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Biden Is Not Ending The ‘Forever Wars’. He Is Preparing The Path To New Ones.
Daniel Larison writes that Joe Biden's foreign policies are probably worse than Trump's:
Joe Biden’s foreign policy record as president in his first six months has been as bad as his non-interventionist and antiwar critics feared it would be. Biden has made one significant and correct decision that he appears to be following through on, and that is the withdrawal of the last remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan, but even here there is reason to worry that US forces may be relocated to other nearby countries and the war against the Taliban will continue from afar. On almost every other front, Biden has not only failed to undo some of his predecessor’s worst and most destructive policies, but in many cases he has entrenched and reinforced them.
Biden has failed to stop the U.S./Saudi war on Yemen. He is keeping troops in Iraq and Syria. His retreat from Afghanistan turns out to be fake. He is sabotaging a return to the nuclear with Iran.
The U.S. has, in contradiction to its Doha agreement with the Taliban, restarted its bombing campaign against them and is likely to continue it for years to come:
The top American general overseeing operations in Afghanistan declined to say Sunday night whether U.S. airstrikes against the Taliban would end Aug. 31, the date previously given by officials as a cutoff for such attacks.
Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the head of United States Central Command, refused to commit to ending the United States last remaining military leverage over the Taliban: airstrikes.
…
The Taliban reacted furiously to the strikes, saying they were in breach of the 2020 agreement negotiated between the militant group and the United States.
The concentration of strikes against the Taliban reflected a new sense of urgency in Washington about the imperiled Afghan government.
“I’m just not going to be able to comment about the future of U.S. airstrikes after Aug. 31,” General McKenzie told reporters after meeting with Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, and his aides earlier in the day.
The Taliban have recently done a lot of diplomacy with visits to Moscow, Beijing and Tehran. Together, with Pakistan, which continues to supply the Taliban with weapons and manpower, those countries are planing for a future where the Taliban will have total control of, or at least a significant role in. the Afghan government. They have promised to invest in a Taliban led Afghanistan.
But the U.S. will not allow a rebuilding of the silk road between China and Iran. It will not allow for safe 'Belt & Road' investments in Afghanistan. Instead of controlling Afghanistan for its own purpose, as it did with its occupation, the U.S. will, from now on, do its best to deny others to benefit from the country.
After first pressing the Afghan president to make room for an interim government, Biden is now again backing him. In a phone call last Friday Biden pledged full support for Ghani's continued hardline:
President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. spoke today with President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan. President Biden and President Ghani discussed the situation in Afghanistan and reaffirmed their commitment to an enduring bilateral partnership. President Biden emphasized continued U.S. support, including development and humanitarian aid, for the Afghan people, including women, girls, and minorities. President Biden and President Ghani agreed that the Taliban’s current offensive is in direct contradiction to the movement’s claim to support a negotiated settlement of the conflict. President Biden also reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to continue supporting the Afghan security forces to defend themselves.
But Ghani's government has no way to survive. The Taliban control Afghanistan's borders and can finance themselves with customs duties and taxes. Ghani thereby lacks the income to run the state. Now Biden is promising him to give $4 billion per year to the Afghan army while having few control over how that money will be spent. Ghani and his circle will do their best to loot the stash.
Instead of leaving Afghanistan alone and letting it find a new balance Biden is revamping the Great Game in which Afghanistan will be again the foremost casualty.
During his campaign Biden had promised to rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran. But no action has followed. Talks with Tehran started too late and were filled with new demands that Iran can not accept without diminishing is military defenses.
The arrogance of the Biden administration is at full display in its believe that it can dictate the terms to Tehran:
If the U.S. determines that Iran is not prepared to return to full implementation, or that Iran’s nuclear program has advanced to the point that the non-proliferation limits in the deal cannot be recaptured, it will explore options, including for tightening enforcement of economic sanctions, but he hopes it does not come to that, he said.
“We will see whether they are prepared to come back,” the senior US diplomat said.
It is not Iran that left the UN endorsed JCPOA deal. It was the U.S. which went back on it and re-introduced a 'maximum pressure' sanctions campaign against Iran. Iran has said it is willing to again reduce its nuclear program to the limits of the JCPOA deal if the U.S. removes all sanctions. It is the Biden administration that is unwilling to do so while making new demands. That is obviously not going to work.
