Yet on Monday, with Democrats still reeling after their unimagined electoral loss against Trump, they woke to the astonishing news that Biden had broken his promise. But should anyone have been surprised by the volte-face? In many ways, this was just the final flourish in the disastrous failure that has been his entire presidency.

Biden was a political no-hoper even before he got to the White House. He only won the presidency thanks to two outsiders unbalancing the political system: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. As the 2020 presidential election loomed, the Sanders campaign emerged even stronger and more organised than in 2016. And, for a short while, it seemed like the progressive outsider might genuinely run away with the nomination. At this point, facing both Trump in the White House, and an insurgent from inside their own party, Democrats closed ranks and essentially crowned Biden their champion.

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Yet faced with the nightmare of Trump to their Right, and Bernie to their Left, Democrats started rewriting the past. Biden was the father of the nation, the successor to George Washington and Abe Lincoln; he is a visionary the likes of whom hasn’t been seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt with the reforming zeal of Lyndon B. Johnson. Never mind that Biden’s extreme pettiness, vengefulness, and covetousness were extremely well-known on Capitol Hill as far back as the Nineties and that even Barack Obama once quipped that you should “never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up”.

The political Left of the Democratic party — which hated and openly ridiculed Biden in 2020 — was passed a new hymn sheet. And then even Obama started singing from it. All of this was a lie, of course. But people couldn’t cope with the truth: America was burning.

The idea that Joe Biden was the man to put out the fire — that he would restore America to its former glory — was always a madness. All the same, it’s extraordinary to see how he has fanned those flames. The things he was elected to “fix” have simply got worse. Consider foreign affairs. It’s certainly true that the world is exhausted by the shambling corpse of the “rules-based” international order. But by his own action, Biden has made America’s diplomatic position worse by its action in Ukraine, the Middle East and over Nord Stream.

He’s also screwed the American economy. His inflation reduction act was supposed to combine muscular action on national security with concern for America’s working men and women, all in the form of re-shoring industry and greening the economy. But the IRA has proven to be yet another costly boondoggle, filled with roads and bridges to nowhere and subsidies that never seem to pay out. Like at the State Department, meanwhile, the fundamentals at the Fed make for bleak reading. Inflation is up, re-shoring is down, while the US military becomes ever more dangerously dependent on Chinese manufacturing.

Obama was right: never, ever, underestimate Joe Biden’s ability to fuck things up. But all these failures pale in comparison with a secondary much more subtle, almost spiritual failing of his presidency.

Ever since 2016, the sickness eating away at the American body politic has been cast in openly moral terms. Donald Trump is a bad, evil person, and it is his personal failing that’s slowly corrupting the land. This was always a dangerous fantasy: far from being the cause of the country’s problems, Trump was merely its symptom. Yet between his vulgarity and his vindictiveness, it was easy for liberals to blame the former businessman’s personal conduct for the slow unravelling of the American Empire. The lawfare against him during his first term, and the attempts to keep him off the ballot after 2020, all assumed that the Democrats were simply morally superior.

As a parting gift, Joe Biden has finally crushed this shallow morality tale. The forgiveness he’s shown his son is arguably the farthest-reaching pardon in all American history. The closest parallel is the pardon Gerald Ford offered to Richard Nixon — but even that only spanned the years Nixon was in office, rather than the entire decade bequeathed to Hunter. No less important, Nixon was actually president during Watergate, and could potentially be excused for thinking that the illegal things he did were legitimate exercises of power. It’s clearly much harder to make that case for Hunter Biden, a private citizen condemned for drugs and guns. Even worse, the start date of the pardon — 2014 — coincides with the time that the Biden clan got really involved in very shady dealings inside Ukraine. The fact that he is immunising his son from corruption charges that he himself is deeply tied up in is partly an act of Joe Biden pardoning himself.

What the Biden clan has accomplished here is banana republic-style corruption, pure and simple. Moreover, after using lofty rhetoric about how democracy was on the ballot, Trump was an evil fascist, and the future of America itself was imperilled, we now know that Biden went deliberately out of his way to sabotage the Kamala Harris campaign — out of sheer bitterness. So, either Biden never believed any of the stories he was selling, or he wilfully sought to doom America out of sheer meanness. Whatever the case, the upshot is clear: the Biden hagiography won’t survive even half a year of him being out of office, and people will need to reckon with the ashes of its political culture. Perhaps, finally, they’ll grapple with the idea that their problems can’t be blamed on the powers that be. The failures are too systemic for that.

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Unfortunately, root and branch reform now looks unlikely. The temptation to conjure fantasies and blame the moral failings of the enemy is too easy to resist. And it applies to both sides of the political divide. For just as America’s problems could not be fixed by attacking Trump or his supporters, the problems with the US military cannot possibly be solved by launching a crusade against “the woke”. Nor yet can the impending US sovereign debt crisis be prevented simply by skewering only the programmes that liberals are fond of.

Though it seems like Biden himself either did not believe in (or care about?) the rhetoric coming from himself and his party — that democracy was on the ballot, that the republican values of America were being destroyed, and that another Trump win could usher in a new era of political dysfunction — it’s not necessarily true that these were all just fantasies. The Trump years did see a massive loss of small “r” republican virtue in the US, though it’s very much up for debate whether Trump was the perpetrator or the victim of that process.

