You do not need to be over 50 to see today’s parallels with the US of the 1970s. That decade offers an instantly recognisable meme of rising inflation, political drift, spiralling crime and ominous geopolitics. Nor do you need to equate Joe Biden with the hapless Jimmy Carter, whose presidency deserves higher marks than history has given it. There is no Ronald Reagan on the sidelines. After Biden comes the deluge of a resurgent Donald Trump, or a kindred figure. Biden’s goal must be to avoid a Cartesian fate.

Events — and atmospherics — are making that increasingly hard to do. Like Carter, Biden is discovering how little scope the White House has to influence US homicide rates, consumer price inflation or Russia’s military ambitions. As with Carter, he is being blamed anyway. The murder rate took its biggest leap in 2020 before Biden took office, though it continued to increase last year. Rising annual inflation, which hit 7 per cent in December — the highest since 1982 — is largely a function of the pandemic, though Biden might be re-evaluating the wisdom of last March’s $1.9tn stimulus.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has not done anything on the scale of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But the massing of troops on Ukraine’s border poses as big a potential challenge to Biden’s global standing as an aggressive USSR was to Carter’s. In reality, Carter was far more robust than his reputation implied. His appointment of Paul Volcker to chair the US Federal Reserve and backing for Afghanistan’s mujahideen are both steps associated with Reagan. In some respects Reagan’s actions, as opposed to his words, were less decisive than Carter’s. But America’s public thought otherwise. Biden should take note. Vague impressions — of drift and waning energy — are hard to shift once they have formed. Politics offers scant room for reappraisal.