Two out, one back in

Another of our old BBC favourites, retired BBC veteran Hugh Sykes, took to Twitter the other day in light of the BBC's Ukraine coverage to take a potshot at Jon Sopel and Emily Maitlis:

Hugh Sykes: I bet the recent Big Name defections from the BBC are regretting their decision to go dosh-and-podcast - they are nowhere near the front line now: out of sight, out of mind.

David M. Beneš: Oh they’ll soon be back, like KK.

Hugh Sykes: No one is indispensable.

I was also thinking about Maits and Soapless today in light of all the chat hereabouts about how The New York Times has just conceded that The New York Post got it right in 2020 when reporting the Hunter 'Son of Joe' Biden laptop story - a possible major scandal with strong implications for the ethical standing of the present US president, especially in light of the Ukraine crisis. 

This was, notoriously, something that landed The New York Post - a famous US newspaper - with a two-week Twitter ban for its now-shown-to-be-accurate journalism in the run-up to the 2020 US election. 

It's the sort of thing the BBC's disinformation unit and Ros's Radio 4 Media Show should look into and John Simpson should object to. 

Where Jon and Emily come into this is that they did an Americast podcast for the BBC at the time [which Arthur T got me to listen to] where they 'covered' the story. 

'Covered', in inverted commas, is the word. They 'covered' it, but Emily Maitlis in particular - then in her pomp at the BBC - was openly derisive about the story, sarcastically mocking the fact that they were covering it at all. Her and Sopes and The Zurch used every trick of language in the book to show how little they thought of the story. It was all a distraction by The Donald apparently.

On listening back today the word 'covered' took on other connotations: Unconsciously or consciously, they were 'covering' for Joe Biden as he fought for office with President Trump, blowing the same bubbles that their US counterparts were blowing from their echo chamber to help make this story blow away.

Anyhow, they're now LBC's business. Rob Burley, bless him, will probably end up having to defend them on Twitter. For his sake only, I hope they're not a walking disaster for LBC's ratings.

Meanwhile, as David M. Beneš tweeted above, KK - Katty Kay - is back at the BBC. 

She was formerly the face of the BBC in America but left last year to join a left-wing US media outlet that closed shortly afterwards following fraud allegations. 

The BBC has kindly taken her back on as a 'US special correspondent'. 

Kindly for her, though not necessarily for BBC licence fee payers.  

She's now back on the Beeb defending the Biden administration as if she'd never left and back doing the BBC's claim of impartiality harm again.

Despite Hugh, Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel's departure was a blessing for the BBC in impartiality terms. Rescuing Katty Kay - the kind of partisan BBC journalist who also moans about the influence of 'the Jewish lobby' - isn't a good idea for the publicly-paid corporation in that respect.

Different president, different reporting

  

Even since the Biden administration's bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan climaxed in the deaths of 13 US marines and some 200 others at Kabul airport at the hands of Islamic State's Afghan offshoot and the US quickly retaliated, claiming to have successfully struck two ISIS-K targets, doubts have been expressed about those targets. Were they really terrorists? 

We'll probably never know if those killed in the first, surprisingly swift strike were really senior IS commanders, as was claimed at the time, or were merely low-level IS members, or just unlucky locals killed by mistake, because the US has refused to provide any details. It happened out in the Afghan countryside, far from journalists' eyes.

The doubts about the second ''righteous strike'' [Mark Milley, US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] surfaced straightaway. I saw photos of the children killed in the attack within hours and some media organisations were on the case straightaway too saying that an innocent family had been hit, not IS-KP terrorists. From the first hours it looked to me as if the US had struck the wrong people. But the bullish Biden administration/Pentagon officials stuck to their line that it was IS terrorists on their way to attack the airport again who had been vaporised. Finally, the US has now admitted that they did indeed strike the wrong target. They actually hit an aid worker and a translator and another ally, and seven children. What the US military thought were weapons were actually water bottles.

