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Another Look At Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy Team
The choices the incoming president Joe Biden has made so far are not great at all. The people he so far selected are staunch interventionists who will want to continue the wars they have started during their previous time in office.
Tony Blinken will become Secretary of State. (It was probably thought to be too hard to get Senate confirmation for the similar bad Susan Rice.) In 2013 the Washington Post described his high flying pedigree:
Blinken is deputy national security adviser to President Obama, who has also invoked the Holocaust as his administration wrestles, often painfully, with how to respond to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons. One of the government’s key players in drafting Syria policy, the 51-year-old Blinken has Clinton administration credentials and deep ties to Vice President Biden and the foreign policy and national security establishment in Washington. He has drawn attention in Situation Room photos, including the iconic one during the May 2011 raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound, for his stylishly wavy salt-and-pepper hair. But what sets him apart from the other intellectual powerhouses in the inner sanctum is a life story that reads like a Jewish high-society screenplay that the onetime aspiring film producer may have once dreamed of making. There’s his father, a giant in venture capital; his mother, the arts patron; and his stepfather, who survived the Holocaust to become of one of the most influential lawyers on the global stage. It is a bildungsroman for young Blinken — playing in a Parisian jazz band, debating politics with statesmen — with a supporting cast of characters that includes, among others, Leonard Bernstein, John Lennon, Mark Rothko, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Abel Ferrara and Christo.
The man is a war mongering psycho:
Blinken surprised some in the Situation Room by breaking with Biden to support military action in Libya, administration officials said, and he advocated for American action in Syria after Obama’s reelection. These sources said that Blinken was less enthusiastic than Biden about Obama’s decision to seek congressional approval for a strike in Syria, but is now — perhaps out of necessity — onboard and a backer of diplomatic negotiations with Russia. While less of an ideologue than Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (a job for which he was considered), he not surprisingly shares her belief that global powers such as the United States have a “responsibility to protect” against atrocities.
He has since shown no remorse about those foreign policy failures:
Blinken maintains that the failure of U.S. policy in Syria was that our government did not employ enough force. He stands by the false argument that Biden’s vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq was a “vote for tough diplomacy.” He was reportedly in favor of the Libyan intervention, which Biden opposed, and he was initially a defender and advocate for U.S. support for the Saudi coalition war on Yemen. In short, Blinken has agreed with some of the biggest foreign policy mistakes that Biden and Obama made, and he has tended to be more of an interventionist than both of them.
Jake Sullivan will become National Security Advisor. He is a Hillary Clinton figure:
If you can’t quite place Jake Sullivan, he’s was a long-serving aide to Hillary Clinton, starting with her 2008 race against Barack Obama, then serving as her deputy chief of staff and director of the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning when Clinton was Obama’s secretary of state. (…) In 2016, during her failed presidential campaign, Sullivan once again teamed up with Clinton, and he was widely expected to have been named to serve as her national security adviser or even secretary of state had she won.
Since 2016, and since the creation of NSA, Sullivan has emerged as a kind of foreign policy scold, gently — and sometimes not so gently — criticizing those who reflexively oppose American intervention abroad and who disparage the idea of American “exceptionalism.” Indeed, in an article in the January-February issue of The Atlantic, “What Donald Trump and Dick Cheney Got Wrong About America,” Sullivan explicitly says that he’s intent on “rescuing the idea of American exceptionalism” and presents the “case for a new American exceptionalism".
Sullivan send classified documents to Hillary Clinton's private email server. He wrote to her that Al Qaida is "on our side in Syria." He also hyped fake Trump-Russia collusion allegations.
It is yet unknown who will become Secretary of Defense. Michèle Flournoy is the most named option but there is some opposition to her nomination:
[B]ackers of Michèle Flournoy, his likely pick for defense secretary, are trying to head off a last-minute push by some left-leaning Democrats trying to derail her selection, with many progressives seeing her nomination as a continuation of what critics refer to as America’s “forever wars.”
I expect that the progressive will lose the fight and that either Flournoy or some other hawkish figure will get that weapon lobbyist position.
Progressives also lost on the Treasury position. Biden's nomination for that is Janet Yellen who is known to be an inflation hawk. She is unlikely to support large spending on progressive priorities.
As usual with a Democratic election win the people who brought the decisive votes and engagement, those who argue for more socialist and peaceful policies, will be cut off from the levers of power.
In three years they will again be called upon to fall for another bait and switch.
It is curious, but for all the invented illnesses, demons, and direct orders to shut up by Trumpsters on any of us, here a guy who sees it as we did/do, the worst US presidency ever. He must be suffering that syndrome too, anyway with an exceptional intelligence service, that we lack, to keep him on the trails, in case he could deviate through delusional paths, which he obviously does not. He makes no ilusions on Biden´s presidency, but describes what has been in front of the eyes of the whole world ( at least researching a bit on geopolitics ), for anyone who wanted to see.
Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, on Trump´s presidency:
Of course, emotionally, there’s no doubt –and I’m talking about my personal feelings here– that when you look at the Trump administration, the Trump government, it turns out to be the worst government (in US history), or, if not the worst, it is one of the worst US governments in history. This government was the most heinous, the vilest, the most despotic, the most arrogant, the most contemptuous of its friends and allies –for example, there was a difference in the way Trump behaved with Saudi Arabia [repeated humiliations], and his way of addressing Iran: when he addressed Iran, he was more balanced, more measured, more cautious; and he will step down from power with bitterness over not having been able to find a single Iranian official to answer him on the phone. It was the most tyrannical, the most despotic, the most arrogant, the most criminal, the most terrorist government… Such was the Trump administration.
Let’s remember what he did for 4 years. For 4 years, he put the whole world on the brink of war, whether he (deliberately) played on the level of psychological warfare, (on the permanent threat) of the brink of the abyss, or whether he was serious (and willing to go to war). Against North Korea, he brought things to the brink of war. Likewise with China, with Iran, with Venezuela, with Cuba, with Syria, with many places in the world. He brought the whole world to the brink of war! As far as states and peoples are concerned, he has intensified blockades, acts of manifest aggression and the most explicit interference in internal affairs… Of course, we recognize in Trump a very important quality, which is that he showed the true face of the United States. This is their true face. Arrogance, tyranny, (permanent) aggression, despotism, imperialism, terrorism, bestiality, crime, (mass) murder, corruption… This is what Trump showed. His predecessors wore make-up and measured their words, but his quality is that he showed the US as they were to the peoples of the world, (without wearing a mask or using false rhetoric).
(…)But at a practical level, we need to know, through our assessment of these four years (of Trump’s rule), that under such an aggressive (US) government, having such a high level of tyranny and willingness to enter into war… Because it is obvious that the possibility of the Trump administration going to war was higher and will remain higher than that of the next administration. This administration was very inclined to go to war. They had no caution, no limits.
Speech by Hezbollah Secretary General Sayed Hassan Nasrallah on November 11, 2020.
Posted by: H.Schmatz | Nov 24 2020 18:49 utc | 32
Quit “effing” around. He is one of many Obama Administration War criminals and they should be labelled as such. And what is the war crime? Quick the Nuremberg wiki…. hmmm planning war of aggression? propagandizing. Biden says “Blinken” I will see your “Blinken” and raise you a Rosenberg. ”
The Nuremberg Trials
After the war, the top surviving German leaders were tried for Nazi Germany’s crimes, including the crimes of the Holocaust. Their trial was held before an International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg, Germany. Judges from the Allied powers—Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States—presided over the hearing of 22 major Nazi criminals. Subsequently, the United States held 12 additional trials in Nuremberg of high-level officials of the German government, military, and SS as well as medical professionals and leading industrialists. The crimes charged before the Nuremberg courts were crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes.
In all, 199 defendants were tried at Nuremberg, 161 were convicted and 37 were sentenced to death, including 12 of those tried by the IMT. Holocaust crimes were included in a few of the trials but were the major focus of only the US trial of Einsatzgruppen leaders. The defendants generally acknowledged that the crimes they were accused of occurred but denied that they were responsible, as they were following orders from a higher authority.
The Nazis’ highest authority, the person most to blame for the Holocaust, was missing at the trials. Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in the final days of the war, as had several of his closest aides. Many more criminals were never tried. Some fled Germany to live abroad, including hundreds who came to the United States.
Trials of Nazis continued to take place both in Germany and many other countries. Simon Wiesenthal, a Nazi-hunter, provided leads for war crimes investigators about Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann, who had helped plan and carry out the deportations of millions of Jews, was brought to trial in Israel. The testimony of hundreds of witnesses, many of them survivors, was followed all over the world. Eichmann was found guilty and executed in 1962.
Key Dates
August 8, 1945
Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) announced at London Conference
The International Military Tribunal (IMT) is composed of judges from the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. Leading Nazi officials will be indicted and placed on trial in Nuremberg, Germany, under Article 6 of the IMT’s Charter for the following crimes: (1) Conspiracy to commit charges 2, 3, and 4, which are listed here; (2) crimes against peace—defined as participation in the planning and waging of a war of aggression in violation of numerous international treaties; (3) war crimes—defined as violations of the internationally agreed upon rules for waging war; and (4) crimes against humanity—”namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war; or persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated.” https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nuremberg-trials. His offenses are legion….
Posted by: SteveLaudig | Nov 25 2020 4:11 utc | 89
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