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Biden’s Foreign Policy Is One Big Mess
Over the last months I have written little about other U.S. foreign policy issues than the war in Ukraine.
A short review shows that there is little that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken or his president could count as a success.
Last month Biden traveled to Asia where he had meetings with the QUAD (Australia, Japan, India and the U.S.) as well as with South Asian leaders.
The QUAD meeting was a failure as India showed no sign of joining the other three in their condemnation of Russia. Instead of sanctioning Russia India is buying more oil from Russia which offers decent rebates. Such disunity does not look good for a U.S. designed anti-China coalition.
Most noted though was that Biden came to Asia with empty hands:
Months after U.S. President Joe Biden first indicated that his administration would launch a new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) that would signal strengthened U.S. engagement with Asian economies, the president, together with the leaders of a dozen countries from across Asia, announced the launch of the IPEF in Tokyo on May 23.
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The slow process of determining what will be in the four “pillars” of the IPEF, how negotiations will be handled due to a division of labor between the U.S. trade representative and the commerce secretary, and uncertainty about which governments would sign up have deepened the ambivalence.
As a result of this ambivalence, the joint statement launching the framework referred to “collective discussions toward future negotiations,” indicating that there is more work to do to flesh out the initiative.
Asian governments are not wrong to have mixed feelings about the IPEF. U.S. trade officials plan to seek higher labor and environmental performances from negotiating partners, but they have also indicated that they are not prepared to offer access to the U.S. market—let alone pursue a TPP-style free trade agreement.
Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad said that the new US-led trade group IPEF is intended to ‘isolate China’. It will be unsuccessful doing that as it the whole idea is likely to fail.
As a writer for the Lowy Institute in Sydney opined in the New York Times:
Mr. Biden huddled last week with leaders of the four-nation “Quad” group formed to counter Beijing, vowed to defend Taiwan against China and introduced a new economic pact involving a dozen nations to shore up U.S. economic influence in the region.
Yet China is already winning throughout much of Asia on both the economic and diplomatic fronts, and nothing the United States is doing seems likely to change that.
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The Biden administration’s answer, unveiled last week in Tokyo, is its Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. It falls far short.
The plan calls for cooperation on trade, supply chains, infrastructure and fighting corruption. But it does not include better access to the huge U.S. import market, a crucial carrot that normally underpins trade agreements.
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Meanwhile, China has forged ahead. State-owned companies have locked up big projects around the region, often under the umbrella of China’s sprawling Belt and Road Initiative.
China also practices persistent diplomacy. Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s travels in Southeast Asia and the Pacific have far outstripped the pace of his U.S. counterpart, Antony Blinken. Despite the fanfare of Mr. Biden’s recent trip to Asia, it was his first to the region since taking office 16 months ago and included visits only to close allies South Korea and Japan.
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Competing with China in Asia will not be easy. But it starts with recognizing that right now the United States is losing.
Those words, coming from a staunch U.S. ally, are pretty harsh.
Another area where current U.S. foreign policy is failing is in the Americas. Biden is currently hosting the 'summit' of the Organization of American States. The head of states of at least 7 of the 34 OAS member states were not invited or declined to come:
Mr. Biden’s insistence that the leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela not attend the summit was seen in many capitals as a sign of U.S. imperialism and an unwillingness to address in an honest way the complex issues in the region.
The three Central American nations known as the Northern Triangle — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — which along with Mexico are the source of about 66 percent of the illegal migration at the U.S. border, decided to send their foreign ministers to the summit as a signal of their displeasure.
Biden's (or Blinken's) ideological argument that Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are 'dictatorships' does not make much sense when one learns that the unelected acting president of Haiti, Ariel Henry, was invited even though he is under suspicion of having ordered the murder of his predecessor Jovenel Moïse.
Biden again came with empty hands:
Administration officials said that Mr. Biden would propose reforms to the Inter-American Development Bank to encourage more private investment in the region and investments of $300 million by the United States to combat food insecurity. On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced pledges of $1.9 billion in investments by private companies over the next several years.
But it is not clear that the investments will be robust enough to prevent those countries from turning to China for help, a key goal for Mr. Biden.