Watching BBC News at Ten's brief coverage of the US admission last night and reading the BBC News website's report on the story, featuring 'analysis' from Barbara Plett-Usher, I was struck by how little they were tying the Biden administration to the story. It's as if they were downplaying the Biden administration's responsibility. No mention of Mark Milley. Just a passing somewhat positive reference in the online piece to Joe Biden.  [''The last US soldier left Afghanistan on 31 August - the deadline President Joe Biden had set for the US withdrawal.'']. And quotes from the US Defence Secretary being added to the online piece 9 hours later.

I think blog favourite Adrian Hilton sums it up well:

Adrian Hilton: If this appalling tragedy had occurred under Donald Trump, I'm sure UK media (esp. BBC News and Channel 4 News) would have apportioned blame directly at his feet, and given it hours of negative coverage. But under Joe Biden it's excusable; not newsworthy...'collateral damage'.

To put it another way: Just imagine what would have happened if Donald Trump had carried out the strikes, and seven children had been killed in a botched response to a terror attack which killed 13 Americans as a result of bottlenecking caused by the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul airport, accompanied by images of people falling from the wheel wells of aeroplanes. 

It speaks of biased reporting. 

And scanning the BBC's TV channels today for 'Biden', he's only being mentioned in connection with a pro-Trump/pro-Capitol protesters rally coming up this weekend and the French withdrawing their ambassadors to the US and Australia over Aukus.

Update - Nomia Iqbal's report on the BBC News Channel this morning ended by focusing on ''the US military'', not the Biden administration:

This awful mistake further dents the US military's reputation, that has already been damaged by its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Guess who John Simpson blames?

On Jon Sopel [the Full Sopes treatment]

I

A few days ago, one Tony Spencer tweeted a link to a BBC News website piece, Three ways this Afghanistan crisis really hurts Biden The US president promised more competence and empathy - his reputation and America's have taken a hit. 

Tony wrote,

Hope @BBCJonSopel is not reading this. Biden's number one fan will be so disappointed.

Jon Sopel, adding a 'rolling eyes' emoji, replied,

Tony - I wrote it.

“Burn!” cried Jon's delighted Twitter fans.

Tony then replied,

Wow. I'm impressed and should have read the credits!! Fair play to you Jon on this article, which is well balanced. Changed your tune a bit, though.

To which Jon - channeling his famous “impartial, free and fair” response to President Trump's 'Another beauty!' crack - replied,

Nope. Have not changed a bit. Hold people in power to account - fairly and firmly whatever their political stripes.

II 

Jon Sopel's belief in his own impartiality is undoubtedly sincere. He evidently thinks he's getting it right.

He's proclaimed it many times, from his appearances on Feedback and Newswatch, to his newspaper/gazette interviews. 

He's even favourably contrasted his own 'fair' reporting of Donald Trump to that of 'unfair' partisan, liberal US outlets, despite himself reporting on the previous US president in pretty much the same hostile, sneering spirit as they do - albeit with added British dryness.

There's none so blind, perhaps...

Or to quote the ripe-for-cancelling Rabbie Burns on behalf of Jon: O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us!

I, personally, don't think that Jon Sopel has been even remotely impartial as the BBC's North America editor - whatever he thinks. He objected to Donald Trump and fixated on Donald Trump's tweets [despite criticising others for fixating on them], and sneered and sneered and sneered about Mr Trump, whilst evidently getting a real kick out of playing to the gallery, reinforced by the enthusiastic responses he got from the usual, unrepresentative suspects on Twitter. 

III

Yes, many more people than just Tony - including me - found themselves taken aback by the sheer unexpectedness of Jon Sopel's strong criticisms of President Biden over the incompetent-at-best Afghan pullout. 

From Twitter to the BBC's News at Ten he's actually been pretty brutal.