Today Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei met with the outgoing government of President Rohani and warned the incoming government against any hope that the U.S. will change its unreasonable position:
Khamenei.ir @khamenei_ir – 9:20 UTC · Jul 28, 2021
Others should use the experience of Mr. Rouhani’s govt. One experience is distrusting the West. In this administration it became clear that trusting the West isn’t helpful. They don’t help and they strike a blow wherever they can. When they didn’t, it was because they couldn’t.
Administrations should utterly avoid tying their plans to negotiations with the West, for they’ll certainly fail.
This administration too, wherever it relied on negotiations with the West & the US, they were unsuccessful, & when they relied on domestic potential, they succeeded.
In the recent nuclear talks, the Americans staunchly insisted on their obstinate stance. When making promises & on paper they say they’ll remove sanctions, but in practice they didn’t & won’t. Then they say new articles should be added to the deal that already exists.
The West & the US are totally unjust & malicious in their negotiations. They have no hesitation in breaching their commitments at all. In the previous agreement, they breached their commitments & they give no guarantee they will abide by their commitments in the future either.
If the U.S. does not come back into the JCPOA deal, without any further conditions, Iran will eventually leave the deal and proceed with its nuclear program as it wants. That would be an utter failure of Biden's hardline tactics. One wonders what the Biden administration has planned to do when that happens.
As Larison summarizes:
Biden’s foreign policy so far is largely made up of failures to achieve his stated goals and failures to overturn the worst policies that he inherited from Trump. In some cases, Biden has not even made the effort to overturn them. The Biden administration likes to use the phrase "America is back" as its foreign policy motto. Judging from Biden’s first six months this just means that America is back to more of the same destructive and inhumane policies that we have had for decades.
Instead of ending the 'forever wars', as Biden promised during his campaign, he is prolonging old ones while preparing the path for new ones.
That is a path that will not go well for the U.S. of A.
Michael Hudson = Rockefeller’s Chicago Plan
@ karlof1 (#66), glad to know my “entreaties aren’t falling on deaf ears.” I cover the SUPERSET of the global construct resulting from the Monetary Imperialism and its enslavement. We have 360 degree global coverage and familiar with the work of American Monetary Institute (AMI), Public Banking, Positive Money of UK, Swiss, Germany, INET,…
Michael Hudson (MH) only covers the subset of the problems that will enable the Chicago plan of the Chicago University (Rockefeller Institute). He has admitted that he supports the Chicago plan. Most of MH’s solutions were proposed by Irving Fisher, a member of Skull & Bones society. MH worked at Chase (Rockefeller bank) and had a frontal seat in 1970s. MH in his work doesn’t cover the key elements such as power players, POWER, central bank history, key global drivers, the control system, its structure… I share geostrategic construct which is much broader and deeper. Most commentators here don’t define reality clearly in right WORDS. Suzerainty not democracy, Imperial policies not Biden’s policies…
@ karlof1, you will benefit from broadening your horizon to look at works of others. I have shared their names here such as Nikolay Starikov, Guido Perparata, Richard Werner (good work on BOJ), Damon Vrabel, Ellen Brown, William Engdahl, Norbert Haering,… If you have a particular topic, will be happy to guide you. MH, Dennis Kuccinch, Stephen Zarlenga,… are from AMI (Rockefeller funding). You might want to attend their monetary conference to understand them better.
Many of the statements of MH that you shared are MISLEADING.
“U.S. diplomacy quickly reduced the Britain and its imperial sterling area to vassalage by 1946, followed in due course by the rest of Western Europe and its former colonies.”
Where is the Eurodollar market? Which is the #1 place for currency trading? Where were derivatives invented and good majority transacted? Where does the regulatory arbitrage happens in the financial arena? The answer to these questions will reveal reality and debunk MH’s assertion. MH has consistently put all blame on the Dollar Empire, ignoring its parent the Financial Empire. The control, dominance and rent seeking plan existed before “the Mexican Revolution.” The monetary fraud started with the creation of the first CENTRAL BANK and the rent-seeking even before that during Babylon.
The next step was to isolate Russia and China, while keeping ‘the barbarians from coming together.
Why isolate communists? What was the real plan? What happened in 1950s, 1960s…. 1990s? Who backed and banked the concept of communism?
“”By 2016, Brzezinski saw Pax Americana unravelling from its failure to achieve these aims. He acknowledged that the United States ‘is no longer the globally imperial power.'[5] That is what has motivated its increasing antagonism toward China and Russia, along with Iran and Venezuela.”
