Tuesday, January 14, 2025

 The Dangers of Biden’s Legacy and Trump’s Inheritance


 January 14, 2025
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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

A key measure of any U.S. president’s success is the ability or good fortune to leave his successor with a better international situation than the one he inherited.  Donald Trump inherited a relatively stable situation from Barack Obama, but his chaotic and unstable leadership did no favors for Joe Biden.  Trump now inherits a broad pattern of disorder in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific, and has named a national security team that seems destined to make all of these issues worse.

Sadly, Joe Biden is leaving the presidency with no awareness of his shortcomings.  He has charged Sudan with genocidal policies, but refuses to acknowledge his complicity with regard to Israeli genocidal policies.  Recently, Biden announced an additional $8 billion in fighter jets, attack helicopters, and artillery to an Israel that relies almost solely on sophisticated U.S. weaponry inappropriate for the terrain and the targets that Israel is facing.  Biden’s national security team ignored Israel’s right-wing attempts to undermine the rule of law, although the importance of the rule of law was Biden’s major campaign volley against Trump.

The Israeli Defense Forces have been politicized and radicalized in their support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies.  The same can be said for the Israeli police on the West Bank, which are conducting their own war crimes in support of Netanyahu.  Israel has made no attempt to examine the serious and profound allegations of the abuse and misconduct on the part of its military and police in Gaza and the West Bank.  The U.S. threat to limit arms shipments to Israel if humanitarian aid wasn’t increased was embarrassingly ignored by Israel.  In fact, Israel tightened the borders and the deliveries, and not even the unconscionable deaths of Palestinian infants has made a difference.

Soon after the war began, Biden arrived in Israel and signaled that the United States would give “carte blanche” to Israel regarding weapons transfers and diplomatic support.  Biden continually referred to his relationship with Prime Minister Golda Meir from the 1970s, and failed to realize that Meir’s Israel no longer exists and that Netanyahu’s Israel has become an imperial power in the Middle East.  Secretary of State Antony Blinken did worse: he arrived in Israel before Biden and stated that “I come as a Jew.”  Thank you, Tony Blinken.

Biden came to the presidency in 2021 with more experience than any previous president in the field of foreign policy and national security.  He said that “I know more about foreign policy than Henry Kissinger.”  In a recent interview, he told reporters that “I know more world leaders than any one of you have ever met in your whole goddamn life.”

But unlike Kissinger, Biden had a weak national security team, conducted foreign policy on his own, and ignored the Cold War situation that he helped to create.  Although the current Cold War promises to be more dangerous, more costly, and more implacable than its predecessor that dominated the 1950s and 1960s, Biden continued to paint Russia and China with the same brush.  Unfortunately, he received support from the mainstream media and the foreign policy community.  Kissinger had very different policies toward Moscow and Beijing, and improved bilateral relations with both of them.

We can’t begin to tackle energy and environment problems without establishing a serious dialogue with China, but as recently as last week Biden, Blinken, and U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns were lecturing Beijing regarding China’s relations with Russia and Iran.  Biden appointed Ambassador Burns, a Sovietologist and not a Sinologist, in 2022; since then, both Biden and Burns have been lecturing Beijing about its policies toward Russia, Iran, and North Korea.  But China isn’t about to change its relations with Russia, interrupt its huge purchases of oil from Iran, or alter its relations with North Korea.  China has its own problems with North Korea, a nation on its border that has developed a close relationship with Russia, which worsens Beijing’s national security situation.  Thank you, Nick Burns.

More sadly, a Trump administration offers the promise of worsening these problems.  Although Biden never fulfilled his commitment to create a “rules-based international order” and a “foreign policy for the Middle Classes,” a second Trump administration is likely to worsen the chaos and instability that earmarked the first Trump administration.  Trump’s national security team, if it survives confirmation, will certainly repeat the “carte blanche” of Biden’s four years. The “China hawks” at the White House (national security adviser Mike Waltz); the Department of State (Marco Rubio), and the intelligence tsar and the Central Intelligence Agency (Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe, respectively) hardly inspire confidence.  Trump’s self-proclaimed success was in the field of real estate development, but there were failures there as well.

There is no reason to believe that Trump can manage the array of challenges that confront the United States at this time.  And unlike Trump’s first term, there is no one in the second Trump administration that will be able to curb his worst impulses.  The Founding Fathers believed that the Supreme Court and the mainstream media would be able to limit Trump’s powers, but Trump has packed the Court in his favor and the Washington Post is leading the way in limiting the power and influence of the mainstream media.  Thank you, Jeff Bezos.

On the eve of the presidential election in November, the Economist asked “What could possibly go wrong?”  In view of President-elect Trump’s incendiary comments on trade and tariffs, Gaza, Greenland, the Panama Canal, the Gulf of Mexico, and Canada, we’re about to find out.  Trump called “tariffs” his favorite word in the dictionary.  It’s very possible that our worst fears about a Trump presidency will come to pass.  Thank you, American voters.

