Joe Biden Tells the World America Is Back Not That It Ever Really Went
Anywhere
Bidens shifting global dynamics are what Obamas Defense Secretary Chuck
Hagel referred to as challenging the world order that American leadership
helped build after World War II. In other words, the worlds sole
superpower is averse to an emerging multipolar world.
by Roger D. Harris
February 26th, 2021
By Roger D. Harris
WASHINGTON America is back, President Joe Biden bellicosely proclaimed
in his major foreign policy priorities speech at the Munich Security
Conference on February 19. Repeating it for effect, Biden signaled the end
of the Trump interregnum.
No more assuring words could have been uttered for George W. Bushs former
Defense Secretary Colin Powell and the 70-odd Republican national security
officials who had written an open letter endorsing Biden out of fear that
Donald Trump would upset the bipartisan foreign policy consensus of regime
change, forever wars, and the NATO alliance. Republican neocons now shelter
in the Democrats big tent, todays party of war.
The major difference from his predecessor is that the new U.S. president
promises a greater reliance on multilateral diplomacy and international
cooperative agreements to achieve U.S. imperial goals. Biden pledged to
remain in the World Health Organization and to return to the Paris Climate
Agreement, although compliance with the latter is voluntary and Biden
defends fracking. Where Trump withdrew the U.S. from the UN Human Rights
Council three years ago, the U.S. will now re-engage as an observer. And
Trumps Muslim ban was reversed on Bidens first day in office.
Regardless of the changing of the guard in Washington, the imperial goal of
full spectrum dominance endures from one administration to the next. The
global network of up to a thousand foreign military bases will not be
shuttered.
The fact that the U.S. can with impunity punish a third of humanity (39
nations) with illegal sanctions what the UN calls unilateral coercive
measures is a measure of its hegemonic standing. These sanctions are a
form of hybrid warfare, which can be just as deadly as outright war.
Although Biden is reviewing the sanctions policy in light of the COVID-19
pandemic, he is expected to keep using [the] U.S. sanctions weapon but with
sharper aim, as reported by Reuters.
The new secretary of state, Antony Blinken, asserted that his policies would
follow his predecessors, but will more effectively target official
enemies such as Venezuela, and will double down on Russia. Following Trump,
Biden is appealing to the UK High Court to extradite Julian Assange.
Were at an inflection point
Biden warned, in his foreign policy priorities speech, about competition
among countries that threaten to divide the world, caused by shifting
global dynamics. The threat to divide the world that concerns the U.S.
president is precisely any deviation from U.S. domination. Biden was
referring to the emergence of potential rival powers. His warning affirms
and extends Trumps 2017 National Security Strategy doctrine of great-power
competition and swings away from Barack Obamas earlier and subsequently
abandoned conception of international interdependence.
Bidens shifting global dynamics are what Obamas Defense Secretary Chuck
Hagel referred to as challenging the world order that American leadership
helped build after World War II. In other words, the worlds sole
superpower is averse to an emerging multipolar world.
Biden's First Month Marked by Broken Promises
President Joe Biden's first month in office has been marred by a spat of
broken promises justified by the need to reconcile with Republicans.
MintPress News | Alan Macleod | Feb 19
Bidens speech concluded, Were at an inflection point caused by new
crises. While not identified by Biden, this is implicit recognition of the
impending crisis of legitimacy of the neoliberal world order. The U.S. is
the main beneficiary, proponent, and enforcer of a global political economy
that increasingly is seen as failing to meet peoples needs. Class
disparities are ever more evident in the U.S. and internationally during an
economic recession. Here in the U.S., billionaires have added $4 trillion to
their net worth since the onset of the pandemic.
Return to Atlanticism and NATO expansion
While still president, Trump spoke against the U.S. as the worlds gendarme:
The plan is to get out of endless wars to bring our soldiers back home, not
be policing agents all over the world. For a variety of reasons, Trumps
iconoclastic words never found their way into policy. And Bidens speech
writers certainly will never give him similar words to read.
