|
Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy Team
As this blog is often concerned with U.S. foreign policy and the damage it causes, a look at Biden's foreign policy team seems adequate.
In short – it is awful.
Susan Rice of Benghazi fame, National Security Advisor under Obama, is said to become Secretary of State.
Michele Flournoy, co-founder of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), will become Secretary of Defense. Flournoy is a hawk. CNAS is financed by donations from the who-is-who of the military industrial complex. She also co-founded WestExec Advisors, a consultancy that pulls strings to help companies to win Pentagon contracts.
Also at WestExec Advisors was Tony Blinken who is set to become the National Security Advisor. He was National Security Advisor for then Vice President Biden, Deputy National Security Advisor for Obama and Deputy Secretary of State.
All three, together with Joe Biden, promoted the 2003 war on Iraq and supported the wars the Obama administration launched or continued against some seven countries.
They will continue to wage those wars and will probably add a few new ones.
Biden has said that he will re-instate the nuclear agreement with Iran but with 'amendments'. A realistic analysis shows that Iran is likely to reject any modification of the original deal:
The Biden administration will face the harsh reality that the amendments to the JCPOA that it needs to make its return to the agreement politically viable are unacceptable to Iran. The new US administration will more than likely find itself in a situation in which sanctions, including those on oil exports, must be maintained in an effort to pressure Iran to yield to US demands to modify the JCPOA.
There will be much pressure from the liberal hawks to finish the war they had launched against Syria by again intensifying it. Trump had ended the CIA's Jihadi supply program. The Biden team may well reintroduce such a scheme.
Susan Rice has criticized Trump's Doha deal with the Taliban. Under a Biden administration U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan are therefore likely to again increase.
One possible change may come in the U.S. support for the Saudi war on Yemen. The Democrats dislike Mohammad bin Salman and may try to use the Yemen issue to push him out of his Crown Prince position.
Biden and his team have supported the coup attempt in Venezuela. They only criticized it for not being done right and will probably come up with their own bloody 'solution'.
After four years of Russiagate nonsense, which Susan Rice had helped to launch, it is impossible to again 'reset' the relations with Russia. Biden could immediately agree to renew the New START treaty which limits strategic nuclear weapons but it is more likely that he will want to add, like with Iran's nuclear deal, certain 'amendments' which will be hard to negotiate. Under Biden the Ukraine may be pushed into another war against its eastern citizens. Belarus will remain on the 'regime change' target list.
Asia is the place where Biden's policies may be less confrontational than Trump's:
China would heave a big sigh of relief if Biden picks Rice as his secretary of state. Beijing knows her well, as she had a hands-on role in remoulding the relationship from engagement to selective competition, which could well be the post-Trump China policies.
For the Indian audience, which is obsessive about Biden’s China policy, I would recommend the following YouTube on Rice’s oral history where she narrates her experience as NSA on how the US and China could effectively coordinate despite their strategic rivalry and how China actually helped America battle Ebola.
Interestingly, the recording was made in April this year amidst the “Wuhan virus” pandemic in the US and Trump’s trade and tech war with China. Simply put, Rice highlighted a productive relationship with Beijing while probably sharing the more Sino-skeptic sentiment of many of America’s foreign policy experts and lawmakers.
All together the Biden/Harris regime will be a continuation of the Obama regime. It's foreign policies will have awful consequences for a lot of people on this planet.
Domestically Biden/Harris will revive all the bad feelings that led to the election of Donald Trump. The demographics of the election show no sign of a permanent majority for Democrats.
It is therefore highly probable that Trump, or a more competent and thereby more dangerous populist republican, will again win in 2024.
Posted by: Don Bacon | Nov 18 2020 0:22 utc | 87
Was I around as in still living in the United States? No, actually by that December I was already gone. But maybe you weren’t around when George W. Bush laid out his “non-interventionist” policy that quickly changed after he had his Pearl Harbor moment? Do you also remember how the 2000 presidential campaign played out? Gore was characterized by the MSM, straight up, as an “interventionist” while Bush – eager to distance his own foreign policy from the Balkan wars and Clinton/Gore tried to walk a fine line between isolationism (of which he was accused) and non-interventionism.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush announced that he would pursue a “distinctly American internationalism” in foreign policy (Bush i999a), largely in contrast to the liberal internationalism of the Clinton administration. He initially sought to have a foreign policy that placed greater emphasis on American national interests than on global interests.
