After a Year of Biden, Why Do We
Still Have Trump’s Foreign Policy?
BY MEDEA
BENJAMIN - NICOLAS J. S. DAVIES
JANUARY 21,
2022
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/01/21/after-a-year-of-biden-why-do-we-still-have-trumps-foreign-policy/
President Biden and the Democrats were highly critical of
President Trump’s foreign policy, so it was reasonable to expect that Biden
would quickly remedy its worst impacts. As a senior member of the Obama
administration, Biden surely needed no schooling on Obama’s diplomatic
agreements with Cuba and Iran, both of which began to resolve long-standing
foreign policy problems and provided models for the renewed emphasis on
diplomacy that Biden was promising.
Tragically for America and the world, Biden has failed
to restore Obama’s progressive initiatives and has instead doubled down on
many of Trump’s most dangerous and destabilizing policies. It is especially
ironic and sad that a president who ran so stridently on being different from
Trump has been so reluctant to reverse his regressive policies. Now the
Democrats’ failure to deliver on their promises with respect to both domestic
and foreign policy is undermining their prospects in November’s midterm
election.
Here is our assessment of Biden’s handling of ten
critical foreign policy issues:
1. Prolonging the agony of the people of
Afghanistan. It is perhaps symptomatic of Biden’s
foreign policy problems that the signal achievement of his first year in office
was an initiative launched by Trump, to withdraw the United States from its
20-year war in Afghanistan. But Biden’s implementation of this policy was
tainted by the same failure to
understand Afghanistan that doomed and dogged at least three prior
administrations and the U.S.’s hostile military occupation for 20 years,
leading to the speedy restoration of the Taliban government and the televised
chaos of the U.S. withdrawal.
Now, instead of helping the Afghan people recover from
two decades of U.S.-inflicted destruction, Biden has seized $9.4 billion in
Afghan foreign currency reserves, while the people of Afghanistan suffer
through a desperate humanitarian crisis. It is hard to imagine how even Donald
Trump could be more cruel or vindictive.
2. Provoking a crisis
with Russia over Ukraine. Biden’s first year in office is ending with
a dangerous escalation of tensions at the Russia/Ukraine border, a situation
that threatens to devolve into a military conflict between the world’s two most
heavily armed nuclear states–the United States and Russia. The United States
bears much responsibility for this crisis by supporting the violent overthrow of
the elected government of Ukraine in 2014, backing NATO expansion right
up to Russia’s border, and arming and training Ukrainian
forces.
Biden’s failure to acknowledge Russia’s legitimate
security concerns has led to the present impasse, and Cold Warriors within his
administration are threatening Russia instead of proposing concrete measures to
de-escalate the situation.
3. Escalating Cold War tensions and a dangerous
arms race with China. President Trump launched a tariff war
with China that economically damaged both countries, and reignited a dangerous
Cold War and arms race with China and Russia to justify an ever-increasing U.S.
military budget.
After a decade of
unprecedented U.S. military spending and aggressive military expansion under
Bush II and Obama, the U.S. “pivot to Asia” militarily encircled China, forcing
it to invest in more robust defense forces and advanced weapons. Trump, in
turn, used China’s strengthened defenses as a pretext for further increases in
U.S. military spending, launching a new arms race that has raised the existential risk of
nuclear war to a new level.
Biden has only exacerbated these dangerous
international tensions. Alongside the risk of war, his aggressive policies
toward China have led to an ominous rise in hate crimes against Asian
Americans and created obstacles to much-needed cooperation with China to
address climate change, the pandemic, and other global problems.
4. Abandoning Obama’s nuclear agreement with
Iran. After President Obama’s sanctions against Iran
utterly failed to force it to halt its civilian nuclear program, he finally
took a progressive, diplomatic approach, which led to the JCPOA nuclear
agreement in 2015. Iran scrupulously met all its obligations under the treaty,
but Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in 2018. Trump’s withdrawal
was vigorously condemned by Democrats, including candidate Biden, and Senator
Sanders promised to
rejoin the JCPOA on his first day in office if he became president.
Instead of immediately rejoining an agreement that
worked for all parties, the Biden administration thought it could pressure Iran
to negotiate a “better deal.” Exasperated Iranians instead elected a more
conservative government and Iran moved forward on enhancing its nuclear
program.
A year later, and after eight rounds of shuttle
diplomacy in Vienna, Biden has still not rejoined the
agreement. Ending his first year in the White House with the threat of another
Middle East war is enough to give Biden an “F” in diplomacy.
5. Backing Big Pharma over a People’s
Vaccine. Biden took office as the first Covid vaccines
were being approved and rolled out across the United States and the
world. Severe inequities in
global vaccine distribution between rich and poor countries were immediately
apparent and became known as “vaccine apartheid.”
Instead of manufacturing and distributing vaccines on
a non-profit basis to tackle the pandemic as the global public health crisis
that it is, the United States and other Western countries chose to maintain
the neoliberal regime
of patents and corporate monopolies on vaccine manufacture and distribution.
The failure to open up the manufacture and distribution of vaccines to poorer
countries gave the Covid virus-free rein to spread and mutate, leading to new
global waves of infection and death from the Delta and Omicron variants.
Biden belatedly agreed to support a patent waiver for
Covid vaccines under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, but with no real
plan for a “People’s Vaccine,” Biden’s concession has made
no impact on millions of preventable deaths.
6. Ensuring catastrophic global warming at
COP26 in Glasgow. After Trump stubbornly ignored the climate crisis
for four years, environmentalists were encouraged when Biden used his first
days in office to rejoin the Paris climate accord and cancel the Keystone XL
Pipeline.
