U.S. foreign policy under Biden is essentially one of reviving the Cold War that existed with the Soviet Union to the current period against China and Russia.
Wouldn’t it be fun if delegates to the United Nations General Assembly had buttons at their seats to gauge audience reaction in real-time to speeches delivered by world leaders from the podium? Dare we say, the address by U.S. President Joe Biden this week would have engendered a lot of digital groaning and guffawing at his rank hypocrisy.
Biden made an unctuous appeal for global diplomacy and for nations “to work together as never before” to solve a host of urgent challenges including adverse climate change and pandemic disease. He even had the double-think temerity to condemn those abusing the UN Charter by “trampling and twisting [it] in the pursuit of naked political power”.
In seven decades since the UN was formed in 1945, no other nation has been so often at war than the United States under the guise of various pretexts, allegedly from fighting communism to fighting terrorism, to defending democracy to defending human rights. Regardless of these hollow self-appointed claims, the fact is no other nation has violated the UN Charter as habitually or as brazenly as the US with wars and aggressions in every decade since 1945. Tragically, the very purpose of the UN to prevent a repeat of Second World War Nazi aggression has been thwarted systematically by the U.S.
President Biden held forth from the podium, declaring: “I stand here today, the first time in 20 years the United States is not at war. We’ve turned the page.”
Well, alleluia!
Biden went on, “we close this period of relentless war, we’re opening a new era of relentless diplomacy.”
He was referring to the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan last month. So just like that, an ignominious defeat and shambolic retreat by the American military and its NATO allies from the Central Asian country is presented as somehow virtuously leading to a new era of enlightened diplomacy.
For at least the past two decades, the U.S. has been on a rampage of criminal wars and military interventions, not only in Afghanistan but also in former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and several other African nations. Some of these military operations continue as in U.S. airstrikes on Syria, Iraq, and Somalia. So what is Biden talking about when he says “an era of relentless war is over”? It still very much persists.
Biden said that “U.S. military power must be our tool of last resort”. He claimed that Washington is “not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs.”
The American president has the gall to utter such cynical and disingenuous words only days after he unveiled a new military alliance with the United Kingdom and Australia – known as AUKUS – which is aimed at confronting China. Australia is to be armed with nuclear-powered submarines to join U.S. and British warships already targeting China.
Biden’s rosy rhetoric about diplomacy is rendered meaningless by his administration’s ramping up of hostility towards China. Under Biden, the U.S. has dispatched more warships to the South China Sea in the name of “freedom of navigation”. Washington is also inflaming tensions over Taiwan by arming and encouraging the island territory to declare independence from Beijing’s sovereign authority.
On Friday – two days after his UN address ostensibly extolling diplomacy – President Biden convened a summit of leaders from the Quad nations at the White House. They include Australia, India and Japan. As with the AUKUS alliance, the U.S.-led Quad has appointed itself the mission of “confronting China”.
U.S. foreign policy under Biden is a continuation of the policies under his predecessors Trump, Obama, and so on. The policy is essentially one of reviving the Cold War that existed with the Soviet Union to the current period against China and Russia.
China and Russia have both repeatedly denounced the U.S. and its Western allies for perpetuating Cold War mentality in international relations. That polarizing dichotomy is essential for justifying American militarism and imperialistic conduct. The U.S. and its NATO subordinates need to have enemies in order to sustain their inordinate and obscene militarism. Biden talks about the “war era” being over as the United States spends around $778 billion a year on its military forces. It is ludicrous to talk about diplomacy and cooperation in the context of such gargantuan militarism.
The proof is that while the U.S. has retreated from Afghanistan, it is evidently preparing for its next war against “great power rivals” designated as China and Russia. Why else is Washington forming exclusionary military blocs like AUKUS and the Quad whose objective is openly to isolate and contain China? That is aggression.
If Biden had any sincerity about his appeal for global diplomacy he would be convening a summit with the main powers, particularly the leaders of the nuclear powers. Why isn’t Biden sitting down with the leaders of Russia, China, and other members of the UN Security Council to cooperate on global security? Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed such a forum over a year ago. It has been ignored.
Biden has held one summit with Putin since he took the White House. That summit in Geneva in June lasted for a couple of hours. There’s been little in the way of follow-up negotiations. President Biden has yet to have a face-to-face summit with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. So far, they have had two phone calls in nine months. Is this supposed to be what Biden means by “an era of relentless diplomacy”?
As with past U.S. presidents in their verbose addresses to the UN, the speeches are an insult to common intelligence. They are barefaced lies and saturated with hypocritical virtue-signaling. American wars and aggression continue unabated. The irrational hostility that Washington and its vassals continually project towards Moscow and Beijing is driving the world to war, this time potentially a nuclear conflagration.
When an American president scales back massive US militarism, ends the illegal occupation of several countries, ends air strikes on foreign countries, ends ruinous sanctions against other nations, ends irrational and unsubstantiated antagonism towards other nations, and begins to call for unconditional and open dialogue among equals based on mutual respect and the UN Charter, then maybe we might give some credence to appeals for diplomacy. Until then, it is all just duplicitous posturing aimed at concealing criminal hegemonic roguery.