Finally, the leading columnists of the Washington Post and the New York Times are encouraging policies that will worsen both domestic and international challenges that confront the United States.  Regarding Israel, the Times’ David French praises Biden because he “stood behind” Israel in the Middle East, and Trump for the “hard line against Iran.”  Bret Stephens, the Times’ shill for Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, praises Trump for recognizing the “need to spend a whole lot more on defense,” describing our nuclear weapons infrastructure as “decrepit.”  The Post’s David Ignatius credits U.S. military power for backing Israel as “it remade the Middle East,” and falsely credits Biden with seeking to “manage competition” with China, which is exactly what the Biden national security team failed to do.  Thank you, Mainstream Media.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.


AU CONTRAIRE

Will Trump End Washington’s Democratic Foreign Policy Façade?


Donald Trump’s political adversaries have long contended that he is a danger to democracy both at home and abroad.  The alleged threat that he poses domestically is symbolized by the riot his supporters waged at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  Opponents denounce Trump’s foreign policy views both for being “isolationist” and overly sympathetic to autocrats around the world.  Trump’s mere willingness to interact with the latter individuals is deemed to be sufficient evidence of his own evil inclinations.

Aside from the internally contradictory aspects of the two criticisms, a key problem with the overall thesis about Trump’s alleged radicalism is that the substance of U.S. foreign policy did not change very much during his first term. Yes, his administration sometimes expressed pointed criticism of U.S. allies and security clients, especially NATO’s European members.  But the dominant theme of Trump’s criticism was that those countries were not doing enough for either their own defense or the collective military missions that Washington led.  His tone was sharper and more confrontational, but the content of his criticisms differed little from the complaints that previous administrations (going as far back as Dwight Eisenhower’s) had expressed about a lack of burden-sharing in the Alliance.

A shift in tone rather than substance is likely to constitute the principal change during the second Trump administration.  Trump’s predecessors in both Democratic and GOP administrations have strongly touted Washington’s alleged support for democracy around the world.  That stance complemented America’s supposed commitment to a globalist economic system after World War II.  The promiscuous use of the term “free world” was an essential component of the overall U.S. propaganda strategy.

Many of the countries and political factions that Washington supported did not merit that designation, even if the most vague and generous definition was used.  When U.S. policymakers and their allies in the establishment news media applied the free world label to regimes run by the likes of South Korea’s Chun Doo Hwan, Taiwan’s Chang Kai-shek, the Shah of Iran Nicaragua’s Manuel Noriega, and an array of military dictators throughout Latin America, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa, it is hard to conclude that U.S. official policy was little more than cynical propaganda concealing a variety of far less savory objectives and motives.

Such U.S. conduct has persisted throughout the so-called post-Cold War era.  For example, both the Obama and Biden administrations, as well as their conduits in the press, routinely portrayed Syria’s Islamist rebels as “freedom fighters” against Bashar al-Assad’s secular dictatorship.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton initiated Washington’s financial and military support for the insurgency in 2011, and Washington’s assistance was instrumental in the ultimate victory of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HST) in December 2024.  Washington’s rhetoric about the political orientation of the anti-Assad forces was a typical model of duplicity.

The whitewashing of Syria’s Islamist rebels, though, was eclipsed by the deceptive propaganda campaign Washington has waged on behalf of its clients in Ukraine.  The West’s foreign policy establishment (aptly nicknamed “the blob”) has misrepresented its own role in that country and the nature of the faction it has supported.

Biden and his minions routinely portray Russia’s February 2022 invasion as “unprovoked” and the current Ukrainian government of Volodymyr Zelensky as a symbol of democracy.  Both contentions are false. The United States and its NATO allies repeatedly engaged in provocative policies that intruded into Russia’s sphere of influence and even into the country’s core security zone.  NATO’s overall eastward expansion after the collapse of the Soviet Union was bad enough, but Washington’s determination to install and maintain a puppet government in Ukraine as a de facto NATO military asset became an intolerable provocation to Moscow.

The Biden administration’s continuing campaign to portray the armed struggle between Russia and Ukraine as an existential conflict between authoritarianism and democracy, not only was a gross oversimplification and distortion, it was (and remains) an insult to the intelligence of people around the world.

Those who believe that there will be major changes (either good or bad) in the substance of U.S. foreign policy during Trump’s new term as president are likely to be proven wrong.  His administration may try to extricate the United States from its quagmire of a proxy war using Ukraine to weaken Russia.  Trump’s frustrations with NATO generally may even reach the point of de-emphasizing Washington’s military role in Central and Eastern Europe.  Such moves would benefit the American people.  On the other hand, Trump’s renewed tenure is likely to lead to greater U.S. tensions with both China and Iran.  His intensified focus on Mexico and the rest of the Western Hemisphere could produce an assortment of new or enhanced troubles.  Few people imagined that Greenland’s status would become a significant issue, for example.

Manifestations of change, though, are likely to be more stylistic and geographical than truly transformative.  The phony justifications about defending or promoting “democracy” around the world that have characterized so many recent administrations will fade.  Trump is an old-style, unabashed nationalist and imperialist.  He has more in common with Theodore Roosevelt than with members of the early 21st century political and foreign policy elites in either party.  U.S. foreign policy may well become less hypocritical with him at the helm, and some geographic priorities may shift, but there is little evidence that overall it will become less activist.

Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and a senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute. He also served in several senior positions during a 37-year career at the Cato Institute.  Dr. Carpenter is the author of 13 books and more than 1,300 articles on foreign policy, national security, and civil liberties topics.  His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).

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