Biden in Review: Foreign Policy Pt. 2

As I tried to show in the previous column about Biden’s foreign policy, the Democratic party did not successfully resist the siren song of neoconservatism. In fact, one can say that they succumbed to it. For instance, as many have written, President Obama was convinced by Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power and Susan Rice to use NATO to bomb Libya and get rid of Gaddafi. This turned out to be a debacle in more than one way. (Salon, article by Ben Norton, 3/2/16)

Jake Sullivan, who was at State at the time, championed Clinton’s Libya campaign, then worked on her 2016 presidential campaign. Sullivan then became President Biden’s National Security Advisor. (Hollie McKay article, 11/24/20, Fox News.). I have no problem in saying that Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was a neocon. Therefore, the choice of Sullivan tells us much about what Biden had become as both Vice-President and then President in foreign policy.

In fact, as Katrina Vanden Heuvel wrote in Responsible Statecraft, Biden had pretty much chosen a war party in foreign policy by 2023. Victoria Nuland, who supervised American policy in Ukraine, became the number two official at State. The capper was when Biden named Elliot Abrams to his Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. (Article dated 9/4/23) Abrams came out of Senator Henry Jackson’s office in the senate, which means he was then a Democratic neocon. Like many of Jackson’s employees he joined up with the Reagan administration. Many have argued that Abrams helped cover up the El Mozote Massacre under Reagan. He pleaded guilty to committing perjury over the Iran/Contra scandal.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken was a champion of another disaster, namely the Iraq War. (ibid) One would have thought that anyone who favored that debacle would be automatically ignored afterwards. Such was not the case with Blinken. And what made that choice palatable was, of course, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. Biden, Blinken and Sullivan all saw this as something akin to the Nazi invasion of the Sudetenland. Somehow, if Putin/Hitler was not stopped he would move on to Poland and elsewhere. The implication being if he was not stood up to here, this would precipitate World War III.

To say that this was a skewed view is something of an understatement. It ignores the neo-Nazi war in Donbas with a reported 12,000 casualties. And it minimizes Putin’s offering of two truces, namely Minsk I and Minsk II. It also discounts the visit by Boris Johnson to stop Ukraine from signing another truce, this time in Istanbul. (The European Conservative, article by Tamas Orban, 11/27/23) But further, in an interview former chancellor Angela Merkel did with the German paper Die Zeit, she admitted that the negotiations over the Minsk agreements were a ruse to give Ukraine time to arm itself. (12/7/22).

And even though this is a war that Ukraine cannot win, Biden ultimately gave permission to President Volodymr Zelenskyy to fire long range missiles from Ukraine into Russia proper. (New York Times, 11/17/24). This is the last step by Biden in what can only be called a Cold War cauldron. The Government Accountability Office has stated that the USA has given Ukraine a total of 174 billion in assistance. (Report of 9/4/2024).

No one knows how many casualties are due to this war, but conservative and reliable assessments, e.g. former military analyst Scott Ritter, place the number at about a half million--most of them Ukrainians. Most are from Ukraine because Russia has fought a sophisticated kind of modern war, using computer censor detection followed by drone attacks targeting Ukraine’s power grid and anti-aircraft system. This has forced about 10 million Ukrianians to leave the region. All in all, this has been a disaster for the people living in the area, and a black eye for American foreign policy--in keeping with the policies of Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright. Just recall, this would all likely have been avoided if America had abandoned its ambition to extend NATO to the Russian border. This was part and parcel of the neocon mantra, adapted by Albright, centered around American Exceptionalism.

But if Ukraine has turned out to be an endless debacle, what does one call the Biden/Blinken/Sullivan policy in Gaza? Well, as we all know, many have called what the Israelis are doing there a genocide. Again, no one knows how many casualties there have been in that conflict--but conservative estimates place the number at well over 150,000, with 90 per cent of the Gaza population displaced. (AP News, 1/4/25; 1/9/2025) Women and children make up more than half the casualty number. As a lot of us know many of the Israeli targets consist of populated areas, including schools and hospitals e.g. Kamal Adwan Hospital.

According to journalist Abby Martin, in addition to that targeting policy, the Israelis have attempted to either ration or cut off food, water and electricity in the areas they have occupied. They have also, in large part, cut off humanitarian aid to the injured and starving. In fact in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on this subject, that body quoted Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu as saying—before the Israeli attack-- there are no innocent civilians in Gaza; the Israeli defense minister was quoted by the court as saying the residents in Gaza were human animals and therefore, Israel needed to act accordingly. Amnesty International, and other human rights groups, hailed the ICJ ruling as upholding international law. (See article at their web site.). Further, Israel has targeted health professionals, killing or detaining over 1200 of them, seventy of whom have died in prisons. (Huffington Post, 1/9/25, article by Sanjama Karanth)

But yet, since the beginning of the Israeli invasion, Biden has sent almost 18 billion in military aid to Israel. And that figure does not include a most recent request to congress for 8 billion more. (See AP story by Matt Lee posted at PBS, 1/4/2025) What is remarkable about this last request is that it included medium range air to air missiles, 155 mm long range artillery shells, Hellfire missiles and 500 pound bombs. When perusing that list, one may ask the obvious: what does all that advanced weaponry have to do with hunting down Hamas in Gaza? In fact, during this entire siege of Gaza, Biden only threatened to limit aid for the planned invasion of the city of Rafah in the early summer of 2024. In October of 2024, Biden authorized a letter to the Israeli Defense Minister threatening to cut off aid on a different pretext: limiting humanitarian help to the residents of Gaza. (BBC story of 10/16/24 by Jeremy Bowen) To put it mildly, neither of these threats ended up being enacted. (Article by Sophie Hurwitz, in Mother Jones, 12/13/24; article by Shannon Crawford, 5/28/24, ABC News)