But by the time Biden got to Glasgow, he had let the
centerpiece of his own climate plan, the Clean Energy Performance Program
(CEPP), be stripped out of
the Build Back Better bill in Congress at the behest of fossil-fuel industry
sock-puppet Joe Manchin, turning the U.S. pledge of a 50% cut from 2005
emissions by 2030 into an empty promise.
Biden’s speech in Glasgow highlighted China and
Russia’s failures, neglecting to mention that the United States has higher emissions per capita than either
of them. Even as COP26 was taking place, the Biden administration infuriated
activists by putting oil and gas leases
up for auction for 730,000 acres of the American West and 80 million acres in
the Gulf of Mexico. At the one-year mark, Biden has talked the talk, but when
it comes to confronting Big Oil, he is not walking the walk, and the whole
world is paying the price.
7. Political prosecutions of Julian Assange,
Daniel Hale, and Guantanamo torture victims. Under President Biden, the
United States remains a country where the systematic killing of
civilians and other war crimes go unpunished, while whistleblowers who muster
the courage to expose these horrific crimes to the public are prosecuted and
jailed as political prisoners.
In July 2021, former drone pilot Daniel Hale was
sentenced to 45 months in prison for exposing the killing of civilians in
America’s drone wars. WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange still
languishes in Belmarsh Prison in England, after 11 years fighting extradition
to the United States for exposing U.S. war crimes.
Twenty years after it set up an illegal concentration
camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to imprison 779 mostly innocent people kidnapped
around the world, 39 prisoners remain there
in illegal, extrajudicial detention. Despite promises to close this sordid
chapter of U.S. history, the prison is still functioning and Biden is allowing
the Pentagon to actually build a new, closed courtroom at Guantanamo to more
easily keep the workings of this gulag hidden from public scrutiny.
8. Economic siege warfare against the people
of Cuba, Venezuela, and other countries. Trump unilaterally rolled back
Obama’s reforms on Cuba and recognized unelected Juan Guaidó as the “president”
of Venezuela, as the United States tightened the screws on its economy with
“maximum pressure” sanctions.
Biden has continued Trump’s failed economic siege
warfare against countries that resist U.S. imperial dictates, inflicting
endless pain on their people without seriously imperiling, let alone bringing
down, their governments. Brutal U.S. sanctions and efforts at regime change
have universally failed for
decades, serving mainly to undermine the United States’s own democratic and
human rights credentials.
Juan Guaidó is now the least popular opposition
figure in Venezuela, and genuine grassroots movements opposed to U.S.
intervention are bringing popular-democratic and socialist governments to power
across Latin America, in Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Honduras – and maybe Brazil in
2022.
9. Still supporting Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen
and its repressive ruler. Under Trump, Democrats and a
minority of Republicans in Congress gradually built a bipartisan majority that
voted to withdraw from the
Saudi-led coalition attacking Yemen and stop sending arms to
Saudi Arabia. Trump vetoed their efforts, but the Democratic election victory
in 2020 should have led to an end to the war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen.
Instead, Biden only issued an order to stop selling “offensive”
weapons to Saudi Arabia, without clearly defining that term, and went on to
okay a $650 million weapons sale. The United States still supports the Saudi
war, even as the resulting humanitarian crisis kills thousands of Yemeni
children. And despite Biden’s pledge to treat the Saudis’ cruel leader, MBS, as
a pariah, Biden refused to even sanction MBS for his barbaric murder of Washington
Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
10. Still complicit in the illegal Israeli
occupation, settlements, and war crimes. The United
States is Israel’s largest arms supplier, and Israel is the world’s largest
recipient of U.S. military aid (approximately $4 billion annually), despite its
illegal occupation of Palestine, widely condemned war crimes in
Gaza, and illegal settlement building.
U.S. military aid and arms sales to Israel clearly violate the U.S. Leahy Laws and Arms Export Control Act.
Donald Trump was flagrant in his disdain for
Palestinian rights, including transferring the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to a
property in Jerusalem that is only partly within
Israel’s internationally recognized border, a move that infuriated Palestinians
and drew international condemnation.
But nothing has changed under Biden. The U.S. position
on Israel and Palestine is as illegitimate and contradictory as ever, and the
U.S. Embassy to Israel remains on illegally occupied land. In May, Biden
supported the latest Israeli assault on Gaza, which killed 256 Palestinians,
half of them civilians, including 66 children.
Conclusion
Each part of this foreign policy fiasco costs human
lives and creates regional–even global–instability. In every case, progressive
alternative policies are readily available. The only thing lacking is political
will and independence from corrupt vested interests.
The United States has squandered unprecedented wealth,
global goodwill, and a historic position of international leadership to pursue
unattainable imperial ambitions, using military force and other forms of
violence and coercion in flagrant violation of the UN Charter and international
law.
Candidate Biden promised to restore America’s position
of global leadership but has instead doubled down on the policies through
which the United States lost that position in the first place, under a
succession of Republican and Democratic administrations. Trump was only the
latest iteration in America’s race to the bottom.
Biden has wasted a vital year doubling down on Trump’s
failed policies. In the coming year, we hope that the public will remind Biden
of its deep-seated aversion to war and that he will respond—albeit
reluctantly—by adopting more dovish and rational ways.
Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for
Peace, and author of several books, including Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the
US-Saudi Connection. Nicolas J. S. Davies is
a writer for Consortium News and a researcher with CODEPINK, and the author
of Blood On Our Hands: the American
Invasion and Destruction of Iraq
