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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.
What will the Biden regime be like?
Certainly, one has to expect the worst. Trump, unfortunately, didn’t really change the foreign policy, but the Biden team of neocons promises to strive for new, unprecedented aggressions. In their pent-up frustration, they would like the US to go completely wild attacking everyone. But reality imposes some limitations.
While it is true that Republican hacks like the time-server McConnell, not to mention the loathsome toads Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, will show bipartisan support for whatever foreign military adventures the military-security apparatus can cook up, the public is seething. So far, the divide-and-rule efforts to split the anti-state opposition on the red-herring issue of Trump have succeeded in keeping the anti-state right and left not only apart but at each other’s throats, but that is a dangerous game to play. The general dissatisfaction does presage an incipient breakdown of the American system. And that system, whatever its earlier virtues or demerits, has been gamed by the elite so long that its claims to democracy, freedom, free trade, free enterprise (remember that phrase) no longer bear much conviction, or at any rate are not very convincing to masses of the people. This is a real problem. The disappointed Trump voters are likely to be nipping at the Democrats’ heels; the election was scarcely a Democratic Party victory at all. And then the huge swath of anti-elite youth on the left will be nipping from the other side too. The Democratic Party administration for the next four years is in for every bit as tumultuous a ride as Trump has had.
So, for them, why not go back to the tried and true formula of diverting the public’s attention with foreign wars? They certainly have the military force to do it, and they still can fabricate fiat money without actually paying anything, while exporting the resulting inflation to other countries. All that will still work as long as the dollar stands. When and if the dollar falls, it is then all over that same day: no more US military, no more aggressions, and at least civil strife at home. But the elite have learned since the financial crisis of 1968-1971, when the dollar was left without any vestige of a connection to gold, that the dollar will stand forever no matter what they do, or so they believe. And indeed, there is still no sign of dollar collapse, even if all things eventually must end. So right now, one would be rash to predict the collapse of the dollar at any fixed future date, as all countries and people still rush right back into the dollar at the first sign of crisis.
But whom can the neocons attack? They can jump up and down screaming in rage like a herd of baboons against Russia and China, but, as those are nuclear-armed powers, they cannot be touched. Especially not Russia, with enough nuclear weapons, like the US, to completely exterminate the whole human race. But even China’s few hundred are enough to end civilization, so, no, no actual wars there, at least not against the national territory of either. Also, those supposed enemies are more of an excuse to justify the military budget than actual enemies. As Trump said, “Russia is a competitor, not an adversary.”
One of the posters above was enraged that Russia and China don’t have a more hostile, anti-US policy. Of course they don’t; they are complicit. The anti-American Russians are the opposition, Zhirinovsky and Zyuganov, not Putin. Rather, Putin seeks to integrate Russia in the world system, but not at the price of being colonized. Ditto for Xi and China. China’s goal is to be the factory of the world; it is an economic, not a military, upper hand that they are looking for. Not only do they have a few nukes; they also have enough US debt to destroy the dollar if they threw it all at once on the open market. But they would never do that unless their very existence was threatened, because they make too much profit from the US.
Otherwise, the world is full of US “allies” that Biden is promising to restore ties with. Most of these countries are ruled by freeloading parasites who ingratiate themselves with the US to gain favors. However, the US gets back everything from them through dollar dominance. Anyway, while they are allies, they can’t be attacked. Which greatly whittles down the list of possible victims. Of course, there are still quite a few of those, but it is worth studying whom the US has actually attacked in recent history: Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, all little to small-medium-sized countries. Iran is too big for it and the projected consequences are too dire. In 2007-2009, the US had its big window of opportunity to attack Iran, with Dick Cheney all for it, and Israel egging it on, but Bush didn’t do it because the military vetoed it. If it couldn’t happen under those circumstances, it won’t happen. So they have been trying to provoke Iran to attack with all kinds of actual acts of war against it, but Iran seems too smart to be lured in and knows that in this current world, being the victim gains the moral high ground. Afghanistan the US could savage because it is one of the most strategically worthless pieces of real estate on the earth, landlocked, poor and arid, resourceless, and not crucial to any megaprojects whatsoever, despite imperialist lies spread around from time to time, so it makes a good free fire zone and testing ground for weaponry and military techniques. Even Iraq almost broke the bank. And the puppet governments they bought with all their waste: the Afghan president who, while their ally and protected by US mercenary bodyguards, said he wanted to shoot down the US planes that commit the atrocities, and the Iraqi government that went right off and allied itself with Iran. Hah! Some empire! The British held India with 50,000 troops. The US coundn’t even pacify the Sunni Triangle in Iraq with that number. The nature of warfare has changed.
