Tag: foreign policy

The Foreign Policy Blob’s Desperate Attempt To Preserve NATO

There are multiple indications that members of the foreign policy establishment are increasingly worried that the American people are growing weary of Washington’s strategic overextension and the excessive costs in treasure and blood that role imposes.  Elites show their nervousness through desperate attempts to preserve the policy status quo.  One recent example was the effort in Congress to limit the president’s powers and options regarding NATO.

In December 2023, hawks finally achieved their goal when both the Senate and House approved a provision attached to the National Defense Authorization Act that would bar a president from withdrawing the U.S. from NATO without the approval of two-thirds of the Senate or separate legislation passed by both houses of Congress. Washington Post analyst Meagan Vasquez notes that “the bipartisan attempt to add checks and balances highlights the lengths Congress is willing to go to protect the U.S.-NATO relationship amid ongoing Russian aggression and after years of criticism of the military alliance during Trump’s presidential tenure.”

Yet even the Brookings Institution’s Michael E. O’Hanlon, a prominent establishment foreign policy figure, concedes that Congress is entering uncharted and controversial territory.  He points out “that there is precedent for presidents withdrawing unilaterally from treaties without consulting Congress. A chief executive conceivably could push back on efforts to restrict that [authority] particularly if the treaty addresses the United States’ defense posture abroad.  A “future president might challenge such an effort and invoke the president’s authorities as commander in chief under Article 2 of the Constitution.”

Keep reading

U.S. diplomats slam Israel policy in leaked memo

State Department staffers offered a blistering critique of the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war in a dissent memo obtained by POLITICO, arguing that, among other things, the U.S. should be willing to publicly criticize the Israelis.

The message suggests a growing loss of confidence among U.S. diplomats in President Joe Biden’s approach to the Middle East crisis. It reflects the sentiments of many U.S. diplomats, especially at mid-level and lower ranks, according to conversations with several department staffers as well as other reports. If such internal disagreements intensify, it could make it harder for the Biden administration to craft policy toward the region.

The memo has two key requests: that the U.S. support a ceasefire, and that it balance its private and public messaging toward Israel, including airing criticisms of Israeli military tactics and treatment of Palestinians that the U.S. generally prefers to keep private.

The gap between America’s private and public messaging “contributes to regional public perceptions that the United States is a biased and dishonest actor, which at best does not advance, and at worst harms, U.S. interests worldwide,” the document states.

Keep reading

US Declares ‘War’

U.S. foreign policy has set the country on a course destined to lead to a world of rivalry, strife and conflict into the foreseeable future. Washington has declared “war” on China, on Russia, on whomever partners with them.

That “war” is comprehensive — diplomatic, financial, commercial, technological, cultural, ideological. It implicitly fuses a presumed great power rivalry for dominance with a clash of civilizations: the U.S.-led West against the civilizational states of China, Russia and potentially India.

Direct military action is not explicitly included but armed clashes are not absolutely precluded. They can occur via proxies as in Ukraine. They can be sparked by Washington’s dedication to bolster Taiwan as an independent country.

A series of formal defense reviews confirm statements by the most senior U.S. officials and military commanders that such a conflict is likely within the decade. Plans for warfighting are well advanced. This feckless approach implicitly casts the Chinese foe as a modern-day Imperial Japan despite the catastrophic risks intrinsic to a war between nuclear powers.

The extremity of Washington’s overreaching, militarized strategy intended to solidify and extend its global dominance is evinced by the latest pronouncement of required war-fighting capabilities.

Recommendations just promulgated by the congressional bipartisan Strategic Posture Commission include developing and fielding “homeland integrated air and missile defenses that can deter and defeat coercive attacks by Russia and China, and determine the capabilities needed to stay ahead of the North Korean threat.”

They were endorsed by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley in his post-retirement interview where he proposed adding up to $1 trillion to the current defense budget in order to create the requisite capabilities.

President Joe Biden, in his weekend interview on 60 Minutes, reiterated the dominating outlook with buoyant optimism:

“We’re the United States of America, for God’s sake!; the most powerful nation in the history of the world.”

This is the same country whose war-fighting record since 1975 is one win, two draws and four losses — or five losses if we include Ukraine. (That tabulation excludes Granada which was a sort of scrimmage). Moreover, the U.S. stock of 155mm artillery ammunition is totally exhausted – as is that of its allies.