The foreign policy establishment is not happy with this:
Richard N. Haass @RichardHaass – 11:44 UTC · Jun 7, 2022
The Summit of the Americas looks to be a debacle, a diplomatic own goal. The US has no trade proposal, no immigration policy, & no infrastructure package. Instead, the focus is on who will & will not be there. Unclear is why we pressed for it to happen.
U.S. policy in the Middle East is stuck. The nuclear agreement with Iran is unlikely to be revived under Biden as he has rejected to lift Trump's terror designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. His planned visit to Saudi Arabia, to beg for more and cheaper oil, has been moved to some uncertain future date. The leader of Saudi Arabia is still miffed about Biden previously snubbing him. He also wants to continue his OPEC+ agreement with Russia and others oil producer to prevent lower oil prices.
It does not help that the Democratic leaning retired General John R. Allen is under investigation for having lobbied for Qatar, the arch rival of Saudi Arabia. Allen is leading the equally Democratic leaning Brookings Institute which has received major donations from Qatar.
On its anti-China policy the Biden administration had two other setbacks. It had banned solar modules from China over alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang where the raw materials for making these modules is coming from. This, and a minor trade dispute, led to supply crisis for solar panels and stopped some major 'green energy' projects. Biden reacted to that by signing an emergency authorization to lift tariffs on solar modules from southeast Asian 'producers' which are in fact reselling Chinese produced ones.
The State Department also seems confused about its own anti-China policy:
The U.S. State Department has updated its fact sheet on Taiwan again, to reinstate a line about not supporting formal independence for the Chinese-claimed, democratically-governed island.
One might argue that Biden's plan to lure Russia into a war in Ukraine has worked well. NATO is at least temporarily united and the EU under strict U.S. control. But the monetary assault on Russia via sanctions has turned out to be a total failure with the ruble gaining new heights. The effects of the sanctions have instead created another supply shock with prices for oil, fertilizer and wheat going through the roof.
The World Bank has downgraded its global growth predictions and is warning of stagflation. The average gasoline price in the U.S. has hit $5 per gallon and is likely to increase further. General inflation has markedly increased thought the causes get misidentified. This while the stock and house markets are more or less in free fall.
It does not look good at all for the Democrats in the upcoming mid-term election or a reelection of Biden in 2024.
Morale in the White House is down:
President Joe Biden and his aides have grown increasingly frustrated by their inability to turn the tide against a cascade of challenges threatening to overwhelm the administration.
Soaring global inflation. Rising fuel prices. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A Supreme Court poised to take away a constitutional right. A potentially resurgent pandemic. A Congress too deadlocked to tackle sweeping gun safety legislation even amid an onslaught of mass shootings.
In crisis after crisis, the White House has found itself either limited or helpless in its efforts to combat the forces pummeling them. Morale inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is plummeting amid growing fears that the parallels to Jimmy Carter, another first-term Democrat plagued by soaring prices and a foreign policy morass, will stick.
Biden could still save his bacon by replacing his ideological minded secretary of state and national security advisor with capable realists. The above list includes enough reasons to do so.
He also needs to shut down the war in Ukraine. He could tell Zelensky to end the senseless fighting and to submit to Russia's demands. Sanctions against Russia could then be lifted and a further oil price increase prevented. (As the war has already moved off the front pages this is likely doable.)
Biden though has never shown the necessary flexibility to do either.
Following in Ukraine’s footsteps: the West is aiming for the Nazification of Belarus (EurAsia Daily, Pyotr Makedontsev, June 4, 2022 — in Russian)
While the attention of a significant part of the world is fixated on the confrontation between Russia and the West, the Belarussian opposition, led by Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, continues its activities aimed at destroying the Union State of Russia and Belarus.
The speech of the self-proclaimed “national leader of Belarus” at the summit of the European People’s Party, held in Rotterdam on May 31, 2022, was no exception. We must thank Tikhanovskaya for naming some of her allies:
“For many years, the EPP has been a driving force supporting Belarussian democracy in the European Parliament and beyond.
Let me also express my admiration and respect for the Belarusian members of the EPP family—the United Civic Party, the Belarussian Christian Democracy [Party] and the For Freedom movement.”
Calling the 2020 protests a “democratic uprising”, the impostor lashed out at a third country:
“I would like to repeat one obvious but sometimes forgotten fact: Belarus is Europe. Belarus is not Russia.