So where specifically can they go that will not be a fiasco? It’s hard to see. Venezuela is kind of big to do too. And how can they sell any of these small countries as “an existential threat,” the way Reagan did Grenada or Bush I Panama? People aren’t going to buy that now when they are faced with their own immediate insecurities. Whatever they do, they are not in for an easy time.
Back in the day, when there was the bipolar US vs. Soviet Cold War world, countries couldn’t just do what they wanted in foreign places, because they had to look to the US. Now, look at Turkey, a NATO ally, mucking around on its own, after it had the chutzpah to refuse to the let the US attack Iraq from its territory in 2003. Similarly, Saudi Arabia against Yemen, and UAE interfering there and in Libya and apparently Ethiopia. The US dominance does seem somewhat to have shrunk, and that can’t be bad. But watch for the lashing out of the wounded animal.
Posted by: James Davis | Nov 18 2020 5:07 utc | 115
@Don Bacon 21:
First off, DB, the Taiwan Relations Act very much does stipulate that the US must come to the aid of Taiwan, should the Mainland make the decision to annex the island by force. That was the entire purpose of the Act: to make clear that any attempt to annex Taiwan by force would be met with a strong US military response. Yes, there is no mutual aggression pact–of course there isn’t! To impose such a stipulation on the tiny island of Formosa would be absurd.
Secondly, it looks to me as if Flournoy was just playing to the peanut gallery, declaring what she knows the both the Ethnic Min (the majority ethnicity, ~65-70%, here in Taiwan) chauvinists and the KMT want to hear: that the US is still capable of kicking Chinese butt, and will do so if the CCP is foolish enough to try and take the island. I don’t know if she’s foolish enough to believe what she said: they appear to me as rather absurd assertions, but if she does truly believe it then that bodes ill for both Taiwan and the US. Any war between the US and China would mean both the destruction of Taiwan and the end of US prosperity–in any form–for many, many generations. Such saber-rattling is extremely dangerous, but she’s an Academic skirt-wearer who has never actually been in any kind of genuine fight in her life, so likely she sees it merely as “good PR.”
Another observation I’d like to make is that I find it comical how vk, you (Don Bacon), and a few others here seem to believe that Taiwan is the evil Chinese sibling that wants to destroy its sober elders, the CCP, so full of largesse and gentility. That is an absurdly idealized perception with no basis in reality.
Taiwan is a small island that is quite independent of China, at the moment; it is an independent nation state, by any definition of that phrase. Yes, its ability to exercise international diplomacy (including its capacity to declare that independence) is rather limited, and its economy is slowly shrinking because of the CCP’s determination to force it to capitulate and “unite.” Yet the peoples of the PRC currently share no kind of influence, history, or experience with the people of Taiwan, going back some 150 years. Taiwan has its own government, military, police, flag, national anthem, economy, technology sectors, industries, educational institutions, and yes: a history that runs entirely independent of China going back 125 years, now. Instead of waxing so bitterly over Taiwan’s lack of gratitude and stubborn denial to simply capitulate to rule by the CCP–a rule which would certainly result in a quick deterioration in living standards and political responsiveness for the local population–it would be better for everyone to recognize that Taiwan’s relationship with the PRC is very much a direct analogy to Cuba’s situation with the US.
