Biden In Review: Foreign Policy

Part 1

(Part one will deal with Biden and his foreign policy prior to his inauguration)

In a previous series I tried to trace the rise of the neocon movement and how it usurped the foreign policy of President Kennedy. As I said there, this movement became so powerful that not only did it dominate the Republican party, but for all intents and purposes, it took over the Democratic party.

It is not easy to trace how precisely that was done. One could say that it originated incrementally with National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and his service under President Carter. After all, it now looks to any objective person that the Brzezinski choice to support the Shah of Iran until the bitter end was a colossal error. And when that is coupled with the Brzezinski/Carter decision to support the mujahideen against the Russians in their invasion of Afghanistan--well, what can one say about historic misjudgments? Except maybe: Osama Bin Laden?

But Jimmy Carter was not really a classic Cold Warrior in the Nixon/Kissinger mode. And, in fact, he resisted the overtures of the man who may have originated the Neocon movement, that is, Paul Nitze. Nitze was almost pathological about the Russian threat. And when Carter would not go along with the program, Nitze was one of the originators of the powerful Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) that opposed him. Carter’s refusal to let them become inside advisors embittered them and turned the group—which included Eugene Rostow and Richard Pipes-- into outsider Cassandras, warning of the impending Soviet threat that Carter was ignoring.

What angered Nitze most about Carter’s administration was the appointment of Paul Warnke as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. (Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis, p.181) Warnke firmly believed in the concept of arms control. In fact, he thought that the arms race was rather pointless. He wrote a famous essay describing that idea for Foreign Policy magazine called “Apes on a Treadmill.” In front of the senate, Nitze strongly opposed this appointment. (Sanders, p. 207) Carter got Warnke through, but it was a bloody fight and the leader opposing Warnke on the floor was Democratic senator Henry Jackson, a neocon in foreign policy. He can be included as one of the stepping stones within the Democratic party on its way to neoconservatism. The problem for Carter was this:

Underlying the Carter predicament is a significant rightward shift of intellectual and political power on the issue of cooperation with the Soviet Union. It is respectable again to be hardline. (Sanders, p. 227)

But, agreeing with Jeffrey Sachs, I think the point of no return for the Democrats came during the Clinton administration, specifically with the 1997 appointment of Madeleine Albright as Secretary of State. Prior to that Albright was a staff member of the NSC under Brzezinski, was on the faculty at Georgetown, advised Democratic candidates for the presidency and helped assemble Clinton’s National Security Council. Clinton rewarded her by giving her the UN ambassador position. And, according to more than one source, it was Hillary Clinton who pushed her husband into appointing Albright as Secretary of State.

Recall, this was well after the fall of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin had led Russia into an economic collapse. But yet Albright insisted on not just maintaining NATO, but expanding it. NATO had been created to stop an attack from the USSR through East Germany. Now there was no East Germany and no USSR. So what was the point of keeping NATO? Well, it was Albright’s idea not to disband NATO but to enlarge it! This was after former Secretary of State James Baker told Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev that no such thing would happen. (Current Affairs, July 17, 2024)

Perhaps because of his wife’s influence on him, Bill Clinton went along with this scheme. And the first three countries recruited were Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Albright’s former boss, Brzezinski, cheered it on. But the father of containment policy, George Kennan thought it was both reckless and dangerous. This policy continued under Bush II, where Victoria Nuland—who would become the Lady MacBeth of Ukraine—was first brought into the scheme. Now the object was to weaken Russia by engaging both Georgia and Ukraine.

Joe Biden began his Washington career as an anti-Nixon, anti-Vietnam senator. In the seventies, when he was junior senator from Delaware, these were fairly popular viewpoints for a Democrat to take. And at that time, and a bit beyond, Biden appeared to be a strong liberal voice in the senate, comparable to say Gary Hart or Walter Mondale. For example Biden opposed the Strategic Defense Initiative proposed by Ronald Reagan.

But the Reagan regime was elected and re-elected. And many of the CPD neocons were enlisted to serve under him, some from Henry Jackson’s office: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Abrams. There is little doubt that eight years of Reagan did much to pull the political spectrum to the right. And this seems to have influenced the Clinton administration, e.g. the break-up of Yugoslavia and Clinton’s 78 days of NATO bombing of Belgrade took place. Not to mention the prior Clinton bombing campaigns in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The bombing of Belgrade was the first time NATO had done so without UN approval. Biden was all on board for this, in fact he did not think Clinton was doing enough. He once said, “I’m the first guy to call for airstrikes in Bosnia and wrote that lift-and-strike policy.” (Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept, 4/27/21)

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden voted for the war resolution against Iraq in 2002. (As a point of comparison, Bernie Sanders was strongly opposed.) Biden arranged to have White House representatives appear before the senate and they recited the Bush/Cheney talking points about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. (Vox, 10/15/19, story by Tara Golshan and Alex Ward) In fact, at an August hearing Biden said,

