There is a great believe peddled by main stream media that the Biden administration is trying to hold the Zionists back from their devastating action in Gaza, Lebanon and beyond, but unfortunately fails to do so. Some commentators argue that this is the case because the Israel lobby has a very strong position in U.S. policies and can direct the U.S. government into any direction of its liking.
My hunch is that this is putting the cart before the horse.
It is in fact the Biden administration which is using the Israeli (and Ukrainian) government to serve its foreign policy purposes. As I remarked:
This has been the general theme of a media campaign for a while. "Natanyahoo is steamrolling Biden and the poor guy can do nothing about it."
I do not buy it. One phone call from the White House to the Pentagon would hold resupply flights from the U.S. to Israel. Without constant supply renewal the Israeli Air Force would have to stop its bombing campaigns in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen within days if not within hours.
But instead of calling the Pentagon, the whole Middle East team around Biden, Antony Blinken, Brett McGurk and IDF soldier Amos Hochstein, has been urging Israel to extend its campaign.
They are hoping, like the neoconservatives in 2006 during the Bush administration, for the 'birth pangs of a new Middle East', which will forever change the strategic situation on the ground.
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The conclusion from this is that Netanyahoo is largely doing exactly what the Biden administration wants him to do.
Gilbert Doctorow, the well known historian and journalist, is of similar opinion:
More on tails wagging dogs and vice versa
Some viewers/readers support my contention that the United States is using Israel as its proxy in the Middle East and is not just enabling but even directing Israel’s rampage in the region to ‘kick ass’ generally and to reinforce American dominance there in line with American global hegemony. Far from being outraged by the Israeli atrocities, the U.S. government is satisfied to see Israel take revenge for the many humiliations that the United States has suffered in the Middle East, most recently in the disorderly and disgraceful pull-out from Afghanistan but going back, say, 40 years to the hostage taking at the American embassy in Teheran by the new revolutionary Iranian leadership there that overthrew the American backed Shah.
Others in my audience have not hesitated to say that they think I am wrong, and that indeed Prime Minister Netanyahu is leading Joe Biden & Company around by the nose, which just happens to be the consensus view in mainstream media.
Most of this discussion is not visible to the broad public. However, the ‘Judging Freedom’ channel which has 450,000 subscribers and its host, Judge Andrew Napolitano put my proposition on the dog (USA) wagging the tail (Israel) to several of his best-known panelists in the 24 hours following my interview with him. To be sure, my idea seemed so ‘contrarian’ that it demanded a response from the mightiest minds in the alternative media camp. They obliged. With one exception, the mightiest minds were dismissive of my interpretation in more respectful, less respectful ways.
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Professor John Mearsheimer and Larry Johnson are two of the guest on the Napolitano show who reject Doctorow's thesis.
However, Doctorow and I are not the only ones delving into this conundrum. Professor of history at Columbia University Adam Tooze, a rather famous commentator, joined us with his current Guardian comment:
Facing war in the Middle East and Ukraine, the US looks feeble. But is it just an act?
There is one school of thought that says the Biden administration is muddling through. It has no grand plan. It lacks the will or the means to discipline or direct either the Ukrainians or the Israelis. As a result, it is mainly focused on avoiding a third world war.
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But what if that interpretation is too benign? What if it underestimates the intentionality on Washington’s part? What if key figures in the administration actually see this as a history-defining moment and an opportunity to reshape the balance of world power? What if what we are witnessing is the pivoting of the US to a deliberate and comprehensive revisionism by way of a strategy of tension?Revisionist powers are those that want to overturn the existing state of things. In an extended sense, this can also mean a desire to alter the flow of events; for instance, to redirect or halt the process of globalisation. Revisionism is often associated with resentment or nostalgia for an earlier, better age.
Tooze digs down into the various action the Biden administration has taken against Russia, China and in the Middle East. He concludes:
In all three arenas – China, Ukraine and the Middle East – the US will say that it is responding to aggression. But rather than working consistently for a return to the status quo it is, in fact, raising the stakes. While insisting that it supports the rules-based order, what we are witnessing is something closer to a revival of the ruinous neoconservative ambition of the 1990s and 2000s.
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[T]here is more going on here than simply muddling through. First the Trump and now the Biden presidencies are willing contributors to the controlled demolition of the 1990s post-cold war order.
People seem to have forgotten that Biden was never a liberal in the progressive sense. Since being a freshman in Congress Biden has always been on the conservative side of things:
Alliances With Segregationists
1975: Mr. Biden joined Senator Jesse Helms, a Republican segregationist from North Carolina, in supporting an anti-busing amendment to an education spending bill. When the amendment failed, Mr. Biden wrote a narrower measure that prevented schools from using federal dollars to assign teachers or students by race. It passed, 50-43.
In a television interview, Mr. Biden called busing an “asinine concept” and said he had “gotten to the point where I think our only recourse to eliminate busing may be a constitutional amendment.”
In 2002 Biden was joined at the hip with the neoconservatives when he, as the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, feverishly argued for launching the war on Iraq:
In a speech days before the 2002 [Iraq war] vote, Bush did say approving the resolution “does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable,” but he also laid out in detail why military action “may” be needed. And on the day the war broke out, Biden acknowledged, “We voted to give him the authority to wage that war. We should step back and be supportive.”
When the Biden administration is sowing global chaos the way it currently does, it is acting along a path which Biden has long favored and with the intent to sow chaos, not because this or that outside power is pressing him to do so.