Here's a small sample of his reporting, broadcast over the month on BBC One's main news bulletins:

• Those optics are terrible. This looks like being the most consequential decision that Joe Biden is going to take. It could also be the most calamitous.
• Over many years and at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, the US trained and equipped Afghan forces to be ready to take back control of their country. But they collapsed like a house of cards - one of many miscalculations made by the Biden administration over these dizzying few weeks.
• This may have been Donald Trump's policy, but it is Joe Biden's implementation, and I think he will play quite a price for the shambles that has unfolded over the past few days. 
• America is the world's pre-eminent superpower, but after the past few days, it doesn't look very super and it actually doesn't look that powerful.

So is this a sign of impartiality? He spent four years 'holding Donald Trump to account' and then some, after all,

Or does it show the opposite? 

Because this could very well be Jon marching in lockstep with like-minded US journalists, let down by and angrily disagreeing with 'their' President.

Many of them - just like the BBC's John Simpson - seem to be deeply wedded to the liberal interventionalist model, and aghast at the pullout.

[They also like war reporting.]

And, indeed, it does strike me as being highly suggestive that huge swathes of the US liberal media - even some of the most partisan outlets - have just-as-suddenly turned on Joe Biden over Afghanistan too, at exactly the same time, over exactly the same issues, and just as fiercely, and that they are all making much the same criticisms of the incumbent President as Jon Sopel's been making. 

Liberal interventionist birds of a feather flock together, even on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean?

IV

And it also strikes me that Jon Sopel, like his BBC colleagues, has been just as guilty as those partisan, liberal US outlets of not holding President Biden to account...up till the point when the Afghan debacle began unfolding.

The other day on GB News Simon McCoy [ex-BBC] commented, just as the crisis began:

If you watch some channels you would be forgiven for thinking everything's fine because President Trump's gone. And yet America, Joe Biden, with the decision to remove troops from Afghanistan, there are issues, there's sleaze bubbling under around President Biden.

I think he had the BBC in mind, doubtless among others. 

The Real Simon was, I think, rather understating it though. From the border crisis and growing economic woes to VP Kamala Harris's unpopularity and the divisiveness of Democrat identity politics radicalism, there's so much to say about the present US government.

Indeed, the 'Nothing to see here' attitude to the Biden administration's many failings even saw the BBC park their Americast podcast - the one with Sopes, Maitlis, and Zurch. 

No Trump to sneer at, no fun perhaps.

And then came Afghanistan.  

Americast was brought back this week, and Jon Sopel rose from his post-Trump slumbers, describing Joe's handling of the Afghanistan fiasco as ''totally incompetent''. 

V

Despite all this, I'm sensing - especially from his latest BBC One reports - that Jon's now starting to restrain himself, slipping back into more circumlocutory turns of phrase in describing the latest Biden misspeaks than he was last week. 

I think that might be because of that very Americast. 

He started expanding on his earlier criticisms of Mr Biden's ''totally incompetent'' handling of the Afghan crisis [as he put it], but found himself alongside a far-more-charitable-to-Biden Emily Maitlis and - their special guest - a kind-to-Biden ambassador. 

BBC and US media liberal groupthinks colliding and scattering, maybe.

VI

It's a tricky thing, thinking you're impartial when you're not. 

VII

CODA

And to end, a little light relief, plus an opportunity to post a map...

The good old 'crossing the DMZ from Tajikistan' defence for getting your facts wrong is one we've surely all used, especially in pub quizzes. 

I once got a Lady Gaga question wrong in a pub quiz, saying that Her Ladyship really was the sister of Queen's Radio Gaga, but excused myself by saying ''Sorry, but Jon Sopel crossed the DMZ from Tajikistan once'', and was awarded the point. 

Rightly so. Maybe Joe Biden should try it?

Indeed, as geography fans will know, Russia now has a minimum of two countries between it and Afghanistan [almost always three countries], depending on your land journey - unless you take the narrow but long land route via China. 

