Joe Biden has been President of the United States for just over two and a half years. Everyone wonders how long this can go on.

Everyone also wonders if and when Biden will invite Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House. I wonder if it matters at all.

Netanyahu was re-elected in November 2022. Israel’s President Isaac Herzog visited Washington in July, but the Israeli presidency is ceremonial. Then again, so is Biden’s.

Ask anyone in Washington if he’s in charge, and you get the same answer. Biden has always been more interested in power than policy. His presidency is a slow-motion race against the clock.

His aim is to stagger over the line to August 2024 and the Democratic nomination, then avoid falling on his face before crossing the finish line in the November elections.

This kind of presidency, like this kind of debilitated president, is unprecedented in modern American history.

Ronald Reagan went a bit gaga in his second term, but he stayed competent enough to keep an eye on the Cold War and read from the teleprompter without lapsing into gibberish.

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Joe Biden (Photo: Getty Images)

Reagan’s vice-president, George HW Bush, was a competent politician and Cold War strategist. No one has ever used the words “competent” and “strategist” to describe Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice-president.

The word is that the actual work of the presidency is being done by the dozens of Obama-era advisers and managers, most of them unknown to the public.

They waited out the Trump presidency in think tanks, universities and cable-news shows, and have resumed where they left off in 2016. A fascinating dialogue on the “third Obama presidency” appeared this week on the Tablet website.

Tablet’s David Samuels and David Garrow, the biographer of Martin Luther King, discussed Garrow’s biography of Obama’s early years.

Obama, they note, is the first president to buck the tradition that when you leave the White House, you leave Washington DC and allow your successor to get on with the job.

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Barack Obama (Photo: Getty Images)

The Obamas stayed on, ostensibly to allow their daughters to finish high school. Their daughters have graduated from college, but the Obamas are still there.

It is rumoured that Obama is running a remote-control presidency from his iPhone, with limos bearing his old advisers and their security details coming and going from his house.

This would not be illegal, but again, it would be unprecedented. The chronic incuriosity of the American media is also unprecedented.

There is, however, precedent for friction between Benjamin Netanyahu and a Democratic-run White House that wants to make a deal with Iran. Herzog’s visit — bipartisan ovations in Congress, declarations of mutual democratic affection in the White House — felt almost nostalgic, a reminder that Israel was not always a bitter point of partisan division.

The non-invitation to Netanyahu is the reality. During Herzog’s visit, Biden and Netanyahu spoke on the phone. This was the administration’s way of denying that inviting the ceremonial Herzog to DC (twice!) was a breach of protocol.

Netanyahu said afterwards that Biden invited him to the White House.

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President Herzog addressing Congress (Photo: Getty Images)

But the White House and the State Department refuse to specify when the visit will occur, and even whether it will be at the White House. Israeli media have claimed that Biden never invited Netanyahu at all.

Meanwhile, the administration signals its goodwill to the terrorist regime in Tehran by buying back American hostages, and announces that the US will secure a Saudi-Israeli deal in time for the 2024 elections.

The administration dislikes Israel in general and hates Netanyahu in particular. Netanyahu dislikes the Democrats in general and hates the pro-Iran appeasers in particular.

The administration contrives petty ways to slight Netanyahu, and Netanyahu, the world champion of the petty slight, pays it back. You can see why people call this the third Obama term.

The possible outcomes of a Netanyahu visit matter less than the message of a non-visit. The goal is to position Netanyahu and his hard-right coalition as the “obstacle to peace”. By which the White House means an obstacle to securing four more years in power.

The real question isn’t whether Netanyahu gets a photo-op in DC or the administration gets to send a message in the American media.

It’s whether the Saudis get what they’re asking for in return, especially a Nato-style defence pact with the US and a US-supplied “civilian” nuclear programme.

The Democrats who are trying to undermine Netanyahu may yet grant him his biggest photo-op of all — in Riyadh.