From 2016 to 2020, it’s quite easy to say he was the victim, but will that hold true for 2024 to 2028? With all the lawfare, the internecine fighting inside the US bureaucracy, and the general lack of trust and growth of polarisation, Republicans may be more interested in revenge than reconciliation. And revenge can be very, very seductive, especially when you’ve given up on actual reform: if you don’t believe that the US budget deficit can be closed, or the Empire can be saved, at least you can have some fun seeing your enemies suffer on TV.

The question for Democrats, then, is what they will do now that they’ve temporarily been shorn of their moral self-righteousness. But this applies to the Republicans, too. Will the incoming Trump administration be strong enough to resist the tempting morality tales that so bewitched the Bidens? Will the Republicans, now that they are faced with almost insurmountable structural problems, fall for the quick expedient of simply blaming them on the moral failings of the other side? We probably won’t have to wait very long for our answers.

In the late-1990s, I witnessed North American United Nations (UN) personnel visiting a local brothel in Pristina, Kosovo. Despite warnings that anyone caught frequenting such places would be disciplined and sent home, the men were never called to task, and buying and using women and girls for sex became embedded within so-called peacekeeping culture.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 2003, there were 150 allegations of sexual assault by peacekeepers at MONUC (the new name for the United Nations Mission there). These allegations included rape, child abuse and prostitution. Reports also alleged instances of torture, the pornographic filming of Congolese women and children by UN peacekeepers, and the fathering of babies by these men. One case even included an employee who filmed himself torturing and sexually assaulting naked young girls.

The exposure of this abuse in 2004 by a number of UN peacekeepers in the DRC resulted in UN staff admitting they had seen male colleagues exploiting young and vulnerable locals during overseas missions. This sparked the start of a genuine effort to end such corrupt practices. But the problem hasn’t gone away.

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In 2016, there were 65 allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse against civilians, and 80 allegations against female colleagues by male UN personnel. There were at least 311 known victims, of whom 309 were female. Not enough is being done to protect these vulnerable individuals from the very people whose job it is to help them.

Some of the vile acts committed by UN personnel are not even criminal, such as paying for sex in countries where the sex trade is so normalised that the punters are free to do whatever they want to prostituted women. I have spoken with several people close to the UN who even use the casual term ‘transactional sex’ to sanitise the act of sexual exploitation that takes place via prostitution. One UN woman told me: “I have heard men justify buying sex from desperate, teenaged women in [African countries] by claiming that they are helping her feed her kids.”

The problem, of course, is not confined to UN personnel. A seasoned aid worker who asked to remain anonymous says that sexually abusing or exploiting people in developing countries is fundamentally inconsistent with the UN’s obligations to improve the human rights of citizens. “But this applies as much to employees of oil companies or accountancy firms [based in developing countries] as it does to aid workers or peacekeepers,” she says. “Often we find that private contractors are not held to account anywhere near as vigorously as are international civil servants or NGO workers. An evening spent in a bar in Abuja, Accra or Baku reveals the massive level of men buying sex from local girls, boys and women, yet men in general, never mind the UN, are subject to very little scrutiny or accountability.”

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In January 2017, UN Secretary General António Guterres established a high-level task force within the UN to identify and eradicate sexual exploitation and abuse. This was in response to the scandal in the Central African Republic in 2017 when several children were sexually abused by a French peacekeeping force that was under UN control. Since then, more cases have emerged.

One senior staff member tells me: “It is almost impossible for victims to report such incidents because they are either not believed or not adequately supported through a criminal trial, and are often stigmatised and punished by their family members and wider communities for speaking out.”

The 2017 appointment of Jane Connors, the first Victims’ Rights Advocate for the UN is a positive step. I recently visited the UN and saw Connors in action. I was told by several people involved in combatting sexual abuse that Connors is passionate about giving victims a voice, and holding perpetrators responsible. Connors has made a tangible impact in encouraging victims to come forward, and so far, has visited the Central African Republic, Haiti and South Sudan in order to train Victims’ Rights Advocates, which she describes as “the operational reflection of my policy”.

Connors has driven home the need for a victim-centred, child-sensitive and non-discriminatory approach in dealing with those who have experienced sexual violence and exploitation.

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While the UN is obviously taking abuse by its peacekeepers seriously, it seems at a loss as to how to end it. My personal view, informed by almost four decades of campaigning against sexual abuse of women and girls, is to put in place hard-hitting, no-nonsense sanctions in order to deter potential perpetrators. That means stringent, public and internal disciplinary proceedings in cases where there is any corroborating evidence, and the threat of criminal sanctions and job losses.

In his 2018 report on special measures for protection from sexual abuse, Guterres said: “I have repeatedly affirmed that sexual exploitation and abuse will not be tolerated by the United Nations.” He added: “No individual serving under the United Nations’ flag should be associated with sexual exploitation and abuse.” It is outrageous that that still needs to be said.

The extent of sexual abuse during UN missions is shocking and disturbing. The very men who are tasked with making life better for these already traumatised women are making their lives infinitely worse. The UN must be held to account for its employees’ behaviour. It must take responsibility for the fact that the vast majority of sexual assault and exploitation is by humanitarian workers in unregulated NGOs. Strong words are not enough.