A Retrospective On The Biden Administrations' Foreign Policy

A Full Review Of One Of The Most Pro-War Cabinets In American History.

With the Biden administration going out the door, and the Trump administration about to be inaugurated on January 20th, I think now is the perfect time to go over the Biden Administration’s horrific foreign policy and what its true legacy is and will be.

In reality, Joe Biden himself had very little to do with the actual decisions in his administration, given the now undeniable reality that he has dementia. Despite the mainstream media’s best efforts to cover it up, his debate with Donald Trump and subsequent public appearances showed that he had clearly lost his mental faculties.

However, for the neocons in his administration, this was seen as a positive. In June of last year investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported that because of Biden's dementia, he was unable to “understand the contradictions of the policies he and his foreign policy advisers have been carrying out.” Hersh reported that Biden’s mental state allowed for the “increasing isolation of the president on foreign policy issues”.

For the neocons in his cabinet, the fact that the president had an increasingly deteriorating mental state meant that it would be so much easier for them to go through with all the neo-con policies they wanted without any pushback. Biden staffed his cabinet with ultra-hawks and neo-con insiders.

• His Secretary of State Antony Blinken never met a war he didn’t like, previously supporting the Iraq war, war in Libya, regime change in Syria, coup in Ukraine, and Saudi-led genocidal war in Yemen.

• His national security advisor, Jake Sullivan was best known for advocating for America to ally with Al Qaeda in the Syrian war.

• His defense secretary Loyd Austin, openly bragged that America will use the war in Ukraine to ‘weaken Russia”.

• His Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland was one of the most influential neo-cons in Washington. She worked for Dick Cheney during the war in Iraq and is married to Robert Kagan, the co-founder of PNAC (Project for a New American Century), the think tank responsible for staffing the Bush Administration.

For these neocon Hawks, taking part in an administration with a president in a deteriorated mental state was the perfect opportunity to put through their desired neocon foreign policy, and boy did they. From the proxy war in Ukraine to facilitating complete Israeli/American supremacy over the Middle East, these hawks were able to achieve almost every neo-conservative foreign policy goal around the world.

The Ukraine Proxy War

After the end of the Iraq war, many neo-conservatives redirected their ire from the Middle East to Russia. As economist Jeffery Sachs wrote in Drop Site News, for many neocons the Cold War was not over when the Soviet Union fell. Neo-conservatives in both Democratic and Republican administrations slowly began supporting more hawkish policies toward Russia. Some early ones listed by Sachs in the piece are

• The 78-day bombing of Russia’s ally Belgrade in 1999, with the goal of setting up a NATO base in the Balkans.

• Unilitatallary withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty against Russia’s wishes in 2002.

• Continuing NATO enlargement toward the Black Sea region by admitting Bulgaria and Romania as members in 2004.

• And pledging to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in 2008.

By 2008 the Hawkish Russia policies got so dangerous that even the current CIA director William Burns warned that it could escalate tensions. In a leaked 2008 memo titled “Nyet means Nyet,” he warned that talk of accepting Ukraine and Georgia into NATO “could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.”

Instead of listening to this warning, the neocons decided to double down. Not only did they not take Ukrainian and Georgian NATO membership off the table, but Victoria Nuland and other neocons in the Obama administration backed a coup against Ukraine’s pro-Russia-leaning president Viktor Yanukovych and helped install a pro-Western government.

This led to a civil/proxy war breaking out in Ukraine’s Eastern Donbas provinces between pro-Russia and pro-West Ukrainians, exactly as William Burns had warned.

By 2022 when Russia was on the precipice of its illegal invasion of Ukraine and the Biden administration was in power, the Biden administration refused to negotiate with Russia in order to stop the war. Russia put out a list of concessions they would need from the West in order to not invade Ukraine which included:

NATO guarantees that it will not deploy missiles in nations bordering Russia. (They are already in place from Slovenia to Romania, with Poland to follow)

NATO to stop military and naval exercises in nations and seas bordering Russia.

Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.

the West and Russia to sign a binding East-West security pact.

– the landmark treaty between the US and Russia covering intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be restored. (The US abandoned it in 2019)

The Biden administration refused to negotiate on a single one of these demands. As Noam Chomsky and Nathan J Robinson wrote in their recent book “The Myth Of American Idealism” they “Refused to consider revoking the commitment to admit Ukraine into NATO” and even “reaffirmed that it was ultimately planning to integrate Ukraine” in NATO as late as December of 2021.

The reason for this refusal to negotiate was, as the Ukrainian outlet Strana wrote:

Nuland and Blinken, apparently imagined themselves to be great "geopolitical combinators" and decided to play a "cunning game", actually pushing Putin to invade, hoping that it would lead to his collapse.

This point is even better underscored by the fact that the Biden administration sent the UK Prime Minister Boris Jhonson to stop peace talks taking place between Ukraine and Russia as early as April of 2022, which could have ended the war. As the veteran U.S. diplomat Chas Freeman said, the Biden administration’s policy was designed to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian”.

Freeman was exactly right that this was the Biden administration’s intention, throughout the war they refused to do anything to negotiate an end to it. In October of 2022 when progressives sent an open letter to the Biden administration urging them to negotiate an end to the war, they faced so much backlash from neocons in the Biden administration and Democratic Party that they were forced to retract it.

In September of 2022, the Biden administration facilitated the bombing of the “Nord Stream 2” pipeline between Russia and Germany which caused the “equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions of Denmark” according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Biden administration later tried to deny doing this, first blaming Russia for the bombing, then the Ukrainian government, and eventually a rogue group of Ukrainian officials but Joe Biden himself admitted that “we will bring an end” to Nord Stream if “Russia invades” before the bombing took place while Victoria Nuland heavily implied that the U.S. was behind the bombing and Anothony Blinken admitted that the bombing was a “tremendous opportunity” for the United States.

