Where Do the Candidates Stand on War? Someplace Very Vague
Photograph Source: Expert Infantry – CC BY 2.0
Since a prerequisite for the American presidency is being ready, willing and able to slaughter lots of foreigners, it would be nice to know where the candidates stand on war, especially for those of us against it. We know where Joe “Proxy War” Biden stands. He’s all in. We can only pray that Kamala “Military Mystery” Harris does not follow in his bloodstained footsteps, although her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention does not inspire hope. At pains to challenge Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, Harris made it clear she would not flinch from hostilities with those nations. Whether those hostilities are rhetorical or military remains to be seen, but if the presidential past is precedent, gore awaits us.
Still, there are indications that Harris might not be as gung-ho as her current boss on combat in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. For instance, the current idiotic, small-scale NATO-backed invasion of Russia is not something any sentient American ruler would support, as it could ultimately result in Moscow nuking European cities followed by an atomic face-off with Washington, and Harris has wisely remained mum on this incursion, though it would be even wiser to condemn it. Meanwhile, Donald “Arms for Ukraine” Trump claims he’ll end this proxy war fiasco, but given that he was the president who green-lit American weapons for Kiev, after Barack “Bomb Libya” Obama refused to do this, one must take his claims to be a peacemaker with a grain of salt. Trump also insists he’ll end the Gaza War. But I notice Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t exit his recent tete a tete with Trump at Mar-A-Lago chastened or in any way ready to curtail military operations. In fact, and quite dismally, nothing changed.
Then there’s Iran and Israel, two countries in desperate need of diplomatic contacts, if ever there were any. They have to talk, period. If the requirement for such negotiations is a prompt ceasefire in Gaza followed by a just, acceptable settlement for Palestinians, well, good. Only a fool would refuse. Besides, it’s the only moral and decent thing to do. In the mega-picture, the threat of catastrophic regional war is just too great; it looms over West Asia like the shadow of death, and would bring no winners. And so, Moscow has offered to mediate. Clearly Beijing is on board too.
Even Biden has worked overtime to prevent death from swinging his scythe over the entire region. But the western fantasy of NATO-lite, an alliance of Israel and moderate Arab countries against Iran and its friends, not only won’t fly, but also, worse, will explode into war. Besides, it’s a provocative move when the times call for a big, calming strategy. And that means Tehran and Jerusalem must talk, in order, at long last to sign some sort of peace treaty. After all, who wants a mini-NATO in the Middle East? Look what the original NATO did in Europe – hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainian soldiers, tens of thousands of dead Russian ones, the Germany economy crashing, western defense supplies utterly depleted and Europe in a total economic and political tailspin. NATO has failed, as Dwight Eisenhower predicted it would, if it outlasted his administration by 10 years. Well, 60 years later this zombie still feasts on corpses. We don’t need it gifting us any offspring – in the Middle East or in the Far East, with the moniker AUKUS.
Biden’s bloody legacy is the war he provoked in Ukraine and the one he refuses to end in Gaza, which he could do by slamming his foot down for the Israeli prime minister, as Ronald Reagan did regarding Lebanon back in the 1980s. So I guess we’re lucky Biden’s no longer in the running. But what about Trump, currently being set up and egged on to confront Iran? By whom, you may ask. By the American intelligence cabal, with lurid tales of Iranians hacking his campaign and plotting to assassinate him. Not that Trump needs to be encouraged. He was plenty hostile to Tehran to start with and anyone sanguine about him promoting peace with the Persian nation needs to check in with reality. He came close to embroiling the U.S. in war there during his last administration. His track record in West Asia doesn’t bode well.
Trump, however, is better on the Ukraine fiasco. He says he’ll get a peace pact within 24 hours of taking office. While it’s unlikely that the Kremlin is even still interested in any ceasefire with Kiev, except on the harshest terms, after Ukraine’s absurd incursion into Russia, an incursion any nitwit could see was doomed to cause nothing but trouble for Ukraine – well, Trump is welcome to try.
But the mere fact that he wants to makes him persona non grata among Washington elites, immaturely and impotently obsessed, as they are, with Russian president Vladimir Putin. It also enflames the ghouls in that shadowy forest known as the deep state. And we all got a good look at “deep state” handiwork the last time Trump was prez – the phony Russiagate nonsense, four years of lawfare and anti-Moscow hysteria, aka CIA propaganda, thoroughly polluting our already filthy media. That, of course, slipped like a hand into a glove right into Biden’s Ukraine proxy war frenzy, leaving us denizens of planet Earth closer now to nuclear extinction than any time since the Cuban missile crisis. Biden’s legacy could yet be humanity’s shroud.
When it comes to that pelagic expanse called the China Sea, however, Trump is as bellicose regarding Beijing as he is regarding Tehran; it just plays out differently. With China, the worry is not so much Trump himself, as his advisors, people like Elbridge Colby and Robert O’Brien, both fanatical Sinophobes. While Colby has been mentioned for a national security position (time to head for the hills, if that happens), O’Brien has busily tried to influence the Trump campaign, advocating such imbecilities as cutting of ALL economic ties with China and horrors like deploying ALL marines to Asia – just to make sure, I guess, that Beijing gets the memo that Washington wants war.
Meanwhile, Dem bigwigs advise Harris to keep her policies under wraps until and if she wins. This lousy, profoundly dirty and undemocratic idea is of a piece with Democratic policy generally. After all, who knew, during his 2020 campaign that Biden intended to antagonize Moscow up to and including war? Or that he would allow far right maniacs in Netanyahu’s coalition to dictate U.S. policy? Who knew that Biden would push for Kiev to join NATO – something Putin vociferously objected to steadily, consistently and ever more loudly since 2008 – that he would ignore Kremlin pleas to consider Russia’s security concerns and that he would use the invasion he thus provoked to wage all-out NATO war on Moscow? If Biden had spelled this hideous policy out during his first presidential campaign, voters might well have said, uh, war with nuclear-armed Russia? No thanks. So the question naturally arises: does Harris have something equally horrible up her sleeve?
Where does she stand on the Ukraine War, the Gaza War, the explosive situations with Iran and with Taiwan? The longer the details of her views on these matters remain unknown, the worse, not just for Americans, but for our species. It is the height of manipulative cynicism for Dem honchos and doners to seek to conceal exactly what she would do, because she will be called on to make fateful decisions from day one. Actually, she’s called on NOW, because the ship of state is adrift, steered by a senile captain. If she wants to sit in the oval office, she needs policies and a path through all four of these thorny patches and must start pushing those policies pronto. Indeed, if we don’t see any change in the status quo between now and November, it’s a safe bet that she won’t stray from the primrose path littered with corpses, down which Biden has led the entire nation.
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