Let us make one thing clear: Joe Biden has always been an unmitigated supporter of Israel. He once said on the floor of the senate that if Israel did not exist, it would have to be invented. In this author’s opinion, that comes pretty close to falling under the rubric of Zionism. When the first Palestinian American woman in congress, Rashida Tlaib, asked Biden what he was going to do about the pitiful bombing of Gaza he replied with: Israel has the right to defend itself. (BBC, story of 11/7/23, by Sam Cabral and Nadine Yousif)

This self-defense motif refers to the attack by Hamas against Israel on October 7, 2023. It reportedly killed 1200, and Hamas took about 250 hostages. Hamas declared that this assault was a reaction to Israeli efforts to take over the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Hamas also wanted the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israel, and said that, by the end of that year, Israeli soldiers had killed at least 505 Palestinians, the worst year since the UN began keeping records in 2005. (BBC News, story of 10/21/24) Reportedly, both sides are now negotiating over a truce. I cannot help but wonder if the impending inauguration of Donald Trump has something to do with that late in the day attempt. (AP News, article by Josef Federamn and Samy Magody, of 1/6/2025)

What about the Biden policy in Cuba? I think we all recall Barack Obama’s visit to that island and him sitting in the stands with Raul Castro watching a baseball game. I don’t recall a similar event with Biden. I also recall Senator Marco Rubio assailing Obama for attempting a reconciliation with Cuba without Cuba giving in on preconditions. Well, Biden took his cue from Rubio, not Obama. And in a May 2022 White House directive, Biden announced a policy that provided the Cuban people with “additional tools to pursue life free from Cuban government oppression and to seek greater economic opportunities.” (See also Politico, article by Eric Bazail Eimil, 8/13/24)

What about China? China owns about 860 billion in US debt, second behind Japan. Yet Biden has strongly contested China on economic terms; in fact he has more or less continued the Donald Trump economic warfare with China. But Biden has coupled this with an additional militancy about Taiwan. He even allowed congresswoman Nancy Pelosi to visit there in 2022. This outraged China to the point that it launched missiles over the island. (7/5/24 article by Laura Sesma, Global Affairs and Strategic Studies)

What does it say about an administration’s foreign policy when it trumpets as an achievement the overthrow of a secular leader in Syria by an Islamic fundamentalist group, an outgrowth of Al Qaeda? Yet that is what this administration has done. In fact Antony Blinken admitted that the White House was in direct contact with the fundamentalists. Yet HTS has been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department since 2018. And that designation is supposed to carry severe sanctions, up to and including a ban on any kind of material support. (AP Story by Matt Lee, 12/14/24) The leader of HTS, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, was once labeled as one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists. CNN reported that he was well known for abducting, torturing and slaughtering racial and religious minorities. In fact, immediately after Assad left, there was a scramble in Washington to remove both HTS and Jolani from the terrorist list. Which is hard to justify, since Jolani once fought for ISIS and served as a deputy to its founder. He was sent to Syria by ISIS to found a protest movement against Assad, the secularist leader. Yet this is the man who England’s Daily Telegraph suggests will construct a new Syria respectful of minority rights. (Consortium News, article by Alan MacLeod, 12/17/24)

The Biden administration says that their policies in Ukraine and the Middle East weakened Russia and Iran, thus allowing HTS to dethrone Assad in Syria. Can one imagine the bankruptcy that allows such a declaration? A toll of well over half a million casualties; that justifies bringing to power a group that has already launched Sharia patrols, dismissed female judges, and now requires the hijab as compulsory uniform in Syrian state schools? (Consortium News, article by Craig Murray, 1/8/25). And make no mistake, the overthrow of Assad stems back to the CIA operation codenamed Timber Sycamore. And there is evidence that the fundamentalists started the Syrian civil war the year before that project began, hoping that their actions would attract Agency and American backing. (See article by Kit Klarenberg, 12/01/24, “Syrian Dirty War’s Secret Origins”.)

But its even worse than that. Because Israel is now building several military bases in the occupied Syrian territories. While it constructs artillery installations around dams they control. (Op. cit.,Murray)

Joe Biden’s foreign policy follows a line going back to Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton. It stands in direct contrast to John F. Kennedy, especially his famous Peace Speech. Kennedy once said that you should not corner a nuclear power into a choice between humiliation and war. But as editor Joe Lauria said recently, this is what the extension of Albright’s policy for expanding NATO did with Russia. (Consortium News, 1/8/25, interview with Rachel Blevins.). As Lauria also added, that article he wrote on Kennedy was so popular that many tried to share it, but Facebook would not let it be shared. He appealed the decision but Facebook never got back to him.

What is the other negative achievement of the Albright/Clinton/Biden foreign policy? The ascension of BRICS. As Kennedy also once said, America should not be on the wrong side of history.