Keep reading

America’s Broken, Lurid View of Foreign Wars

The English-language media has spent a lot of time debating whether Israeli babies were beheaded. An Israeli newscaster had reported that a soldier found decapitated children at the scene of an attack on Kfar Aza by the Palestinian group Hamas. The story made it to front pages around the world. Other journalists began to scrutinize the claim and heard different accounts from different officials in the Israeli government. U.S. President Joe Biden implied that he had seen photos of the beheadings, then the White House backtracked.

All this debate around beheadings seemed to miss a more fundamental point: that children were killed. The existence of a massacre should be enough to shock and horrify. Hamas killed or took hostage hundreds of Israelis. (Clearly frustrated with media skepticism, the Israeli government posted pictures of burned Israeli children to social media.) The Israeli military has killed hundreds of Palestinians with bombs in retaliation. The intense focus on one gruesome detail amid a pile of dead and maimed bodies shows there is something fundamentally wrong with the way American society approaches war in foreign countries.

Keep reading

This War Wasn’t Just Provoked — It Was Provoked Deliberately

In an interesting speech about the way US imperial aggression provokes violence around the world, antiwar commentator Scott Horton made reference to an April 2022 article from Yahoo News that had previously escaped my attention.

The article is titled “In closer ties to Ukraine, U.S. officials long saw promise and peril,” and it features named and unnamed veterans of the US intelligence cartel saying that long before the February 2022 invasion they were fully aware that the US had “provoked” Russia in Ukraine and created a powderkeg situation that would likely lead to war.

“By last summer [meaning the summer of 2021], the baseline view of most U.S. intelligence community analysts was that Russia felt sufficiently provoked over Ukraine that some unknown trigger could set off an attack by Moscow,” a former CIA official told Yahoo News’ Zach Dorfman, who adds, “(The CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.)”

Dorfman writes that initial support provided to Ukraine during the Obama administration had been “calibrated to avoid aggravating Moscow,” but that “partially spurred by Congress, as well as the Trump administration, which was more willing to be aggressive on weapon transfers to Kyiv, overt U.S. military support for Ukraine grew over time — and with it the risk of a deadly Russian response, some CIA officials believed at the time.”

Keep reading

U.S. Actions Produced Majority Of World’s Refugees

According to figures from the United Nations refugee agency, the majority of refugees in the world today — and ever since the start of this century — have been fleeing from countries that were sanctioned, couped, and/or invaded, by the U.S. Government.

The latest such annual report by the UNHCR is “Global Trends Forced Displacement 2021”, and it indicates that “69% originated from just five countries” which were: Syria (6.9 million), Venezuela (4.6 million), Afghanistan (2.7 million), South Sudan (2.4 million), and Myanmar (1.2 million). The report’s “Figure 7” “People displaced across borders by host country | end-2021” shows that the top recipient-countries that year were: Turkiye (3,759,800), Colombia (1,843,900), Uganda (1,529,900), Pakistan (1,491,100), Germany (1,255,700), Sudan (1,103,900), Bangladesh (918,900), Lebanon (845,900), Ethiopia (821,300), and Iran (798,300). The report notes that there were “72 percent hosted by neighboring countries” but the exceptions were likewise notable. For example: “Figure 13” “Major countries for individual registration of new asylum seekers | 2021” showed that #1 on that list (and these numbers indicate ONLY the refugees that were officially recorded in these nations as being refugees who came there during that year, NOT the total who had somehow become “displaced” and who now were there) as being U.S., 188,900. #2 was Germany, 148,200. #3 was Mexico, 131,400. Some others among the top 10 were: France, Spain, UK, and Italy.

Keep reading

In Venezuela, the US Recognizes a Nonexistent Government

In a piece of bizarre political theater, the US now officially recognizes a government in Venezuela that does not exist. Despite the termination of the government recognized by the US, State Department spokesman Ned Price assured a press briefing that “our approach has not changed.” The US still considers the elected President illegitimate – an increasingly isolated position – and the assembly the unelected president led legitimate, though he no longer leads it, and they are no longer the assembly.

Since February of 2019, the US has recognized the never elected Juan Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela, creating an already bizarre situation in which there were parallel governments in Venezuela: one recognized within the country and one recognized outside the country.