This became obvious when Lukashenko tried to drag our country into the war. Belarussians have made every effort to help the Ukraine. 1,500 people were detained for anti-war protests in February and March. On the territory of Belarus, partisans committed more than 80 acts of sabotage, more than 1.5 thousand volunteers joined the Belarussian battalions of the Ukrainian army.”
When reading this fragment, one may experience déjà vu. We’ve heard something like that before. The title of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma’s book Ukraine Is Not Russia, published in 2003, comes to mind. At that time, the process of Uniate–Banderite nation-building accelerated in the Ukraine, based on severing of all ties between the Ukraine and Russia. The effects of this can be observed since 2014. It turns out that Tikhanovskaya’s patrons in the West decided not to bother and are following Ukrainian template, trying to turn Belarus into anti-Russia 2.0. It is no coincidence that since 2019 some European countries have changed the words denoting Belarus in their languages so that they do not sound consonant with the words denoting Russia. Sweden, Denmark and Norway have already done this, and Finland and probably Lithuania are discussing it. That is, the Europeans are not even hiding their intention to destroy the Union State of Russia and Belarus. It must also be emphasized that Tikhanovskaya is lying in her speech, since in 2020, in addition to the zmagars,¹ the protests were initially attended by people who were not ideological Russophobes, but were simply dissatisfied with Lukashenko.
It is noticeable that the “pacifist” Tikhanovskaya advocates the participation of zmagars in hostilities on the side of the Ukraine, that is, she supports the ethnocide and genocide of the pro-Russian population of the DNR and the LNR and other regions of the former southeast Ukraine.
She further urged Europeans to open doors for Belarussian students, support “free” (read: zmagar) media, accept Belarussian business, help zmagar militants, consider introducing a unilateral visa-free regime for citizens of Belarus, and release political prisoners.
However, then the impostor again went off track:
“In 2020, we have won the right to determine our own future as a nation. We have shown that Belarus is not Russia. We have begun our journey to freedom and democracy. We are a European nation with our own language,² identity and history. This path leads Belarus to where it historically belongs—to Europe. It also raises the question of European future for our nation. We are looking for a form of partnership that will strengthen our position in the European family. I am sure that the path to peace in Europe lies through freedom in Belarus. The path to peace in Europe lies through the victory of the Ukraine. I know it’s the hard way, but it’s the only right one. Let’s walk this path together. Because only when we walk together are we Europe.”
What does Tikhanovskaya mean by “own history”? Was it not the leader of the Polish uprising of 1794, Tadeusz Kościuszko, whom she adores, who dreamed of Polonizing and Catholicizing Belarusians and Malorussians (read “Russia’s Special Operation in the Ukraine will save Belarus from the zmagars”), who told his supporters:
“Some dozens of your ancestors could conquer the whole state of Muscovy, bring its tsars in fetters, appoint rulers to the Muscovites—and you, the descendants of the same Poles, are doubting the success of the struggle for the fatherland, freedom and your homes, for blood and friends and consider these predatory gangs invincible, who only get the better of you when you are cowardly!”
If the “national leader of Belarus” means this historical character, then Tikhanovskaya and the zmagars look like a laughing stock, since Kościuszko, speaking about the events of 1610 related to the events of the Time of Troubles in Russia, clearly said that Rzeczpospolita³ was a Polish state. Accordingly, the “winged” hussars,⁴ Lisowczyks⁵ and the atrocities of the Polish gentry in Russia have nothing to do with Belarussians who were subjected to social, national and religious oppression in Rzeczpospolita.
But maybe Tikhanovskaya is going to defend native Belarussian [history and culture], after all? Judging by her speech before the representatives of the OSCE Permanent Council in Vienna at the Hofburg Palace, where she was invited by the delegations of the United States and the European Union, the “national leader of Belarus” is going to defend the interests of anyone except Belarussians. For example, the impostor drew attention to the situation of the Polish community and the closure of Polish and Lithuanian schools in Belarus, as well as to the fact that journalist Andrzej Poczobut is in prison. The latter is especially noteworthy. Pochobut, a member of the opposition Union of Poles in Belarus, was arrested in 2021 for participating in organizing an event at the Polish School in Brest in honor of the “cursed soldiers”—members of the Polish anti-communist armed underground of the 1940s, who engaged in the killing of peaceful Poles and Orthodox Belarussians (read “Belarus: the enemy is in the house, it’s time to wake up!”). That is, Tikhanovskaya and the zmagars are actively supporting the anti-Belarussian policy of Poland and its agents of influence.