Clicking the link in the tweet Jon replied to, you find that Jon has [without admitting so on Twitter] edited the piece. 

Instead of ''three countries that neighbour Afghanistan - Russian, Iran and China'', the piece now says ''Why, three countries near Afghanistan - Russia, Iran and China''. 

Hm, Russia's still not that near. Kazakhstan, especially, is huge. Gawd know what they eat in Kazakhstan to make their country so big. Yaks? Lost yetis? Or former Kazakh regime advisor Tony Blair's legendary all-you-can-eat Brown burger specials?

How would the BBC have reported the US airstrikes on Iran-backed targets if Donald Trump had launched them so early in his presidency?

Did you know that President Joe Biden has already bombed Syria? 

It's something that could easily have been missed if you simply relied on BBC TV/radio news. 

Here's Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times this morning: 

Joe Biden’s kinder, gentler America fired a number of missiles into Syria last week, killing an estimated 22 people. I assume it was some kind of goodwill gesture towards foreigners. Certainly that’s how it was reported by the BBC. Whenever Trump did anything similar it was presented as “fascist madman murders civilians and starts Third World War”.

That sounds like the sort of thing the BBC would do, but did they? I've searched via TV Eyes and I can only find one reference to the US airstrikes on Syria on BBC One or BBC Two or the BBC News Channel, at around 5am on Friday morning - which is quite some feat of under-reporting. 

  

I see Radio 4 reported the US strikes though, intermittently, throughout Friday and Saturday. Except for a brief mention during a news bulletin, Today ignored the story, as did The World at One and The World Tonight. However, Friday's P.M. asked one question about it. Rod must have heard it somewhere on Radio 4.

How did they report it then? 

• 2am, Friday: The Pentagon says the US military have hit facilities in eastern Syria used by Iran-backed militias in retaliation for recent rocket attacks on US troop locations in Iraq. A defence spokesman said the air strikes were carried out following a directive from President Biden.
• 6.35am, Friday: Joe Biden has authorised his first known air strike since becoming US President. It targeted facilities in eastern Syria used by militias backed by Iran and was in retaliation for recent rocket attacks on American targets in Iraq.
• 11.02am, Friday: The US says its air strikes on targets in eastern Syria have destroyed 9 facilities controlled by Shia militia. It's the first US military operation since Joe Biden became president. The attacks were ordered after a civilian contractor was killed by rockets fired at US positions in Iraq.
• 5.50pm, Friday: Evan Davis: Now, the first military action of the Biden administration was carried out last night - an air strike targeting Iran-backed militias in Syria. That came 10 days after Americans were targeted. A civilian contractor was killed in a rocket attack on US targets in Irbil. Syria has condemned the attack as "a bad sign" from the new US administration. But are we able to say much about American foreign policy under Joe Biden? As we speak in fact, lines are coming out of the White House. It has just said "strikes were necessary to reduce the threat of further attacks" and the Americans have also said they will be releasing later today their evidence, their intelligence, on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, that killing. We can talk to Karin von Hippel, who's Director General of the Royal United Services Institute for defence and security studies. This strike last night, Karin, some might say it shows a a willingness to get dragged back in. I don't know. What did you make of it? Karin von Hippel: I actually think it was a targeted and limited strike and, in a sense, a response to say 'you can't attack American bases or American personnel or troops' and also a message to Iran, that's getting involved in a lot of proxy conflicts, or has been, for a very long time in the region and Biden is very desperate to get back into an Iran deal, the JCPOA plus whatever the new version will be, and there's a big debate going on about whether or not Iran's involvement in the region should be brought into the deal or not. So this is sending a message to the Iranians essentially. Evan Davis: Great.
• 4.04am, Saturday: President Biden has said that Iran cannot act with impunity, and he warned the country's leaders to be careful. He was speaking after US warplanes attacked facilities in eastern Syria controlled by Iran backed Shia militias. At least 17 people were reported killed. With more detail, here's Gary O'Donoghue. Gary O'Donoghue: The Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said two F15 aircraft dropped a total of 7 precision-guided munitions totally destroying 9 facilities and partially destroying two others. Battle damage assessment, he said, was still being carried out and he would not confirm reports that 17 people have been killed on the ground. The strikes, he said, were justified under both US law and United Nations statutes and were directed at Iran-backed Shia militia groups.

