Joe Biden’s New Beginning: “Forward to the Past”

By Rainer Rupp.

After Biden’s supposed victory over Donald Trump last November, a victory that many tens of millions of American voters still doubt, the Democratic camarilla in Washington has issued the slogan for the senile presidential puppet’s next four years in office to “Build Back Better”.

The new leaders in Washington, however, are so blinded by their victory over Trump that it does not occur to them that Trump and his election as president in 2016 were merely a product, or a reflection, of the profound domestic and foreign policy dislocations of the U.S. empire. If the Biden administration now charges forward into the past, the problems that had accumulated to date will only intensify. For example, the fact that Biden had already promised his wealthy supporters in a July 2019 election rally (1) that nothing would change for the rich under his presidency speaks to a further intensification of social contrasts. One-time Corona consolation pledges of $1600 per family cannot prevent the desolate structural poverty in the U.S. from getting worse and the gap between rich and poor from widening.

In terms of foreign policy, the Bidens camarilla also wants to repair the damage that President Trump, as an opponent of globalization, has done to the interests of the elites of the “liberal world order.” At the same time, the return to U.S. exceptionalism has been proclaimed. This means that Washington again claims for itself to fight for democracy as a superpower for good worldwide and to create globally uncontrolled markets for exploitation by U.S. corporations. Trump had repeatedly ridiculed this American exceptionalism in public as stupid hubris. Now the quasi-religious belief in this self-image, which is deeply rooted in U.S. society, is again to serve the imperialists in Washington as legitimation to continue the endless wars or to ignite new ones around the world.

But regardless of the subjective American will, the objective realities have changed. For today, the power of the U.S. superpower is no longer sufficient for the continuation of U.S. global military adventures on its own. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that the global correlation of forces has been moving at an increasing rate to the disadvantage of the United States over the past decade. Second, the American superpower is itself standing on increasingly rotten economic, social and societal crutches. Third, it is unmistakable that centrifugal forces within the U.S. alliances have intensified enormously. Especially in the face of divergent common interests and the increased perception of national priorities in many member states of the U.S. alliances. In this context, the traditional ruling class groups that still adhere to the liberal world order model of business are increasingly being pushed back.

All of these objective developments just listed are what the new Biden administration is trying to stop and push back with its “forward into the past” march. A lofty promise to “rebuild everything better” is not enough if objectively the resources are missing, if the social consensus for it cannot be established, or if the allies cannot or do not want to take on higher burdens because the Big Brother’s policy becomes too dangerous for them.

Around the world, many people had high expectations for the new Biden administration, hoping for a reassessment of the costs and benefits of U.S. global engagement. But the faction of the liberal world order supporters has prevailed in Washington, breathing new life into their kindred spirits in Europe, who were fighting a losing battle under Trump. Biden’s election and developments since then have done nothing to change the bleak realities in both the United States and Europe. As a result, the gap between aspirations and reality, between political will and ability, is wider than ever in Washington today. Combined with arrogant U.S. hubris and the Wild West adventurism of the war hawks, this can lead to highly dangerous confrontations in a number of smoldering trouble spots on four continents.

Quite a few people around the world, in their naiveté, believed that Biden and his clique of neoliberal hawks would reinvent themselves once they were in the Oval Office. Then they would hit a reset button and pursue a different, a peaceful foreign policy. In that regard, believing in the Easter Bunny is more realistic.

After all, this is the same Joe Biden who, as a senator, advocated U.S. wars of aggression against Grenada and Panama in the 1980s, the Balkans in the 1990s, and Afghanistan in 2001. However, he had opposed George Bush Senior’s then war of aggression against Iraq in 1991, only to publicly regret that move a little later. For that, he was all the more supportive of the disastrous 2003 Gulf War against Iraq. Likewise, he strongly advocated for Obama’s bombing of Libya in 2011 and most recently Syria in August 2014 as Obama’s vice president.