Ironically, the proxy war did not even bring about the neo-conservative goal of weakening Russia in the way the Biden administration wanted. As Strana wrote in the above-mentioned article

…the offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine ended in failure, the initiative at the front was seized by the Russian army, Prigozhin's rebellion failed, and he himself died, Putin's power within the Russian Federation is currently stable, Russia has become even closer to China, the anti-Western and anti-American alliance in the world has become even stronger.

However, the proxy war was completely successful for U.S. corporations, who made major profits from the bloodshed. Noam Chomsky cited the fact that the Wall Street Journal admitted the war was “a huge boost to arms manufacturers” and the Biden administration bragged that the war was helpful “in building America's defense industrial base, jump starting and expanding production lines for weapons and ammunition and supporting jobs in 40 states.”

The Biden administration also did not care who these weapons were going to no matter how extreme. In June of this year, they officially lifted the ban on weapons going to the Azov Battalion, an openly Neo-Nazi paramilitary group integrated with the Ukrainian military.

The war went beyond Ukraine as well and extended to trying to overthrow foreign leaders who did not support it. The Biden administration backed a soft coup against former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan in 2022 over his opposition to arming the proxy war. More recently they backed a coup against a Romanian opposition candidate for his skepticism towards NATO and the proxy war in Ukraine.

The Biden administrations proxy war in Ukraine which resulted in the destruction of the country, hundreds of thousands of people dead, neo-nazis empowered and a pipeline destroyed in an environmental catastrophe simply for military-industrial complex profit should be enough to leave his foreign policy legacy in infamy, but it was only the beginning.

The Greater Israel Project

On October 7th of 2023, when Hamas breached the fence of the Gaza strip in their attack on Israel in response to the Israeli blockade and routine massacres in Gaza, the Biden administration had a chance to stop Israel's current slaughter.

A former Israeli spokesperson who resigned revealed that Hamas offered to release all the Israeli hostages on October 9th-10th, in exchange for Israel not invading Gaza and Netenyahu rejected the deal. The spokesperson told the Times of Israel that:

We later found out that Hamas had offered on October 9 or 10 to release all the civilian hostages in exchange for the IDF not entering the Strip, but the government rejected the offer

Had the Biden Administration forced Israel to take this deal, they could have secured the Israeli hostages and prevented the subsequent Israeli onslaught into Gaza, but they had other plans.

Instead of forcing a ceasefire, the Biden administration repeated debunked claim after debunked claim to justify Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza. Biden claims he saw pictures of “40 beheaded babies” on October 7th, something that has now been proven to be a hoax.

Biden repeated the claim that there was “mass rape” by Hamas on October 7th, a claim that even Isreali prosecutor Moran Gez admits is evidence free.

Biden constantly blamed all the Israeli deaths on October 7th on Hamas despite the fact that it has now been well documented that Israel intentionally killed their own people to prevent them from becoming hostages.

All of these WMD-level lies were used by the administration to back one of the worst crimes in recent history.

Despite the fact that 70 percent of people killed in Gaza by Israel are women and children and 90 percent overall are civilians, the Biden administration continues to this day to back Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

There was no red line for the Biden administration’s support of Israel, every single day there are countless images of civilians being killed by Israel, and the Biden administration despite having the power to stop it, chooses not to.

Even today after it is undeniable that Israel is intentionally killing civilians, after both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have said Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and after the ICC has put out an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu for “crimes against humanity and war crimes” the Biden administration has approved another 8 billion dollar arms package to Israel, leaving a final stain on it’s bloody, genocidal legacy.

But simply backing the genocide in Gaza has not been enough for the Biden administration in the Middle East. They have also supported the destruction of any forces that oppose Israel’s genocide in the Middle East and U.S. imperialism in the region.

Take for example Lebanon. After Israel committed a terrorist attack on Hezbollah officials in Lebanon using pagers, they were set to invade the country again. The New York Times reported that the Biden administration “told Lebanese officials that if they could secure Hezbollah’s buy-in (to a ceasefire agreement), they would do the same with Israel.” The Times reported that the Lebanese government confirmed that “Hezbollah had agreed to language in the cease-fire proposal”.

However, Politico reported that senior figures in the Biden administration “privately told Israel that the U.S. would support its decision to ramp up military pressure against Hezbollah — even as the Biden administration publicly urged the Israeli government in recent weeks to curtail its strikes.”

After the Biden administration secretly supported this, Israel took out Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (even after he agreed to a ceasefire) and invaded Lebanon with full U.S. backing.

After continuing sanctions and the occupation of Syria’s oil and wheat-rich areas which helped lead to the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria, the Biden administration backed Israel's destruction of Syria’s military infrastructure and theft of more Syrian land past the occupied Golan Heights.

Joe Biden also bombed Yemen on multiple occasions last year because the Houthis are a leading force resisting the Isreali genocide in Gaza.

In all of these cases there is a clear pattern, destroy any force in the region that opposes Israel’s genocide and expansion. This not only makes it easier for Israel to carry out its genocide in Gaza unopposed but also makes it far easier for them to take more land in service of the “greater Israel project” (taking out Syria’s military infrastructure makes it much easier for Israel to take more Syrian land).

Israeli settlers are already planning settlements in Gaza’s beachfront areas and the fact that they want Syria and Hezbollah weakened shows that they want to expand into those countries as well.

A Bloody Legacy

From Ukraine to the Middle East, the Biden administration's legacy will go down in history as an administration that would do anything including war, genocide, and the mass murder of civilians to generate profit for the military-industrial complex. I have strong doubts that a Trump administration will do any better, but I am certainly happy that these bloodthirsty neocons are going out the door.