THE AIMLESS EMPIRE
By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News.
June 5, 2021 | EDUCATE!
Above Photo: U.S. Navy, Zachary A. Anderson.
Under Biden, The Worlds Most Powerful, Most Heavily Armed, Most
Determinedly Righteous Nation Shows Little Sign Of Having Any Foreign Policy
At All.
Bitter and frightening realities face us four months into Joe Bidens
presidency. On the domestic side it is a Potemkin village, behind the
façades of which lies a slum of unfulfilled promises that are no longer even
part of the Washington discourse. That is the bitter part.
The frightening part is this: Biden and the amateurs he has named as
statesmen and stateswomen do not have an inconsistent foreign policy, or a
miscalculated foreign policy, or a confused foreign policy. Such
shortcomings and weaknesses might be repaired. This flummoxed bunch does not
have a foreign policy. And the worlds most powerful, most heavily armed,
most determinedly righteous nation shows little sign of figuring one out:
Readers may perhaps join me in finding this very frightening.
I do not traffic in hyperbole, favored as this is among our poseur pundits,
mostly liberals and progressives, who are little Potemkin villages all by
themselves. It is simply time to state the obvious but unsayable, to run our
palms over the rough skin of the elephant in our living room. The American
empire no longer knows what to do in the world. It is lost in the
21stcentury forest, ever more alone.
Something else must be said immediately. Fearful as it is to contemplate a
nuclear power wandering the globe without aim, at the horizon the Biden
regimes incoherent non-policies are a positive sign of historys movement
in the right direction. Imperial decline, after all, is to be hoped for.
The music of our new century stopped at just about the time the man from
Scranton took office: This administration would have to surrender all
further thought of empire global leadership in polite company if it
were to meet the demands of a new, postAmerican era, or it would have to
enter into a state of sclerosis while reënacting the decades of primacy for
a dwindling audience as if it is still somewhere around 1955.
It has chosen the latter course, maybe inevitably. It would take a president
of far greater vision and conviction than the spineless, chronically
deceitful Biden to understand our moment as one of historical import
requiring a leader with the imagination and courage to guide our republic
into new circumstances and more equitable relationships with others. In
fairness to Biden, America has not produced a leader of this sort in I do
not care to say how long.
It is occasionally said that the military runs U.S. foreign policy. One gets
the point, a grim point, but this is not so, either. The Pentagon has no
vision of where this nation is heading or why. Its only policy is to find
things to do that justify its bloated bureaucracy and budget. That is not
policy; it is something closer to theft.
So are we flying blind in the year 2021.
A Poseur
Biden is one of those senators who come along in each cohort to claim
foreign policy expertise as a signifier of intellect and worldly
sophistication. Two points to be made here. One, this has always been a pose
on Bidens part, given his very poor record in this regard. Two, most of his
foreign policy positions, if not all of the major ones, reflect domestic
political considerations rather than an understanding of this or that set of
on-the-ground circumstances. Error is therefore more or less inevitable.
If Biden has a personnel problem, as I think is the case, the problem begins
with him. But those around him must not be overlooked in this connection.
Antony Blinken, his leader of the charge in U.S. relations with others, has
spent his career as an adviser, for many years aiding Biden when he was
still a senator and subsequently during his vice-presidency. Giving an
adviser executive responsibilities was incautious, to use the kindest word
for it. In the case of Blinken, it is already well on the way to proving
disastrous. This is a man patently in over his head.
Blinken and Nod could hardly have opened up worse during their first weeks
in office. Two weeks after his inauguration, Biden announced he was ending
U.S. support for the Saudi kingdoms savage war on Yemen and its people.
This was a response to domestic pressure and was advertised (to quote the
sycophantic Guardian ) as part of a broad reshaping of American foreign
policy.
Nothing of the sort has come of this. There has been no discernible change
in American support for the Saudis, and we are not looking at a reshaping of
policy: We are looking at an absence of policy.
This latter point became even clearer in the administrations first contacts
with Russia and China. Within three days last March, Biden had his
Putin-is-a-killer moment on ABC News, while Blinken, during his Anchorage
encounter with Chinese counterparts, lectured the Chinese side on human
rights, democracy, and individual freedoms as if reading from a catechism of
rote American pieties.
I have already reviewed in this space the very serious consequences of
these miscalculations. In brief, Moscow and Beijing appear to have concluded
after these events that it is not possible to deal with the U.S. on the
basis of the parity they have pointedly insisted upon for years. We can now
expect an era of alliance-building among nonWestern powers, already
nascent, to flower.
Biden has just scheduled his first summit, to be held June 16, with Vladimir
Putin. In the run-up during these next two weeks, we must ask what the Biden
regimes Russia policy is. Name-calling and expelling Russian diplomats on
the basis of no-evidence allegations of Russian cyberattacks is not a
policy: These are perfectly legible admissions that the U.S. does not now
have a Russia policy.