Biden’s Secretary of State Blinken

Joe Biden has always been a dyed-in-the-wool neo-liberal warmonger, as has his new Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, who is highly regarded by the German ruling elites, and who has gone along with all of Obama’s and Biden’s dirty tricks. Under Obama, Blinken was deputy secretary of state for Europe and a close adviser to Biden. In 2017, during the political void during the Trump administration, Blinken and partners founded the secretive (2) consulting firm “WestExec Advisors,” which worked with various U.S. and Israeli defense contractors to profit from negotiations and contracts with the Pentagon. After Blinken recently accepted his appointment as Secretary of State, he received nearly $1.2 million (3) from his WestExec firm as a parting gift.

Victoria Fuck-the-EU Nuland also back

Along this political line, Biden also recently nominated Ms. Victoria Fuck-the-EU Nuland to be Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, effectively making her the third highest-ranking U.S. diplomat. Nuland played a particularly perfidious role in the “Maidan coup” in Ukraine in 2014, when she not only distributed cookies to the neo-fascists there, but also helped them come to power in Kiev.

Torture-averse as top intelligence official

Avril Haines, a director of Blinken’s WestExec firm in Trump’s time, has risen to become Biden’s Director of National Intelligence. As legal adviser to Obama and the U.S. State Department, and later as deputy CIA director and deputy national security adviser, she provided Obama with a legal fig leaf over the expansion of murderous drone strikes that often killed scores of civilians and, for example, turned weddings into funerals.

Avril Haines also supported the controversial nomination of waterboarding advocate Gina Haspel as director of the CIA under President Trump, even though Haspel was directly responsible for overseeing the CIA’s torture program. Moreover, Haines, through the Accountability Board she created, protected CIA employees from having to answer for their use of torture. Orwell’s 1984 sends its regards. Haines and her team edited the committee’s reports accordingly.

In her former position at the CIA, Haines was also responsible for not punishing the criminal intelligence officials who hacked into Senate staffers’ computers to delete their research on the CIA’s torture program.

Now Haines is Biden’s top boss of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies (Director of National Intelligence). In this position, she has an official seat at the Cabinet table and thus participates in all government decisions.

„If Haines couldn’t even oppose the appointment of a torturer as CIA director, how can she be expected to rein in American intelligence agencies’ abuses of power?”

asked The Guardian (4) in late November 2020.

Global warrior as “defense secretary”

Retired Army General Lloyd Austin is Biden’s “secretary of defense.” An African-American, Austin served as commander of United States Central Command (CENTCOM) and was deputy chief of staff of the United States Army and the last commanding general of U.S. forces in Iraq. Prior to his appointment as Secretary, he was head of the consulting firm Austin Strategy Group and held lucrative board positions at a number of U.S. corporations, primarily defense contractors such as Raytheon Technologies, Nucor Steel, and United Technologies.

He is a global warrior for the U.S. empire, responsible for U.S. wars of aggression in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. Now, as Secretary of State, he is charged with planning more U.S. wars of aggression in the service of U.S. Corporations. The way he described the U.S. war of aggression against Iraq (5) really says it all about the ex-general:

“What our troops achieved in Iraq over the course of nearly nine years is truly remarkable. Together with our coalition partners and core of dedicated civilians, they removed a brutal dictator and gave the Iraqi people their freedom.”

According to the “International Commission of Jurists” (ICJ) in Geneva (6), the invasion of Iraq was not in self-defense, nor was it sanctioned by the UN Security Council, and therefore it constitutes the greatest crime of all, the crime of aggressive war. That is why General Austin belongs before a tribunal for war crimes and not in a ministerial chair.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of Biden’s policy to “Build Back Better” what was supposedly destroyed by Trump. But that’s not what this looks like. It’s the old wine, and the bottles aren’t new either. In fact, Joe Biden’s policies can best be characterized as, “Forward to the past.”

Sources:

  1. https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/
  2. https://www.dict.cc/?s=geheimniskr%C3%A4merisch
  3. https://www.thecable.ng/debunking-bidens-foreign-policy-reset
  4. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/28/joe-biden-cabinet-administration-antony-blinken
  5. https://www.eastidahonews.com/2011/12/obama-welcomes-home-us-commander-in-iraq/
  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_the_Iraq_War#:~:text=The%20invasion%20of%20Iraq%20was%20neither%20in%20self-defense%20against,Jurists%20(ICJ)%20in%20Geneva.

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Image source: Stratos Brilakis  / shutterstock

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