But the US plan failed in its goal of removing Nicolás Maduro from power. And after four years, the opposition in Venezuela decided to abandon the plan and move on. At the end of December, 2022, Venezuela’s opposition lawmakers by an overwhelming preliminary vote of 72-23, removed Guaidó from power and pulled the plug on his interim government. On December 30, three of Venezuela’s four main opposition parties supported the proposal to remove Guaidó.

Though the US continued to support Guaidó, few in Venezuela did. Only 6% of Venezuelans said they would support Guaidó in presidential primaries, and more than 56% said the interim government should be terminated. Miguel Tinker Salas, Professor of Latin American History at Pomona College, and one of the world’s leading experts on Venezuelan history and politics, told me in November, 2022 that “For all intents and purposes he has been sidelined by developments in the country and even for those in the opposition he is a non-entity.”

Keep reading

New House Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul Is a Standard Old-School Interventionist

For those who hoped the new Republican-led and Trump-approved House of Representatives under Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) might promote some of the better aspects of MAGA-ism, such as a foreign policy that recognized the mistakes of the past three decades, and charter a less bellicose and controlling path for the U.S. abroad, the ascension of Rep. Michael McCaul (R–Texas) to chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee should be unpleasant cold water.

While the Trumpian strain in the GOP is supposed to favor a radical rethink of the U.S. mission to find and combat foreign adversaries with every sort of intervention, involvement, and pressure even if short of direct troop deployment, McCaul retains an older sense of an abiding American mission to shape the world to our desires and “interests.”

McCaul:

• is an enthusiastic supporter of U.S. military aid to Ukraine and helping ensure Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian leaders face war crimes tribunals;

• is fighting to raise the political costs of ending foreign interventions by an attack investigation on President Joe Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal (which was following through on Trump’s intentions) and insists the U.S. must even now “hold the Taliban accountable for their appalling actions”;

• wants to make sure the U.S. is optimally aggressive in supporting Taiwan against China, including “strategic, long-term security assistance well in advance of conflict in order to effectively deter, and, when necessary, to respond to, acts of aggression”;

• wants more U.S. pressure on Nicaragua;

• is angry that Biden “has backed away from the goal of North Korea’s complete denuclearization [and] failed to make the security commitments to the Indo-Pacific that its own National Defense Strategy demands”;

• demands “immediate action to combat and deter the proliferation of Iran’s conventional and non-conventional weapons, including through the use of sanctions and enforcement of U.S. export controls”;

• legislates to ensure the U.S. keeps an eye on foreign lands’ “freedom of expression…with respect to electronic information”;

• and had been a loud voice in opposition to former President Donald Trump’s plans to lessen U.S. presence in Syria.

While McCaul thankfully isn’t making open calls to immediately send in the troops to solve all the world’s problems, he is a largely pre-Trump Republican when it comes to foreign policy, eagerly demanding to keep U.S. money, arms, and pressure at play in as many foreign fields as he can survey.

Keep reading

America’s Perpetual Foreign-Policy Crises

Ever since the federal government was converted from a limited-government republic to a national-security state after World War II, America has lived under a system of ongoing, never-ending, perpetual foreign-policy crises. That’s not a coincidence. The national-security establishment — i.e. the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — need such crises to justify their continued existence and their ever-growing taxpayer-funded largess. 

An interesting aspect of this phenomenon is that oftentimes the crises are ginned up by the national-security establishment itself. Once the crisis materializes, the Pentagon and the CIA play the innocent. “We had nothing to do with ginning up this crisis,” they cry. “We are totally innocent.” 

After the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon and the CIA were desperately in need of a crisis that could replace the Cold War crisis, which they were convinced would last forever. That’s when they began going into the Middle East and killing people. When that massive killing spree, which included killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, ended up producing terrorist blowback, the national-security establishment had its new crisis — terrorism, which replaced communism as America’s big official enemy. 

The “war on terrorism” replaced the Cold War’s “war on communism.” Americans began fearing the terrorists (and the Muslims) almost as much as they feared the Reds. With the new crisis, the national-security establishment, including its army of “defense” contractors, was assured of continued existence and ever-expanding taxpayer-funded largess.

Keep reading