Rather, Biden said in his foreign policy speech that the U.S. is fully
committed to our NATO Alliance and welcome[s] Europes growing investment
in [its] military capabilities. The U.S. mission in Iraq will be expanded
and more U.S. troops will be sent to Germany.
Biden justifies the NATO military encirclement of Russia, with intimations
that Ukraine and Georgia may eventually join, by the threat from Russia.
However, Russian reactions to staging hostile war games and nuclear-capable
facilities on its border are plausibly defensive. Meanwhile the U.S.-led
military alliance has long since broken loose from its Atlantic-centric
borders, with NATO Partners Across the Globe extending to Afghanistan,
Australia, Colombia, Iraq, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mongolia, New Zealand
and Pakistan.
Africa and the Middle East
The new administration will expand U.S. military presence in Africa through
its Africa Command (AFRICOM), which in 2019 deployed Special Forces in 22
countries and was in active combat in at least 13 of them. The largest ever
U.S. military exercise in Africa, African Lions 21, is scheduled for June
with partner nations.
Bidens State Department approved a $200 million arms sale to Egypt, a
country headed by the man Trump called his favorite dictator. The U.S.
continues to be the worlds largest purveyor of military equipment,
eclipsing the combined sales of the next four highest war profiteers.
Oil and gas are strategic resources, and their international flows are key
factors for imperial control. Absent oil and gas sales, 60% of its GDP,
Russia would be a minor economy.
Now that the U.S. is a net oil exporter, the oil-rich Gulf monarchies are
both allies and potential competitors.
Trump extended the U.S.s special relationship in the Middle East with
Israel and Saudi Arabia; Biden continues this trajectory. Trumps
provocative move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem will not be reversed by
Biden, nor will Palestinian rights be recognized.
Leaving Aside International Law: Democrats are as Dangerous as Republicans
to Peace in Palestine
There are obvious differences in Democrats approach to Israel and Palestine,
but only in semantics and political jingoism, not policy.
MintPress News | Ramzy Baroud | Feb 18
Ignoring nuclear-armed Israel, the Biden team continues the U.S.s obsession
with Irans nuclear program. Biden has committed to renegotiate a better
deal regarding Iran after Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan
of Action; the deal retains Trumps demand to include Irans whole regional
policy.
The new U.S. administration will be augmenting troops in Syria and expanding
and building new military bases there. Damascus is in a weakened state,
facing the pandemic, economic blockade, and continued military hostilities
by the U.S. and its partners.
Biden announced that the U.S. will no longer support offensive operations
in the Saudi-led war on Yemen that has precipitated a human rights
catastrophe. It remains to be seen what continuing lethal defensive aid to
the Saudis entails. The Saudis have the worlds fifth largest military,
costing an astronomical 8% of their GDP. Some U.S. military sales to Saudi
Arabia and the UAE have been temporarily suspended. In response, the CEO of
military merchant Raytheon commented: Peace is not going to break out in
the Middle East anytime soon. He should know, as Bidens defense secretary
formerly sat on his companys board of directors.
Americas backyard 21st century Monroe Doctrine
Treatment of Latin America and the Caribbean as the U.S.s proprietary
backyard, under the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, is being challenged by a rising
pink tide: recent leftist electoral wins in Mexico, Argentina, and
Bolivia, and a possibility in Ecuador in April; popular uprisings in
Argentina, Haiti, and elsewhere; and continued resistance by Venezuela,
Cuba, and Nicaragua.
Biden, the day he entered office, had the power of executive order to
restore Obamas openings to Cuba that had been reversed by Trump. Now, with
over a month in office, Biden has not ended limits on remittances,
restrictions on travel, or other illegal sanctions on Cuba. Biden continues
the illegal policy of regime change for Cuba of the previous twelve U.S.
presidents: covert and overt destabilization, blockade, and occupation of
Guantánamo. It should be noted that Obamas openings to Cuba were not a
deviation from previous policy but an attempt to achieve regime change by
different means.
Venezuela featured prominently in the presidential campaign speeches of
Trump and Biden, with both promoting regime change. U.S.-anointed
counterfeit president of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, has lost his credentials
with the European Union. But the farce initiated in 2019 by Trump is
nonetheless being continued by Biden, who backed down on his campaign pledge
to possibly negotiate directly with the democratically elected president,
Nicolás Maduro.