As well as a few other short summaries overnight on Friday night and Saturday morning, that seems to have been it. 

Even the likes of Jeremy Bowen have kept quiet on this story.

It's as if, without Donald Trump, the urge to report - and denounce - certain actions holds less appeal.

Er...

 

My goodness, has the BBC's Daniel Sandford become the first BBC journalist on Twitter to criticise Joe Biden? 

The President was drinking a cup of coffee outside the White House. Then, either ignoring or forgetting social distancing, he went over and handed his drink to an obviously cold journalist. 

Cue Daniel:

The Beauties - BBC Bias à propos US Politics

 

A Guest Post by Arthur T 

I have made the point recently that the BBC’s news gathering and broadcast is more biased in the US than in the UK. From top to bottom, the BBC have allowed their dislike of President Trump to pervade every pore of news reporting as they seek to ridicule him. Jon Sopel just couldn’t wait to label his nemesis ‘loser’ as the BBC declared Biden victorious in the November 3rd Presidential Election. 

The above screenshot from the other day has replaced the US Election feature on the BBC News website US and Canada pages. What caught my eye was the Sopel and Maitlis Americast: Review of 2020. I thought ITBBCB? might review Sopel and Maitlis’s podcasts, one in particular: 'Hunter Biden’s Laptop, Why the media isn’t covering a story Trump wants them to’, a podcast from 21st October - just two weeks before polling day. Craig has very kindly made a transcript:

Jon Sopel: Let's go onto the topic of conversation that Donald Trump would love to be talking about. It's a complicated story, but it seems that someone got hold of a laptop allegedly containing emails written by Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden's laptop, which apparently he had taken in for service. He had forgotten about it. Owner of the shop looks at it, thinks 'Oh, those are interesting emails', sees if the FBI are interested, they're not, and it ends up in the hands of Donald Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and in the hands of Steve Bannon, former campaign director at the last election. And they have touted it around. They have tried to give it to Fox News. Fox weren't interested. Then it ends up being published by The New York Post, a Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper. And the suggestion, I think, at the most is there may have been a meeting organised between Hunter Biden, who was then a director of this Ukrainian energy company Burisma and his father Joe Biden, then the vice-president, to meet a couple of the executives. But it is a screenshot that has been taken. And the reason a lot of people are very suspicious about this is that no one's actually examined the hard drive to see whether the screenshot has been doctored in any way. And so that it why a lot of news organisations have been treating this story with suspicion. It ain't Hillary Clinton's email investigation of four years ago when the FBI announced two weeks before polling that they are investigating her. This is a laptop that has kind of washed up and, you know, it looks like...it may all be genuine but it looks like it's dirty tricks as well. 

Emily Maitlis: But the interesting thing is, you said that Fox News wouldn't cover the story but Fox & Friends, the chat show, did talk to the President about this because this is fertile ground, as Sopes said, for him and they said, "What are you going to do?", and he said, "I think we ought to get the Attorney-General William Barr and ask him to investigate". Now that is an extraordinary step, you know. Just think about that in sort of political overreach terms. You're actually going to get the Attorney-General to investigate Hunter Biden,...

Jon Sopel: For corruption.

Emily Maitlis: ...your opponent's son, for corruption. Let's not forget, the last time Donald Trump asked somebody to investigate Hunter Biden for corruption it was the Ukrainian government, and it got him into the impeachment scenario. So this is something that you kind of, you know...it does sort of make you think it's a whole different league of playing politics. And really the cards are on Bill Barr, who has not shown himself to have an enormous spine in standing up to this president, and to see how far he will go in playing this game.

