trump’s multiple legal cases. And twice that to one of the most profound ramifications of the Trump presidency: the wars over abortion rights and reproduction.
Yet Biden plays a low, slow game, and the coverage from Ireland, even if it cannot compete with his once-and-future rival’s travelling circus, will – he hopes – drip steadily into the subconscious of some swing voters.
The first tale he is trying to tell is the one that attracted most interest from the US media this week: the anniversary of the Belfast Agreement and its relative success in ending a conflict that had seemed endemic. This message matters for very American reasons: it is a success story. And America needs reassurance about its place in the world and the possibility that it could still be a moral force on the global stage.
Biden knows all too well that Trump was very good at tapping into a sense of failure and futility in his country’s foreign interventions. He crafted an ambiguous but highly effective narrative: that the post-9/11 “forever wars” showed America’s descent into weakness – and that Americans should put themselves first and stop caring about foreigners.
It was Biden’s misfortune to have to complete Trump’s abandonment of Afghanistan and, in effect, its surrender to the Taliban. This, to most Americans, is a tale of national humiliation. Biden was left holding that very ugly baby.
He is now trying to restore some sense of the US as a global power – especially in relation to the rise of China and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is about military might, but also about the soft power of diplomatic persuasion and moral standing.
Revisiting the Belfast Agreement as the most enduring achievement of US diplomacy of the past quarter century helps Biden to refurbish this narrative. It is, apart from anything else, an obviously contrast to his rival’s bullish and boorish approach – nobody could imagine Trump giving a fig for Northern Ireland one way or another.
The second story is more immediate and almost certainly more potent. With every week that passes it is becoming clearer that Biden’s chances of re-election will hinge on abortion and the reaction against the overturning of Roe v Wade by a Trump-shaped supreme court.
Coverage of Biden’s Irish trip in the US sits within a nest of abortion-related stories. One of them is the huge victory last week of a liberal judge in an election for a vacant seat on the supreme court of Wisconsin – a crucial swing state for 2024.
The liberal candidate won the race in a landslide because the Republicans have used the overturning of Roe v Wade to reinstate a law of 1849 that bans abortion in almost all cases. This shows the potential for the conservative triumph on this issue to turn into a nightmarishly pyrrhic victory. And yet conservatives can’t get off the express train to abortion hell.
The other story dominating the US media is the ruling by a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas that would, in effect, withdraw the abortifacient pill mifepristone from circulation.
How does Biden’s Irish trip dovetail with this much more consequential American narrative? Biden, after all, did not refer to the abortion issue in Ireland.
But the images from the visit – not least those from St Muredach’s Catholic cathedral in Ballina, Co Mayo – reinforce what is, for the Democrats, a crucial counter-narrative. They send out a message that it is okay to be a Catholic and still believe that, in a democratic republic, the law does not have to reflect Catholic theology.
A critical swing constituency in the US now is made up of religious people like Joe Biden who accept church teaching on abortion but who also agree with him when he says that “what I’m not prepared to do is impose a precise view that is borne out of my faith on other people”.
One has to remember just how extreme the Catholic bishops have become in the US, ruling in 2021 that Catholics (like Biden) who equivocate on their line on abortion should be denied Holy Communion. They pulled back from targeting this threat directly at Biden and other Catholic legislators, but the idea that being pro-choice is to be outside the fold presses heavily on many Catholic voters.
Paradoxically, the outmoded idea of Ireland as a model Catholic country actually helps Biden in this struggle: if holy Catholic Ireland accepts the separation of law and theology – and warmly welcomes a president who upholds that separation – it’s surely okay for Americans to do the same.
There is a deep historical irony at work in all of this. Irish liberals used to argue for the separation of church and State by pointing to America as a polity founded precisely on that principle. Now it works the other way around – American liberals can point to Ireland as a society that has learned the hard way that transposing religious zealotry into criminal law is as destructive as it is, ultimately, impossible.
It’s a strange fate for the image of Ireland in American politics. Whoever thought that Northern Ireland could function as an exemplar of political sanity and the Republic as a model for the benefits of disentangling religion from government?
These are weird developments. But in the ever greater weirdness of American politics, they work in Joe Biden’s favour.