In my judgment, President Bush is right to be concerned about Saddam Hussein’s relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and the possibility that he may use them or share them with terrorists. These weapons must be dislodged from Saddam Hussein, or Saddam Hussein must be dislodged from power. (Ibid)

Some complained about the few anti-war voices included in this senate debate. Biden voted for the final resolution, giving broad power for George W. Bush to go to war. But, to be fair, so did 29 other Democratic senators, including Hillary Clinton. In fact, Biden said, “I do not believe it is a rush to war but a march to peace and security.” (ibid). And when the truth came out in 2004, that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, Biden said, “I never believed they had weapons of mass destruction.” As some have said, was he lying back then or was he lying later? (ibid)

Biden was also favorably excited about the George W. Bush invasion of Afghanistan. Again, he voted for the war resolution in a 98-0 vote. The USA started bombing the country and then invaded. In 2002 he called for a long-term international security force which would “shoot and kill people.” (Murtaza Hussian, The Intercept, 4/27/21):

If that was not enough, he continued with:

I’m talking about people who are a bunch of badasses who will come in here with guns and understand that they don’t have to check with anybody before they return fire. (ibid) On October 24, 2001, Biden told congress, “This president, in my view, so far has made the right choices. He has done the right things. He is pursuing the right way.”

We all know that Biden saw the error of his ways and decided to withdraw American troops from that theater. But again, Biden tried to cover his past error by saying on CBS Sunday Morning , “I’ve been against that war in Afghanistan from the very beginning.” (12/12/21) Again, was he lying back then or in 2021?

And then there was Biden’s role in Ukraine as Vice-President under Obama. Obama clearly wanted Biden to be his front man in Ukraine. In fact, Biden made his first visit there in July of 2009. At that time, he talked about having a substantive relationship with Russia that would not hurt, but actually benefit Ukraine. (Kyiv Post, 11/13/20, story by Brian Bonner)

To be mild, that is not how it played out. In late 2013, the elected leader of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, declared he would not sign onto a European Union economic deal. Instead he would pursue a better one from Moscow,. This started up demonstrations in Kiev’s Independence Square, the Maidan. As the late Robert Parry wrote, the Obama administration—with Biden heavily involved-- supported the anti-Yanukovych rioters. Victoria Nuland—the American diplomat on the scene-- actually handed out cookies to the demonstrators in support of their cause.

In fact, as Parry also noted, Nuland was already planning on a replacement government during the rioting. In a phone call she said “Yats is the guy”, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk. On this phone call she actually said about the European Union’s efforts, “Fuck the EU”. Meaning it was her and the USA who was going to run this uprising.

Nuland also was in direct contact with Biden’s office. And she arranged the first of several visits of the vice-president to Kiev. (BBC News 2/7/14) Biden later talked about how often he was on the phone to Kiev. Jokingly, he said he talked to them more than he did his wife. But not only was Nuland choosing who was in, she was also choosing who was out. For example, she did not want Vitaly Klitschko in at that time, the very popular former heavyweight boxer. So far from a spontaneous uprising, this was being controlled by the Americans on the scene, with Biden as a participant in it. And Nuland later said that America had spent five billion up until 2014 in getting the result they wanted, namely the overthrow of Yanukovych.

As Parry exposed in a splendid series of articles, the problem with what Biden and Nuland did was this: they were working with a very strong neo Nazi faction in Ukraine. That aspect stemmed from the cooperation of former Ukraine leaders Stepan Bandera and Mykola Lebed with the Germans during World War 2. This included two huge atrocities, one against the Jews and one against the Poles. The combined deaths in these two incidents is estimated at about 70,000. (Consortium News, 2/13/17, story by James DiEugenio)

As Parry commented, there was little doubt about who these neo Nazis were because some of them wore engraved swastikas on their helmets e.g. groups like Svoboda and Right Sektor. It was almost impossible to avoid the infamous Azov Batallion. As Parry also pointed out, Carl Gershman—president of the National Endowment for Democracy—wrote in the Washington Post that Ukraine was “an important interim step toward toppling Putin”. (9/26/13). But by siding with these groups, Nuland unleashed a terrible anti-Russian vitriol in the Donbas and Crimea.

Parry noted that as late as February of 2015, Russia had offered an agreement called Minsk 2. This would have introduced a federalized system and given Donbas more autonomy. Nuland’s Yatsenyuk deep sixed that by asking that ethnic Russians in the Donbas first surrender. (Consortium News, 7/13 /15). Biden blamed Obama for not taking President Putin seriously enough over the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas. (Newsweek, 10/8/24, story by Kaitlin Lewis)

About Biden and Operation Timber Sycamore, Obama’s CIA program to overthrow the government of Syria, all one needs to know is the following. Jake Sullivan emailed Secretary of state Hillary Clinton: “AQ is on our side in Syria.” AQ stood for Al Qaeda. Biden made Sullivan his National Security Advisor.

(In Part 2 we will see how these characteristics and tendencies carried over into Biden’s foreign policy as president.)