In other words, the West has decided to turn Belarus into anti-Russia 2.0. The only difference from the Ukraine is that the anti–Russian Federation and anti-Russian activities of the zmagars are combined with an aggressive propaganda of Polonophilia.
Footnotes:
¹ “Zmagar” is Belarussian for “fighter”, “adherent”, “zealot”; it is used as a derogatory term for Belarussian “Nationalists” (who really are Russophobes and proponents of Belarus being a slave of the West/Poland).
² Most Belarussians, including most zmagars, speak Russian in daily life.
³ The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
⁴ Heavy cavalry of the PLC.
⁵ Irregular light cavalry of the PLC.
Posted by: S | Jun 8 2022 18:46 utc | 50
Zakharova’s Briefing on Ukraine:
In Ukraine, a special military operation continues to demilitarize and denazify the country, liberate the Donbass and eliminate threats to Russia that came from Ukrainian territory. More and more cities and towns reconquered from Ukrainian neo-Nazis and foreign mercenaries are returning to peaceful life.
Every day of the operation brings new evidence of war crimes of ukrainian armed formations. Over the past few days, more than ten civilians have been killed by shelling by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Donbass, several dozen people have been injured. In Donetsk, a kindergarten and a gymnasium were damaged, in Horlivka – a sports school, a kindergarten and a temple, blows were inflicted on Makiivka and Yasynuvata. During the retreat, the servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine set fire to the wooden hermitage of All Saints, shelling of the area was carried out precisely so that the monks could not extinguish it.
Ukrainian nationalists continue to equip firing positions in residential buildings. This has become their “calling card”. This is also done in educational institutions, music schools and kindergartens in cities and other settlements, using the population as a “human shield”. All these war crimes are recorded by the investigative bodies of Russia and the republics of Donbass. They will be thoroughly investigated, and the perpetrators will be punished deservedly.
To replenish the thinning ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Kiev regime continues to recruit foreign mercenaries. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, more than 6,500 “soldiers of fortune” from the United States, Great Britain, Israel, Poland, Canada and the Czech Republic have already been recruited abroad. There are even citizens of Brazil and South Korea. By early June, the number of foreign mercenaries had almost halved. Someone died, someone came to his senses and returned home, someone was captured.
Despite this, the recruitment of mercenaries and “volunteers” does not stop. The most actively recruit Afghan refugees (which is also symptomatic), unfinished in Syria ISIS. Apparently, they found a new testing ground for their misanthropic ideology. Now it’s Ukraine. All the radical elements of Western countries are now being gathered there, if only to prevent peace from reigning on Ukrainian soil. For their selection and sending to Ukraine, private military companies from the United States and Great Britain are involved. There is no question of any sanctions, restrictions or discontent, statements about the inconsistency of their activities with international law. The OSCE, the Council of Europe and all kinds of parliamentary assemblies of European structures are silent. NATO is happily silent. Still going according to plan. From their point of view, the war in Ukraine must continue. When it comes to crimes against humanity, humanitarian law – this in no way extends to the actions of the West itself. It’s not. Of course, such actions will receive their legitimate assessment from the point of view of international law. They are trying to solve a twofold task – to help the regime of Vladimir Zelensky and get rid of their own extremists and radicals. This logic is flawed. The militants will return to their homes, but only with solid experience in warfare. This will contribute to the growth of the level of radicalization in Western countries. They’ve been through something like this before. Apparently, no lessons have been learned. They want to enter the same “river” again. It’s a strange idea, but apparently they like it that way.
Interestingly, westerners adhere to the same logic in the issue of arms supplies. They believe that this is a “one-way ticket”. Oh no. They are getting rid of obsolete weapons, sending them either to Ukraine or to third countries, which Western states are forcing to give the Kiev regime their even older equipment.