Jon Sopel: Well, I thought there was a fascinating moment where Donald Trump is on the tarmac, he's about to go off to one of his rallies, he's about to board the plane, and Jeff Mason, who's a very well respected agency reporter who covers the White House beat, asks the President about the allegations and calling for a corruption investigation and this is what Donald Trump said: 

Jeff Mason: Your campaign strategy seems to be to call Biden a criminal. Why is that?

Donald Trump: He is a criminal. He's a criminal. He got caught. Read his laptop. And you know who is a criminal here? You're a criminal for not reporting it. You are a criminal for not reporting it. Let me tell you something, Joe Biden is a criminal and he's been a criminal for a long time, and you're a criminal and the media for not reporting it.

So, you guess, a real sense of the President's mood that he thought that they had gold dust. Interestingly, this occurred last week. That's when the story broke in The New York Post. And it was the night of the duelling townhalls, where we did the podcast afterwards, and Donald Trump didn't mention it once, as if to suggest that Donald Trump didn't really believe quite what was being reported. But here you have the White House correspondent for Reuters being accused of being a criminal because he obviously has doubts about the veracity of the story of this laptop and how it came to be in the hands of Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon.

Emily Maitlis: The Zurch, do you think that if it was flipped more papers would be picking this up? If it was a story about Trump would more papers be more inclined to be latching onto this? I mean, that's obviously his allegation in that clip, so maybe we should, you know, air it and we should analyse it?

Anthony Zurcher: Giuliani definitely shopped it around before he ended up with  The New York Post. And I think there were some legitimate concerns, as you mentioned, from even outlets like Fox News about where this laptop came from and the story behind it. Obviously, back in 2016 The New York Times had no problems and media outlets had no problems poring over the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton's campaign team and reporting on them. So in that case it was flipped and we saw what happened. I think maybe this time around there's a little more reluctance on the part of mainstream outlets to run with things that are of questionable sourcing. And there are a couple of things, as you pointed out, in these emails - if they are legitimate - that raise some questions. The one about the Ukrainian businessman thanking Hunter Biden for the opportunity to meet Hunter Biden's father. Of course, that could just have been a handshake at a public event. The Biden campaign has denied that there is anything on the official schedule for it. And then there was another one, a 2017 email where a Chinese associate was paying money to Hunter Biden's company and a business associate of Hunter Biden's said that $10m was going to be set aside, given to Hunter Biden for The Big Guy. And Fox News said that The Big Guy was Joe Biden. So the question is: Did Joe Biden get any money from that business deal? But then again, you know, Donald Trump has clear business dealings with China, we've learned from the The New York Times a bank account in China, so I don't know if the attacks that we see from the Trump side are going to be able to strike home here. It will come up in the debate though, I'm sure of it. 

Jon Sopel: Oh, I'm sure. The debate is going to dominated. I would think that Donald Trump is going to go on and on about this, because that way it will have to be picked up by network news bulletins in a way that the allegations haven't been hitherto. Donald Trump's calculation will be, look, if I talk about the border wall or I talk about whatever it happens to be it's not going to get much purchase. If I want the subject to be Hunter Biden, Burisma, corruption, his father, the best way to do that is, you know, saturate bombing the debate with these allegations. And I think the Biden campaign will be thinking long and hard about what the response should be in the debate to all of that. Does he get drawn into this debate or does he try and make a brief statement and move on? It's tricky. Tricky for Biden.

Anthony Zurcher; And I want to drive home the point, right now there's no evidence that Joe Biden did anything untoward, either in his dealings with Ukraine or in his dealings with China. Although I think it's clear that - it's something we knew before but we know again if we take this laptop at face value - it's clear that Hunter Biden was capitalising on his connections to power and his last name in order to sign business deals, which, unfortunately, in Washington is kind of an age-old tradition, and it is certainly not limited just to Hunter Biden.   