Biden has already deported thousands of emigres back to Haiti and other
countries. This represents a disappointing step backward from the Biden
administrations earlier commitments to fully break from the harmful
deportation policies of both the Trump and Obama presidencies, according
to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Pivot to Asia
U.S. foreign policy reflects the personal qualities of the person occupying
the Oval Office, party affiliation, and the constellation of state and
corporate powers behind the administration. But eclipsing these factors are
larger geopolitical developments, especially now with the emergence of China
as the worlds workshop.
Head of Strategic Command: US Must Prepare for Very Real Possibility of
Nuclear War With China
The head of Strategic Command announced the United States must prepare for
the very real possibility of nuclear war with China or Russia.
MintPress News | Alan Macleod | Feb 5
China is an upcoming rival but falls short as a peer of the U.S. in terms of
economic power. Chinas remarkable economic growth has been predicated on
its integration into, and indeed dependence on, the international capitalist
market, which is dominated by the U.S. Although China is the worlds leading
exporter, only a minuscule 4% of the international exchange of currencies is
denominated in the Chinese yuan, compared to 88% in U.S. dollars. Tellingly,
close to half the trade between China and Russia, two countries sanctioned
by the U.S., is denominated in U.S. dollars.
Following Obamas pivot to Asia in 2012, Bidens policy portends a
continuation of Trumps hostility toward China, only with further
intensification. The U.S. military buildup to confine China includes land,
air, sea, and even space forces, with the South China Sea as a hotspot of
contention.
Trump negotiated a peace agreement between the Taliban and the U.S.-backed
government in Afghanistan, now in its twentieth year of war. The Biden
administration has indicated that it will not honor the agreement, which
requires a U.S. troop drawdown instead of Bidens announced buildup.
The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea is entering its 71st year of
official war with the U.S. with no end in sight. When Trump met with DRPK
President Kim Jong-un in 2019, the Democrats screamed treason. To be sure,
Biden will not make the patriotic mistake of trying to reduce tension
between the two nuclear powers.
Nuclear policy 100 seconds before midnight
The U.S. is ringing Russia and China with missile defense systems, which
had been illegal until George W. Bush abrogated the U.S.-Russia
Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002. A missile defense system is
designed to shield against a retaliatory response after a first-strike
nuclear attack. Congress recently authorized a new generation of U.S.
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
Chinas official policy is not to be the first to use nuclear weapons at
any time or under any circumstances. Russian policy is to use nuclear
weapons only when the very existence of the state is threatened. In
contrast, the U.S. reserves the right to first use of nuclear weapons.
A trillion-dollar-plus nuclear weapons modernization, started by Obama and
continued by Trump, lurches on under Biden, with the entire U.S. nuclear
arsenal scheduled to be upgraded. The consequences are far greater risks of
launching an accidental nuclear war and an accelerated arms race with Russia
and China. Head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, Admiral Charles A.
Richard, warned just this month that in a conflict with Russia or China
nuclear employment is a very real possibility.
Given such an international climate, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
set the 2021 doomsday clock to 100 seconds before midnight. Although the UN
Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons became international law on
January 21, the U.S. has not ratified it. On the brighter side, Biden
extended the New START nuclear arms treaty for four years.
Another world is possible, another U.S. is necessary
The story ends just 100 seconds before disaster, but that is only half the
story. The other half is the resistance to U.S. imperialism. American
leadership of the world, touted by both Republicans and Democrats, is not
democratic. No one elected the U.S. to be the worlds nanny. International
polls show the U.S. is rated among the most feared, hated, and dangerous
countries in the world, and the greatest threat to world peace. The Vox
Populi project reports majorities or pluralities of the U.S. people support
reducing the military budget, achieving peace by avoiding foreign
intervention, negotiating directly with adversaries to avoid military
confrontation, decreasing U.S. troops overseas, and constraining the
presidents ability to attack a foreign adversary.
Feature photo | Biden tours the African Americans in Service Corridor at the