Maybe Biden will come up with something surprising when the two convene in
Geneva, but as things stand one is surprised the Russian president is
bothering with the occasion.
Ditto in the China case. Biden and Blinken have gone notably quiet on
relations with the Peoples Republic since the latters mess in Alaska.
Blinkens few remarks, carried on Twitter, have focused on an improbably
alleged genocide in Xinjiang Province and Beijings assertive handling of
Hong Kongs democracy movement. These do not constitute a policy. The trade
question, South China Sea security, the way forward on the Korean Peninsula:
These are matters of policy, and we have heard nothing about any of them.
Covering their lack of ideas on the Russia and China questions, Biden and
Blinken mark down both as strategic adversaries in accordance with the
Pentagons 2018 National Defense Strategy. At the same time, they propose to
compete fairly with China on the economic side while cooperating with both
on some security matters and questions such as climate change. This is
cake-and-eat-it stuff. There is too much blur in this strategy for it to
work.
Pipeline Reversal
Last week Biden announced he will drop opposition to the Nord Stream 2
pipeline from Russia to Germany and remove the threat of secondary sanctions
against European companies working on it. This is an excellent move, but one
cannot read it as the front end of a renovated policy toward either Russia
or Europe. It is simply a retreat in the face of a fait accompli.
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Europes refusal to bow
to Washington on the Nord Stream 2 project. At this point, Europeans appear
willing to go along with the U.S. on non-substantive questions such as the
(fraudulent) Alexei Navalny case but not when it comes to concrete matters
such as European energy supplies. With the NS 2 confrontation, Europeans
effectively announced their intention to adopt a more independent policy
framework for the first time since preWorld War II days.
The cutting-edge question in transAtlantic relations as NS 2 makes plain,
is Russia. An impulse toward autonomy in transAtlantic ties has been
articulated with greater conviction since Emmanuel Macron hosted the G7
session in Biarritz in summer 2019. The French presidents voice has grown
ever more persistent and won gradually increasing support from the Germans.
Macrons topic was always the U.S. but turned on his Gaullist desire to
advance beyond Washingtons Cold War binary. With Russia, the policy of
progressive sanctions on frozen situations is no longer an effective
policy, Macron said last week. We are at a moment of truth in our
relationship with Russia, which should lead us to rethink the terms of the
tension that we decide to put in place.
Do Biden or any of his people have the sophistication and gravitas to
respond effectively to these profoundly challenging statements? It seems
almost silly to ask. Wanted: A Europe policy that takes account of what time
it is on historys clock. One does not hold ones breath.
As to the Middle East and West Asia, we have five cases of what appear to be
Bidens abiding preoccupation with smoke-and-mirrors appearances as against
reality, and one question on which the administrations position is all too
clear.
We are told that indirect talks with the Iranians in a Vienna hotel are
gradually progressing, but this sounds like so much diplo-speak. Bidens
people are asking too much of Tehran, know they are asking too much, and
have no true intention of rejoining the 2015 accord governing its nuclear
programs.
I have already noted the apparent fraud of Bidens early announcement
concerning Yemen. His subsequent decision to schedule the withdrawal of U.S.
troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11 would count as his best policy move to
date, except that, as noted previously in this space, we do not yet know
what he means by withdrawal. This will almost certainly turn out to be
something other than the end of Americas longest war.
No Syria Retreat
Last week the administration announced that it will not renew the
just-expired license granted last year to Delta Crescent Energy, a concern
with extensive political and military connections, to pump and refine Syrian
oil. It would be nice if this were the start of a similar withdrawal from
the Syrian Arab Republic, but this is an administration that bombed Syrian
positions within weeks of taking office and has done nothing since to
indicate it intends to abandon the third of Syria it illegally occupies. A
similar situation obtains in Iraq, where U.S. troops are no longer welcome
as a matter of Iraqi law but appear to be going nowhere.
We come to Israel, alas. Here, too, the professedly Zionist Biden has no
policy other than to allow Israel to set U.S. policy. That is the policy,
and there is, of course, zero likelihood it will change. One can hardly wait
to see what comes of Blinkens declared intention to aid reconstruction of
the Gaza Strip after apartheid Israels recent aerial attacks.
Do I describe an incoherent American leader and his lieutenants, who speak
gibberish because, having no reply to our moment, the last thing they want
is to be understood? I do. Do I write of a powerful nation that hasa
different thinglost its strength and is critically weakened? This, too.
It is frightening, yes, but our leaders decided in the aftermath of the 2001
events that this is how they will go not imaginatively or creatively, but
inanely.