Nope. Antagonism towards Russia started in 2007. Why? Even today the Empire thinks it can succeed.
Disagree with MH’s characterization of socialism and rent-seeking being the key drivers. MH does have good insights on some problems and his overview of 1970s petrodollars and the development of the financialization is good.
To understand the effort required to create change in the United States please familiarize yourself with how the Fed bill was passed, monetary events after the closer of the Second Bank of the United States. We’re dealing with deceitful, ruthless and evil Saruman and Sauron.
If you were one of the Powerful Rulers of the present times, knowing the existing reality, what would you preserve?
Posted by: Max | Jul 29 2021 4:01 utc | 83
Max @ 82–
Thanks for mentioning Hudson and the Chicago Plan. He just happens to discuss that in his latest interview posted at his website. Its discussion begins about 2/3s of the way down the transcript. The excerpt:
“Hudson: Here’s how it is done in China, and basically what the Chicago plan is supposed to do, subject to the principle of hundred percent reserves: You would do just what you do now. You would go to the bank and ask for a loan. The problem is, in order to make the loan to you, if the bank doesn’t already have the deposits available, it will need money in order to create the credit for you. If you’re borrowing for a productive purpose – not to take over a company, but for a productive purpose – the government will simply create the reserves for the bank to lend you the money. The government creates the money, but it will create money only for banks to make particular kinds of loans. If you want to borrow to buy a house, the government will provide the money for it via the banking system – as if it were a depositor in the bank. If you want to start a business that the bank finds credit-worthy, the banks will be able to judge your credit-worthiness and you get the loan. But they cannot create credit out of thin air. They need government deposit backing.”
That elicited an excellent question:
“QA2: Thank you very much, I really appreciate your analysis. My question is this: The Chicago Plan evolved into the Kucinich bill in the United States, the NEED Act, which does set up essentially the government as a creator of money and makes banks essentially like other non-banks, that is it lends pre-existing money. One of the questions that has come up and you’re undoubtedly aware of was raised by the authors of “The End of Banking.” If you just impose the regulation of the NEED Act, that limits essentially what banks can do. It won’t stop the shadow banking industry. So my question to you is: What would happen in terms of shadow banking as we know it, as a result of simply ending bank creation of money and shifting money creation to the government?
“Hudson: That’s what 100 reserves means. There will still be rich people with money to lend, especially foreign investors. But financial reform needs tax reform to go with it. You have to tax away the existing economic rent, so that it will not be available to pay as interest. Also, it is necessary to wipe out the overburden of debt that now exists. You cannot re-stabilize the economy and get out of today’s austerity and debt deflation without writing down the debts, cancelling many of them. But you can’t cancel mortgage debts of absentee owners without replacing former debt service with a land-rent tax, so as not to make an absentee real estate sector debt-free. These reforms would end a lot of the assets on which the shadow banking industry is based. A proper tax policy and with a debt cancellation would create an environment in which new money creation will work.
“What if China let many billionaires begin buying out companies and creating monopolies? It wouldn’t happen there, and it didn’t used to happen in the United States under the anti-monopoly laws here. You can’t reform only one part of the economy, like finance, without reform the rest of the system. So you need systemic reform: Monetary and financial reform have to go together with fiscal reform, policy reform and legal reform.”
And then we get one final question related to the Chicago Plan:
“QA5: Thank you very much Michael for your talk! My question is this: I was thinking that if we really had a Chicago plan-based economy, where reserves were in place. There should be some way, which is not exactly clear in the Chicago plan, of how to increase the money supply. This is usually by the debt deficit spending of the government. But this does not say that this deficit would not go to the FIRE sector, or that financialization would be over. So the only two things that would be different, in my understanding, is that we would not have any account of how much of this money goes there. That would only be in the government’s books. Is there any other difference? How would we beat financialization? It would not be only by changing the banking system. It would require other kinds of laws.
“Hudson: Yes, you are right. That is why I said the economy is a system, and there have to be other changes. Of course, if the government wanted to keep spending on the military-industrial complex, or to go to war or subsidize corrupt privatizers and financiers, you would have to change the government as well as the banking system. But you are right: Stopping the banks from creating credit solves the problem of bank credit, but it does not solve the rest of the problems that you just brought up.
