U.S. Foreign Policy - "Here we go again."
VP Biden today gave the first outlook on the Obama administration's foreign policy in a speech at the current Security Conference in Munich. The short version:
Specifics:
- Missile defense in Europe will continue to be build.
We will continue to develop missile defenses to counter a growing Iranian capability, provided the technology is proven to work and cost effective.
The Iran line is pure bullshit. The missile defense the U.S. plans is to enable a nuclear first strike capability against Russia. Russia will have to fight this.
- On Iran the Bush policy of uncompromising non-talks will continue:
We are willing to talk to Iran, and to offer a very clear choice: continue down your current course and there will be pressure and isolation; abandon your illicit nuclear program and support for terrorism and there will be meaningful incentives.
- On Afghanistan this gem:
... the imperative of stopping the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan from providing a haven for terrorists.
These mountains are either in Afghanistan or in Pakistan. To define them as "between" makes them some extraterritorial neverland where no laws apply. A verbal trick to allow for unlimited war on the area.
- In general:
When it comes to radical groups that use terror as a tool, radical states that harbor extremists, undermine peace and seek or spread weapons of mass destruction and regimes that systematically kill or ethnically cleanse their own people - we must stand united and use every means at our disposal to end the threat they pose.
The sentence is no different than anything Cheney would have said.
So on all major foreign policy issues there will be no change at all. As William Pfaff recently commented:
The institutional rigidity of U.S. foreign policy has been locked in place. The ideas – there are many – about negotiations, local, regional, or multinational, seem ruled out. Here we go again.
Posted by b on February 7, 2009 at 16:11 UTC | Permalink
« previous pageTangerine, I remember Vietnam all too well. I truly believe that the fear of Communism was of secondary importance. Of primary importance was something like this: "we are right, and we never lose".
Then--as I am even now--I was really astonished at the depths of our sense of entitlement, and of our military invincibility.
These convictions--this mystical thinking, shall we say--will never go away. I thought we had learned a lesson in Vietnam, and I was very wrong about that. Very--how to put this?--naive? Perhaps a little too optimistic about the capacity of a people to learn from their mistakes?
Nothing was learned, and nothing will be learned from our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Especially not when we've withdrawn our forces from those countries, as indeed we shall.
Our sense of entitlement is our raison d'être. We "came' here, if you will, to exercise our sense of entitlement, already altogether too well formed in the places we came from.
Posted by: alabama | Feb 9 2009 23:08 utc | 102
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@ alabama at 84. point well taken.
But now it has become so obvious. Americans do wonder what on earth is the point of the ‘war’ in Afgh. They argued about Vietnam, but the ideological divisions, as well as the gut fear of ‘communists’ were very deep - it seemed there was something serious to oppose or support. Afgh? It is normal, natural, the way of things....I’m sure you get the drift...
Posted by: Tangerine | Feb 9 2009 18:24 utc | 101