(look up George W. Bush and “classical realism”)
So what do Trump and Bush II have in common? How about Trump and Obama? I’ll tell you: The preceding administration of the opposite political party had a history of military interventions that were quite unpopular with the public, which was looking for a change. And guess what Obama said when he first stepped into office. That’s right – he’d pursue a retrenchment based foreign policy dedicated to fighting existing terror threats in places and places near where the previous administration had already placed American troops – AND to wrap up the already existing wars. From the Atlantic’s retrospective:
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Although Obama never presented himself as a pacifist candidate, his 2007-2008 presidential campaign was predicated in part on the promise to end the war in Iraq and properly prosecute the war in Afghanistan. In March 2008, he declared of Iraq, “When I am commander in chief, I will set a new goal on day one: I will end this war.” Later that year, he listed his first two priorities for making America safer as “ending the war in Iraq responsibly” and “finishing the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.” The president also promised a foreign policy that relied more on diplomacy and less on military might in his first inaugural address, telling his audience that “our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.” Well before the tumult of the Arab Spring and its aftermath, Obama famously offered to extend a hand to those willing to unclench their fist. (there are links embedded there)
Here’s what Brookings has to say:
I do not mean to overstate. Obama’s presidency will not go down as a hugely positive watershed period in American foreign policy. He ran for election in 2007 and 2008 promising to mend the West’s breach with the Islamic world, repair the nation’s image abroad, reset relations with Russia, move toward a world free of nuclear weapons, avoid “stupid wars” while winning the “right war,” combat climate change, and do all of this with a post-partisan style of leadership that brought Americans themselves together in the process.[1] He ran for reelection in 2012 with the additional pledges of ending the nation’s wars and completing the decimation of al Qaeda. Six years into his presidency, almost none of these lofty aspirations has been achieved.[2] There has not been, and likely will not be, any durable Obama doctrine of particular positive note. The recent progress toward a nuclear deal with Iran, while preferable to any alternative if it actually happens, is probably too limited in duration and overall effect to count as a historic breakthrough (even if Obama shares a second Nobel Prize as a result).
And before you start to think that Trump said much different, here’s a blurb from your own article:
“We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with,” Trump said. “Instead, our focus must be on defeating terrorism and destroying ISIS, and we will.”
Hence, there hasn’t been a President for the last 50 years that has campaigned on, or entered office with a PUBLIC plan to engage in foreign regime change activities. But nearly every one of them, especially since Ronald Reagan, have had “excuses” crop up for “humanitarian interventions” and that includes Bush II and Obama. The so-called Arab Spring began in earnest in mid- to late 2010 and Syria and Libya were in mid to late 2011 during their peak, at which point the U.S. and France got involved under the auspices of “humanitarian intervention.”
So more than 3 years into his first term, Obama still hadn’t “started any new wars.” Three years is an incredibly short period of time when looking at history, even the history of the United States. Trump’s only been in office for about 3 years and 9 months. Nothing like the Arab Spring has happened so far while he’s been there. That is indisputable. What is also indisputable is that Trump DID try to spark a war by assassinating General Soleimani. Whether there was any plan AT THE TIME to end up invading Iran (a total fool’s errand as you know well), I doubt, but the goal of that assassination was to prevent an organic, non-U.S. brokered peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which at the very least was a threat to Trump’s precious arms sales, but also very much in line with his Zionist friendly Israel policy. At worst, who knows, but you can’t make an unchallenged assumption that Trump and his advisors had fully thought through all possible Iranian retaliation options and concluded that there was no way the assassination would cause Iran to do something so bad that a new war was justified regardless of the cost. Sorry, but you just can’t.
Yeah, yeah, Trump hasn’t started any “new wars” but his rhetoric and public facing stated foreign policy goals were virtually the same as Obama’s. Trump just didn’t get any 9/11s, Eastern European or Middle East uprisings that would have been sufficient for him or ANY previous president to attempt to justify “humanitarian interventions” abroad. As I’ve said for a while, if he had a second term, there would have been a new war – even if it was the “deep state” and CIA who created the astroturf casus belli.
Posted by: _K_C_ | Nov 18 2020 1:12 utc | 95
|