“There has to be overall political reform. That was called socialism in the 19th century. We could still call socialism today. You would need socialist reform and a thoroughgoing political reform to restructure what the government is all about. So, it is not only what money and the financial sector are all about, it is about the role of government. And its role to help society? Is it to help the 99 Percent, or to help the One Percent? Is it to help clean up the world’s environment? Is it to promote peace? Or is it to promote a New Cold War, like the governments today in Europe and America?” [My Emphasis]
Posted by: karlof1 | Jul 29 2021 5:11 utc | 91
Karfloff #66 & S #68
USA is scrambling for resources, for the dollar domination, for putting off debt reckoning, for trade tracks, one sided resource-trade deals, all while acting as ‘spoiler’ to Russia and China.
USA has chosen confrontation over cooperation. Is that the ‘right’ choice to secure an unfair share of world resources? At this point, probably.
Pres. Bidens recent speech to his intel community is indicative of some of his thinking:
“…we have to work in cooperation with nations like China and Russia that are our competitors — and possibly mortal competitors down the road — in the context of there’s — to meet the existential threats, for example, of climate change…I’ll never forget the first time I went down in the tank as Vice President, after I got elected. The Defense Department said what the greatest threat facing America: climate change.
If, in fact, the seas’ level rises another two and half feet, you’re going to have millions of people migrating, fighting over arable land. You saw what happened in North Africa. What makes us think this doesn’t matter? People who were Muslim, and the only difference was Black and/or Arab, killing each other by the thousands for arable — a piece of arable — arable land in North Central Africa. But what happens — what happens in Indonesia if the projections are correct that, in the next 10 years, they may have to move their capital because they’re going to be underwater?”
“Talked about changes. What’s going to happen as we move on and we’re able to develop around the world pathogens that can be transmitted to societies and communities? It may not be a nuclear weapon. It may not be a hypersonic missile. It may not be any of the things we think of.
But think about it. Just think about what’s happened with one — I’m not suggesting it was intended — a lot more we need to know — but think what’s happened: More people have been killed in the United States of America because of COVID than in every single major war we fought combined. Every single one. What’s next? What is intended? There’s a lot of research going on.”
“The world is changing so rapidly — technologically and in terms of alliances and human intercourse — that war is going to change across the board in the next 10 years [more] than in the last 50 years. That’s not hyperbole; that’s a fact.
If I talked to you 15 years ago about hypersonic flight, you’d look at me like I was crazy. So much is going to change…It’s really going to get tougher…
…”So much is going to change…cyber threats, including ransomware attacks, increasingly are able to cause damage and disruption to the real world..if we end up in a war, a real shooting war with a major power, it’s going to be as a consequence of a cyber breach of great consequence.”
Here I take it that he references an effort by a foreign power, probably USA, “attempts to use the Internet to influence weapons control systems.” mentioned by Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov. The day after Pres. Biden’s speech on 27 July 2021…
Pres. Biden on June 28th returned to the theme of meeting peoples needs in a changing world:
“Because when I arrived in office, we had a long time — it’s been a long time since the federal government had worked hard for working people. Things had been great for big corporations, great for the very wealthy, folks at the top. Those 55 major corporations for the past three years paid zero in federal taxes, making over $40 billion. They had no complaints.
But when I put my hand on that Bible on January 20th and took the Oath of Office, I made a commitment to the American people: We’re going to change the paradigm so working people could have a fighting chance again to get a good education, to get a good job and a raise, to take care of that elderly parent and afford to take care of their children, and stop losing hours of their lives stuck in traffic because the streets are crumbling, or waiting for slow, spotty Internet to connect them to the world.”
Increasingly educated and connected, Governments everywhere are in place with the tacit permission of the population – so long as the governments meet their needs.
Now Governments everywhere are defining a reasonable life in terms of domestic industrial production, well trained workforces, security, a future. And the ‘right’ direction for peoples betterment, mainly via education.
Russia, China, Europe, India, USA and everyone else want a population of highly trained STEM people. China and Russia are doing well in that regard. USA, and Pres biden in particular, know they are falling behind.
Trained people vote with their feet, Will they leave the polluted air of Beijing for the shitty streets of San Franscisco?
Not everything is money.
High ground.
And 60-70% of people are service workers on basic wages. Are ordinary peoples needs being met in USA. India, Russia, China?
This is the essence. And things are going to fall apart under climate change, let alone anything else.
Who has the culture & recent history to cope with privation, change, swingeing Govt diktat?
Posted by: powerandpeople | Jul 29 2021 7:12 utc | 96
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