Another Look At Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy Team
DISPATCHES FROM MOON OF ALABAMA, BY "B"
This article is part of an ongoing series of dispatches from Moon of Alabama
The choices the incoming president Joe Biden has made so far are not great at all. The people he so far selected are staunch interventionists who will want to continue the wars they have started during their previous time in office.
Tony Blinken will become Secretary of State. (It was probably thought to be too hard to get Senate confirmation for the similar bad Susan Rice.) In 2013 the Washington Post described his high flying pedigree:
Blinken is deputy national security adviser to President Obama, who has also invoked the Holocaust as his administration wrestles, often painfully, with how to respond to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons. One of the government’s key players in drafting Syria policy, the 51-year-old Blinken has Clinton administration credentials and deep ties to Vice President Biden and the foreign policy and national security establishment in Washington. He has drawn attention in Situation Room photos, including the iconic one during the May 2011 raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound, for his stylishly wavy salt-and-pepper hair. But what sets him apart from the other intellectual powerhouses in the inner sanctum is a life story that reads like a Jewish high-society screenplay that the onetime aspiring film producer may have once dreamed of making. There’s his father, a giant in venture capital; his mother, the arts patron; and his stepfather, who survived the Holocaust to become of one of the most influential lawyers on the global stage. It is a bildungsroman for young Blinken — playing in a Parisian jazz band, debating politics with statesmen — with a supporting cast of characters that includes, among others, Leonard Bernstein, John Lennon, Mark Rothko, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Abel Ferrara and Christo.
The man is a war mongering psycho:
Blinken surprised some in the Situation Room by breaking with Biden to support military action in Libya, administration officials said, and he advocated for American action in Syria after Obama’s reelection. These sources said that Blinken was less enthusiastic than Biden about Obama’s decision to seek congressional approval for a strike in Syria, but is now — perhaps out of necessity — onboard and a backer of diplomatic negotiations with Russia. While less of an ideologue than Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (a job for which he was considered), he not surprisingly shares her belief that global powers such as the United States have a “responsibility to protect” against atrocities.
He has since shown no remorse about those foreign policy failures:
Blinken maintains that the failure of U.S. policy in Syria was that our government did not employ enough force. He stands by the false argument that Biden’s vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq was a “vote for tough diplomacy.” He was reportedly in favor of the Libyan intervention, which Biden opposed, and he was initially a defender and advocate for U.S. support for the Saudi coalition war on Yemen. In short, Blinken has agreed with some of the biggest foreign policy mistakes that Biden and Obama made, and he has tended to be more of an interventionist than both of them.
Jake Sullivan will become National Security Advisor. He is a Hillary Clinton figure:
If you can’t quite place Jake Sullivan, he’s was a long-serving aide to Hillary Clinton, starting with her 2008 race against Barack Obama, then serving as her deputy chief of staff and director of the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning when Clinton was Obama’s secretary of state. (...) In 2016, during her failed presidential campaign, Sullivan once again teamed up with Clinton, and he was widely expected to have been named to serve as her national security adviser or even secretary of state had she won.
Since 2016, and since the creation of NSA, Sullivan has emerged as a kind of foreign policy scold, gently — and sometimes not so gently — criticizing those who reflexively oppose American intervention abroad and who disparage the idea of American “exceptionalism.” Indeed, in an article in the January-February issue of The Atlantic, “What Donald Trump and Dick Cheney Got Wrong About America,” Sullivan explicitly says that he’s intent on “rescuing the idea of American exceptionalism” and presents the “case for a new American exceptionalism".
Sullivan send classified documents to Hillary Clinton's private email server. He wrote to her that Al Qaida is "on our side in Syria." He also hyped fake Trump-Russia collusion allegations.
It is yet unknown who will become Secretary of Defense. Michèle Flournoy is the most named option but there is some opposition to her nomination:
[B]ackers of Michèle Flournoy, his likely pick for defense secretary, are trying to head off a last-minute push by some left-leaning Democrats trying to derail her selection, with many progressives seeing her nomination as a continuation of what critics refer to as America’s “forever wars.”
I expect that the progressive will lose the fight and that either Flournoy or some other hawkish figure will get that weapon lobbyist position.
Progressives also lost on the Treasury position. Biden's nomination for that is Janet Yellen who is known to be an inflation hawk. She is unlikely to support large spending on progressive priorities.
As usual with a Democratic election win the people who brought the decisive votes and engagement, those who argue for more socialist and peaceful policies, will be cut off from the levers of power.
In three years they will again be called upon to fall for another bait and switch.
Posted by b on November 24, 2020 at 16:32 UTC | Permalink
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"b" is Moon of Alabama's founding (and chief) editor. This site's purpose is to discuss politics, economics, philosophy and blogger Billmon's Whiskey Bar writings. Moon Of Alabama was opened as an independent, open forum for members of the Whiskey Bar community. Bernhard )"b") started and still runs the site. Once in a while you will also find posts and art from regular commentators. You can reach the current administrator of this site by emailing Bernhard at MoonofA@aol.com.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
There are so many creatures that the swamp holds. Don't be surprised by what comes next.
Posted by: Sakineh Bagoom | Nov 24 2020 16:37 utc | 1
Posted by: jo6pac | Nov 24 2020 16:41 utc | 2
@jo6pac | Nov 24 2020 16:41 utc | 2
More like 2nd coming of Hillary, unless the fraud is exposed.
Posted by: Norwegian | Nov 24 2020 16:48 utc | 3
The entire project for Democrats in this election cycle was to get rid of Trump. There was never any vision for the future or a presentation of policy to gain voters. It was all "Trump is an existential threat and the only priority is to defeat him at the polls." Bernie Sanders made this all quite clear as he again led his legion of lemmings off a cliff and into an ocean of Neoliberal/neoconservative Forever Empire.
But hey, it's all worth it to get rid of The Man With The Golden Toilet.
Meanwhile, yeah, it's back to future with more of the same as far as the eye can see. Which, with an economy in shambles, and a populace with a death wish, might not be as long as one thinks.
Posted by: gottlieb | Nov 24 2020 16:54 utc | 4
You would think by now people would get tired of the Hollywood hyped trailers which the more they push them at you the bigger dog of a movie you're going to get. I guess the old saying is true, "no one ever went broke overestimating the stupidity of the public." Maybe we are stuck in "Ground Hog Day".
Posted by: Tobi | Nov 24 2020 17:00 utc | 5
At the very least “gravitas” will have been restored to its venerable and “sacred” institution. And a good portion of the american population can heave a huge sigh of relief, and go about their business of profound ritualistic conformity.
Gravitas restored by an aging old man, potentially on the verge of dementia, which is a sad condition by any measure. A collection of Human beings about as bereft of solutions of philosophy of spiritual comprehension as possible, at this point in human history. We all have an enormous amount to look forward to!
Posted by: Geoff | Nov 24 2020 17:03 utc | 6
It's a veritable who's who of the same criminals who instigated and executed the covert (and sometimes overt) military and economic aggressions across several regions of the globe, to include North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.
Posted by: Josh | Nov 24 2020 17:08 utc | 7
Furthermore,
https://journal-neo.org/2020/11/23/the-murky-foreign-actors-behind-us-election-fraud/
The same faction tried to pull the exact same nonsense last time, but some rather serious elements of the intelligence, military, and security services elected to not allow it (via real time monitoring and enforcement).
Posted by: Josh | Nov 24 2020 17:11 utc | 8