They forget that military supplies to Ukraine lead to the development of a “black market” of weapons, including in Western Europe. The authorities of the supplier countries have so far remained silent on this issue, but independent experts and relevant structures, such as Interpol, are already beginning to sound the alarm. They understand where all this will lead. According to information appearing in the media, international criminal groups have already developed schemes for the export of weapons, including heavy weapons, from Ukraine. Some of the weapons are already in Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo. Let me remind you that now the West and the United States and NATO as a whole show unprecedented concern for the future of the Balkans. Let’s imagine what kind of “future” the Balkans will have under the “wing” of NATO, so from such “renewed” “black market” weapons. Those who supply Kiev with weapons today will be responsible for the safety of their own citizens because of the fall of these weapons into the hands of criminals and terrorists. Responsible not even from the point of view of bringing to justice, but what in the historical context will be written in the “merits” of NATO-centric countries. They’re not going anywhere from that. Evidence of this will “surface” here and there in the course of investigations of ordered murders, robberies and raids.
Meanwhile, the Kiev authorities and their Western patrons continue to invent and replicate false information about a special military operation about the allegedly impending strikes by the Russian armed forces on chemical facilities in Ukraine. They had already told everyone about this in advance (three months ago). But the situation suggests otherwise. The Russian military constantly exposes new provocations and fakes.
Let’s take a look at what’s really being prepared. Another provocation of Ukrainian nationalists is planned – the mining of containers with toxic chemicals at the Azot plant in Severodonetsk on the territory of the LPR and the retention of more than a thousand plant workers and local residents in its underground facilities. According to Kiev’s plan, the explosion of tanks with more than a hundred tons of saltpeter and nitric acid should delay the advance of the armed forces of Russia and the republics of Donbass. And russia is supposed to be blamed for the man-made disaster with human casualties. As always. It is sad that the Kiev regime fabricates such fakes at the cost of the lives of its own civilians. We saw what they did in Bucha and Kramatorsk. We are waiting for specific data from the “report” of the “collective West”, which directly and indirectly indulged in all this and became an accomplice to the crimes of the Kiev regime.
We received with great concern the statement of the Minister of Justice of Ukraine Dmitry Malyuska about the creation of a special camp in western Ukraine for Russian prisoners of war, the exchange of which for Ukrainian prisoners is considered “unlikely”.
I don’t really understand how the opposite theses “fit” in the same heads. On the one hand, they claim that there are no neo-Nazis there and they are not subject to any human-phenomenon logic. On the other hand, they talk about creating special camps for people who are not going to be replaced by anyone. Where in history has this been seen? We know where. That’s exactly what we’ve been talking about for years. The Kiev regime and those who stand behind it draw their ideas and inspirations from the world history of the first third of the twentieth century. Europe, Nazism, fascism. It’s some kind of additional new word in understanding how to divide and segregate people.
We saw a lot on the territory of Ukraine. Now, it turns out, such a division into “good” and “bad”, “worthy” and “unworthy” will be carried out among military personnel. What’s it? Where are all the humanitarians and all those who monitor the compliance with humanitarian law of all these statements? Or can they still not move away from Buchi?
Despite the kiev authorities’ claims that the conditions of their detention are in conformity with international standards, there is no evidence of this. The International Committee of the Red Cross has not yet responded to our request for assistance in organizing visits to Russian prisoners of war in Ukraine. At the same time, representatives of the ICRC and deputies of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine were allowed to visit the Ukrainian prisoners of war held in the pre-trial detention center in Yelenivka on the territory of the DPR. I would like to count on reciprocity and constructive cooperation with the ICRC.
War crimes and atrocities of Ukrainian national radicals, unrestrained militarization of the Kiev regime and other facts that have to be faced during a special military operation increasingly confirm the relevance of the goals and objectives set for the protection of the DPR and LPR, demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.
Everything that was denied by the Kiev regime and the international community two months ago is now becoming a reality that everyone sees: division of people, segregation, bullying, mockery, torture. All this is under nationalist banners and is done by the hands of people who are not only wearing blood, but also tattoos, a swastika.
The tasks that have been defined by the Russian leadership, as has been repeatedly stated, will be fulfilled. This will ultimately contribute to the establishment of long-term and just peace and stability in the region and in the pan-European space.
I think that the countries of Europe, which, due to a number of factors, have taken the wrong side of history, begin a weak (not everywhere and not all) insight into what they contributed to on their continent.
Posted by: karlof1 | Jun 8 2022 18:51 utc | 53
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