In both cases–Cuba, and the US–there is a vastly smaller state being imperialistically bullied by a larger neighbor state, and in both cases it’s ostensibly for the purpose of “state security.” Now, we are all firmly of the rather informed opinion that Cuba does not in any significant way threaten the security of the US, and that the attacks on that small island nation are both rooted in racism and capitalist greed–although, if Kruschev had succeeded in installing nuclear weapons there, the story would be entirely different. I do believe that Cuba is engaged in quite a bit of intelligence gathering on behalf of foreign powers–but in this respect, it pales in comparison to Taiwan.
Thus, I do understand China’s determination to push back against Taiwan’s full embrace of the Western Powers: the Taiwan Strait is narrow, and bringing Taiwan into Chinese territory would shut off that quite glaring coastal vulnerability. Similarly, the largest 5 Eyes foreign intelligence gathering facility is right here in Taiwan. So the CCP certainly has some valid reasons to be unhappy with what is going on, here.
But let’s not forget that Taiwan had Chiang Kai Shek forced upon it by the US Navy and CIA; let’s not forget the 228 incident, or the 30 years of martial law under which the local population suffered while the elite families of the KMT enriched themselves. That, fortunately, is mostly in the past, but it has been a hard and often brutal road to travel, for Taiwan to arrive at where it is, today. The cheering I see for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan by people here who otherwise purport to be anti-imperialists suggests, to me, that they’re not quite as anti-imperialist as they’d like to pretend.
Hollywood and CIA propaganda has done quite a number on Taiwanese youth, these last 20 years. A lot of them–just like people in the US–have fallen for the hype. That’s no reason to go off, rejecting them like they’re some sort of enemy; by and large, of the thousands of Taiwanese people I have chatted with on this subject, some 70 or 80% of them just want to keep the quality of their current lives, where they can determine what is best for their local situation by appealing to a local government that generally works pretty well. There are no feelings of aggression towards the CCP–just feelings of revulsion at the thought of such a monolithic and unresponsive institution assuming authoritarian control of their local lives.
That all means, of course, that once the US economic engine tanks and they no longer have a reliable customer for what is, essentially, their only export–computer chips and plastics–they’ll certainly take a long, hard look at things, knuckle under, and take the first step of asking 5 Eyes to relocate to some other land. With 5 Eyes out of the way, there is absolutely no reason for the CCP not to allow Taiwan to continue under the same terms it offered back in ’92: keep your military, keep your police, keep your government, but you will need to coordinate all foreign policy decisions with us.
That’s outcome is a reasonable and realistic possibility; unfortunately, all this fanboy posturing about whose team is better is distracting people from recognizing that a war over Taiwan would result in millions of totally unnecessary casualties, and yet that war is precisely what people like Ms. Flournoy desire (I used to have a quote where, back in the mid-aughts, Bolton or one of his associates flatly stated that the “next war” would be with China over Taiwan, but I lost it when I lost a hard drive, a while back). Taiwan is far more of a victim caught in an abusive relationship, right now, and the current “leadership” of its most US-aligned political party–the DPP–is both so incompetent at the work of government and economic policy, and so blinded by fear of both the KMT and the CCP, that they simply accept prima facie whatever their US handlers dictate.
In a rather odd historical twist, the KMT–originally the CCP’s sworn enemy, Taiwan’s post-WWII invaders and oppressors, and yet today the party with the most competence and experience the mechanisms of governance and foreign policy–are the most unified in their willingness to work with the CCP and come to some sort of agreement. However, for obvious reasons (228, 30 years of brutal martial law) the native peoples of southern Taiwan are skeptical of the depth of that party’s loyalty to locals, and fear those men will set themselves up as local Emirs, to do the bidding of the CCP.
