I'm Sorry, Biden's *WHAT* Foreign Policy??
Listen to a reading of this article:
The New York Times, which consistently supports every American war, has published an op-ed by a neoconservative think tanker titled "Biden’s Cautious Foreign Policy Imperils Us".
This would be Joseph Biden, the president of the United States who has been consistently vowing to go to war with the People's Republic of China if it attacks Taiwan, and whose administration has been pouring billions of dollars into a world-threatening proxy war in Ukraine which it knowingly provoked and from which it has no exit strategy. With this administration's acceleration toward global conflict on two different fronts, one could easily argue that Biden actually has the least cautious foreign policy of any president in history.
"In the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s recent nuclear threat and call-up of reservists, it was reassuring for the leader of the free world to be unflinching," writes the article's author Kori Schake, who then adds, "Rhetoric aside, the administration has signaled in numerous other ways that Putin’s threats have constrained support for Ukraine."
As though the possibility of nuclear war should not constrain US proxy warfare in that country. As though the crazy thing is not the US government's insane nuclear brinkmanship with Russia, but its reluctance to go further.
Schake criticizes the fact that while Biden has been saying a PRC attack on Taiwan would mean a direct US hot war with China, the US military would need far more funding and far greater expansion to be able to win such a war, so it should definitely do those things instead of simply not rushing into World War Three.
"But worse are the real gaps in capability that call into question whether the United States could indeed defend Taiwan," Schake writes. "The ships, troop numbers, planes and missile defenses in the Pacific are a poor match for China’s capability. The director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, has assessed that the threat to Taiwan between now and 2030 is 'acute,' yet the defense budget is not geared to providing improved capabilities until the mid-2030s. More broadly, the Biden administration isn’t funding an American military that can adequately carry out our defense commitments, a dangerous posture for a great power. The Democratic-led Congress added $29 billion last year and $45 billion this year to the Department of Defense budget request, a measure of just how inadequate the Biden budget is."
As Shchake discusses the urgent need to explode the US military budget in order to defend Taiwan, The New York Times neglects to inform us that Schake's employer, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has been caught accepting a small fortune from Taiwan's de facto embassy while churning out materials urging the US government to go to greater lengths to arm Taiwan. In a 2013 article titled "The Secret Foreign Donor Behind the American Enterprise Institute," The Nation's Eli Clifton reports that, thanks to a filing error by AEI, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office was found to have been one of the think tank's top donors in 2009. Had that filing error not been made, we never would have learned this important information about AEI's glaring conflict of interest in its Taiwan commentary.
AEI is one of the most prominent neoconservative think tanks in the United States, with extensive ties to Bush-era neocons like John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, and the Kristol and Kagan families, and has played a very active role in pushing for more war and militarism in US foreign policy. Dick Cheney sits on its board of trustees, and Mike Pompeo celebrated his one year anniversary as CIA director there.
Schake herself is as intimately interwoven with the military-industrial complex as anyone can possibly be without actually being a literal Raytheon munition. Her resume is a perfect illustration of the life of a revolving door swamp monster, from a stint at the Pentagon, to the university circuit, to the National Security Council, to the US Military Academy, to the State Department, to the McCain-Palin presidential campaign, to the Hoover Institution, to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, to her current gig as director of foreign and defense policy studies at AEI. Her entire career is the story of a woman doing everything she can to help get more people killed in military mass slaughter, and being rewarded with wealth and prestige for doing so.
And now here she is being granted space in The New York Times, a news media outlet of unrivaled influence where enemies of US militarism and imperialism are consistently denied a platform, to tell us all that the Biden administration is endangering us not with its insanely reckless hawkishness, but by being too "cautious".
One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being trained to freak out all the time about Russian propaganda, which barely exists in the west, even as we are hammered every day with extreme aggression by the immensely influential propaganda of the US-centralized empire. You know you are living in a profoundly sick society when the world's most influential newspaper runs propaganda for World War Three while voices pushing for truth, transparency and peace are marginalized, silenced, shunned, and imprisoned.
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I just read in another MSM rag (The Guardian) that NASA just slammed a rocket into some asteroid to test the potential for deflecting the path of threats to earth from rogue heavenly bodies. It was accompanied by celebratory language by a spokesperson who opined that “all earthlings should sleep better.” This mentality — that we’re saved by exploding hi-tech crap — is exactly why we find ourselves stewing in this rubbish soup. We are such bloody babies, unable to cope with the reality that trying to protect ourselves from a low-probability event, while unable to do anything about the high-probability demise of the biosphere is the height of diversion denial. As is the idea that a nuclear war, any war for that matter, is "winnable."
Biden’s foreign policy can be summarized in one word: empire.
The same can be said for the NYT. The only question is how to protect and expand said empire.
As to how not escalating the empire's wars of aggression imperils America, as if Iran has readied its vast fleet of war canoes, ready to paddle out of the Straits of Hormuz and make landing on the Manhattan docks at the first sign of weakness, remains unsaid.