Emily Maitlis: I think you could probably say it's really inclusive of the Administration itself, could you?

Anthony Zurcher: Yeah. I think that's safe to say. Yes. 

The tone throughout is to make light of the laptop story - passing it off as unimportant. Zurcher in particular asserts that ‘there's no evidence that Joe Biden did anything untoward, either in his dealings with Ukraine or in his dealings with China.’ He offers no supporting evidence for this point of view, and neither does he offer any evidence for his claim ‘in Washington is kind of an age-old tradition, and it is certainly not limited just to Hunter Biden.’

Emily Maitlis: I think you could probably say it's really inclusive of the Administration itself, could you?

Anthony Zurcher: Yeah. I think that's safe to say. Yes.

In two short sentences he absolves Biden of blame and accuses POTUS of corruption. That’s BBC bias pure and simple, coupled with a loathing for President Trump. As we know, Zurcher, Sopel and Bryant get nowhere near the White House. Most broadcasts are from the pavements of DC far enough away to know only what they are fed through US MSM channels. 

James Delingpole in TCW and now Josh Glancy The Times’ Washington Reporter have finally broken ranks and admit to believing that the laptop story was by no means trivial, but in fact crucially important.

John Simpson forgets Morocco

As mentioned by Sisyphus on the open thread, the BBC's World Affairs Editor John Simpson was as factually slipshod as ever yesterday. 

His disapproving take on Donald Trump's foreign policy allowed the President just "one foreign policy success": "getting two Gulf states plus Sudan to recognise Israel". 

John Simpson had obviously forgotten Morocco. 

Incidentally, I wonder if the way he names the two presidents here will be a foretaste of things to come? 

"Donald Trump" - 3

"Joe Biden" - 5

"Trump" - 3

"Biden" - 0

Anyhow, here's a transcript:

*******

Joe Biden: America is back, ready to lead the world, not retreat from it. Once again at the head of the table. 

John Simpson: Now that Joe Biden is about to take over the White House and Donald Trump's moving out, governments right around the world are heaving sighs of relief. I'm not actually walking into the real Oval Office! This is an exact replica in a Norfolk film studio much used by Hollywood movies. But when Joe Biden sits at that desk for the first time, he's going to be taking charge of a country whose standing in the world hasn't been as low as this in decades. Right around the world there are fences to be mended and alliances to be built up again. 

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US Ambassador toe the UN nominee: America is back. Multilateralism is back. Diplomacy is back. 

John Simpson: That means taking the lead in NATO again after four years of complaints about other members plus threats to cut America's contributions. And another major priority, rejoining the Paris Climate Accord, which Donald Trump said damaged American interests. Joe Biden hopes to revive the nuclear agreement with Iran, which Trump tried to kill off. Iran, the big European countries and Britain are all enthusiastic. Trump's one foreign policy success was getting two Gulf states plus Sudan to recognise Israel. Trump sided strongly with the Israelis and cut aid to the Palestinians. How easy will it be for Joe Biden to be able to change this? Even more important for him is how he'll approach Russia. The Russians meddled in the 2016 US election and seems to have hacked into some of America's most fundamental secrets. 

Anthony Gardner, former US Ambassador to the EU: There's a lot of unfinished business with Russia. I think together with the UK and Europe we'll have to again sit down and decide what kind of serious signals do we send to Russia that its behaviour must indeed change. We have at max four years, probably two years, to really do things together with our allies. 

John Simpson: And there is the most complex problem of all, China. What should Joe Biden's approach be? 

Senator Chris Coons, US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations: Work with China. Compete with them in a persistent and forceful and effective way. Be prepared in the event there is conflict, but always be willing to cooperate with China on some critical issues that are right before us like combating global climate change, dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. 

John Simpson: At 78, time isn't exactly on Joe Biden's side. But for the outside world, he has one huge advantage. He isn't Donald Trump.