It’s a difficult situation, but most assuredly the worst thing one can do is to smugly assert that the people of Taiwan “isn’t a country” and so deserve to be invaded by the CCP–a group which, let us not forget, has a greater claim to imperialist jingoism than pretty much any other country. 3,000 years of actual Empire does tend to leave residuals on the shared psychology, and China has only emerged as an international player capable of direct confrontation with the most highly equipped militaries in the last 10 years–if that.
We have yet to see what China will do with its new-forged military power; the past–Tibet, Vietnam, Mongolia–hints that it may not be quite so anti-imperialist as it pretends, today. The people of Xinjiang have been staging regular uprisings there for centuries, and have lost each time. Just because China is, today, the hero that can oppose the international Western bully, don’t presume that it will remain the hero once it emerges triumphant (which I believe it will). The Red Army leadership has been clamoring for an invasion of Taiwan for 15 years, now–back in 2006 or so Hu Jintao even passed a law to guarantee that it wouldn’t be able to commandeer public policy and force a war of aggression against the island–so let none of us here pretend that there aren’t strong fires of nationalist aggression simmering just under the leadership of the CCP, in the bosom of the Red Army.
Posted by: Pacifica Advocate | Nov 18 2020 5:22 utc | 117
@chu teh, 129:
228 actually happened while Chiang was still engaged in fighting the civil war on the mainland. The incident was initiated by a General who was later court martialed and executed for entirely different offenses (alleged collaboration with the CCP, if memory serves), and on that basis Chiang and the later KMT arrivals feigned ignorance of what had actually occurred, and pretended as if it weren’t their fault.
Nevertheless, the martial law Chiang inherited continued along in the same form down to his death, when Chiang Jing Guo gradually lifted it.
@d dan, 130
Wow, so many false statements within a single comment. It will be too time consuming to refute each of them. So I just randomly pick a few:
You actually picked out pretty much every assertion I made, but then–unlike me, when I made them–fail to back any of your objections up with anything approaching facts.
1. False statement. Please show the clause within the Act that states US MUST aid Taiwan. There is NONE.
You and Don Bacon need to work on your reading comprehension skills. See my response to DB, above.
2. No, it is NOT. Its own Constitution – the ultimate laws in Taiwan – states that it is part of China. Its formal name is Republic of China, i.e. it is part of China.
You got that backwards: the Constitution of Taiwan used to claim that the Republic of China was the only true government of China, but that got amended under Li Deng Hui. At no time, ever, has Taiwan or the ROC claimed to be part of the PRC, or in any way a client to it.
3. Ignorant statement. You didn’t know how much economic helps and benefits PRC has been showering to Taiwan?
Wow–you really don’t understand anything at all about Taiwan, investments, or recent industrial trends, do you? Since the 2000s, Taiwan’s GDP shows a slight but significant trend downwards, with brief boom periods followed by long stagnant periods. Inequality and under-/unemployment during this same period of time has significantly increased since the early 1990s.
source: tradingeconomics.com
Since the Trump Administration started its trade war with China, Taiwanese companies have been retreating from the mainland, bringing their factories back home; at the same time, some foreign companies have shifted their mfg from PRC to the ROC. At the same time, Tsai Yingwen has gone on a borrowing campaign, soliciting investments from every country in SE Asia that is not the PRC. Finally, Taiwan has recently put strict laws in place to make any inflow of cash from the PRC far more difficult, and subject to government oversight.
See here, here, and here
4. Typical ignorant statement of Westerners. The majority of Taiwan today have close links, ties and shared experiences, culturally, linguistically, genetically, historically, religiously, … with the people in the Fujian province of the mainland China.
You really don’t have the slightest clue what you’re talking about. You sound like a cocky 21 year old who knows nothing whatsoever about the history of either the PRC or the ROC. 請給我們大家一個短短的自我介紹，讓大家瞭解一下我們爲何不給你這個三八草莓打一巴掌呢?
Posted by: Pacifica Advocate | Nov 18 2020 10:26 utc | 137
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