Joe Biden’s election win is good news for democracy, for the US, and for the world

It was no longer dawn, not even in California, when the news came. But it marked a new day in the United States and a fresh start for the world. The long wait for the vote counters in Pennsylvania to put the election beyond doubt allowed us to adjust gradually to the momentous change, as if our eyes had to get used to the light before we could see clearly. 

What we see is a more hopeful future. President-elect Joe Biden is a conventional politician. Usually faint praise, that is today a high compliment. As president, he will respect America’s alliances and its international obligations. He will re-engage with the global effort to deal with the climate emergency. We hope he will bring the US and the world together more, after four years of divisive shouting. 

We welcome the election of Kamala Harris as vice president, the first woman and the first woman of colour to hold such high office. For so many Americans, and for so many people around the world, who felt that the current president had encouraged racism, her elevation will be like a liberation. 

This is a good day for democracy. Turnout in the election was sharply up, sweeping aside all concerns that the coronavirus would make it difficult for the people to choose their government. The counting of votes has been slow, but steady, and, despite the complaints of Donald Trump, above reproach. 

In the end, the result will be decisive enough, in the popular vote as well as the electoral college, to pre-empt any questions about legitimacy. The current White House incumbent can press ahead with his baseless lawsuits but everyone knows that his lawyers are merely humouring him. The juggernaut of the republic’s democracy will proceed majestically towards the inauguration of a new president on 20 January. 

Meanwhile, there is work to be done. There is a pandemic on, which President-elect Biden takes seriously; and America needs the divisiveness and hostility of the past four years to be scaled back, for which he has already struck the right tone. 

For the rest of the world, relief will be mingled with uncertainty. For Boris Johnson, this is the start of an awkward two months as he has to navigate between what he might call the Scylla of offending the outgoing president and the Charybdis of annoying the incoming one. Of course, such an analogy probably overstates how much a British Conservative prime minister matters to either of them. 

It does not help with President-elect Biden that Mr Johnson once suggested that the “part-Kenyan” Barack Obama, with whom Mr Biden served for eight years, had an “ancestral dislike” of the UK. That was during the EU referendum campaign, on the day President Obama visited to encourage the country to vote Remain. Senator Biden has been in politics long enough – 50 years since he was elected to a county council seat in Delaware – not to let such nonsense bother him, but it is the kind of thing that many of the officials who will run the new administration’s foreign policy will remember. 

Fortunately, Mr Johnson’s growing enthusiasm for greening the UK economy means that he is well placed to act as a cheerleader for the new president’s promise that the US will rejoin the Paris Agreement as one of his first acts in the White House. We know that a Biden administration will be more interested in what Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron have to say – and understandably so, because the European Union is a more important interlocutor than the UK, however sentimental some Americans may feel about us. A post-Brexit trade deal with the US was always going to be hard to get through Congress, and that hasn’t changed. 

But a Biden-Harris administration is better for America than the alternative, better for the world and better for the UK. Today, we look forward to a more hopeful future.