from Mint Press News
How Joe Biden Plans to Make The American Empire Great Again
Behind his rhetoric, Joe Biden will seek nothing less than global supremacy,
escalating a new and even more dangerous arms race that risks the
destruction of humanity, what he calls "decency" and "normalcy."
by Dan Cohen
November 20th, 2020
By Dan Cohen
Throughout his campaign, Joe Biden railed against Donald Trump's 'America
First' foreign policy, claiming it weakened the United States and left the
world in disarray.
He pledged to reverse this decline and recover the damage Trump did to
America's reputation. While Donald Trump called to make America Great Again,
Biden seeks to Make the American Empire Great Again.
Among the president-elect's pledges is to end the so-called forever wars -
the decades-long imperial projects in Afghanistan and Iraq that began under
the Bush administration.
Yet Biden - a fervent supporter of those wars - will task ending them to the
most neoconservative elements of the Democratic party and ideologues of
permanent war.
Michele Flournoy and Tony Blinken sit atop Biden's thousands-strong foreign
policy brain trust and have played central roles in every U.S. war going
back to the Clinton administration.
In the Trump era, they've cashed in, founding Westexec Advisors - a
corporate consulting firm that has become home for Obama administration
officials awaiting a return to government.
Flournoy is Biden's leading pick for secretary of defense and Blinken is
expected to be national security advisor.
Biden's foxes guard the henhouse
Since the 1990s, Flournoy and Blinken have steadily risen through the ranks
of the military-industrial complex, shuffling back and forth between the
Pentagon and hawkish think-tanks funded by the U.S. government, weapons
companies, and oil giants.
Under Bill Clinton, Flournoy was the principal author of the 1996
Quadrinellial Defense Review, the document that outlined the U.S. military's
doctrine of permanent war - what it called "full spectrum dominance."
Flournoy called for "unilateral use of military power" to ensure
"uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic
resources."
As Bush administration officials lied to the world about Saddam Hussein's
supposed WMD's, Flournoy remarked that "In some cases, preemptive strikes
against an adversary's [weapons of mass destruction] capabilities may be the
best or only option we have to avert a catastrophic attack against the
United States."
Meet the Filthy Rich War Hawks That Make up the Joe Biden Foreign Policy
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Tony Blinken was a top advisor to then-Senate foreign relations committee
chair Joe Biden, who played a key role in shoring up support among the
Democrat-controlled Senate for Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq.
As Iraq was plunged into chaos and bloodshed, Flournoy was among the authors
of a paper titled "Progressive Internationalism" that called for a "smarter
and better" style of permanent war. The paper chastised the anti-war left
and stated that "Democrats will maintain the world's most capable and
technologically advanced military, and we will not flinch from using it to
defend our interests anywhere in the world."
With Bush winning a second term, Flournoy advocated for more troop
deployments from the sidelines.
In 2005, Flournoy signed onto a letter from the neoconservative think tank
Project for a New American Century, asking Congress to "increase
substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps (by) at
least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years."
In 2007, she leveraged her Pentagon experience and contacts to found what
would become one of the premier Washington think tanks advocating endless
war across the globe: the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).
CNAS is funded by the U.S. government, arms manufacturers, oil giants,
Silicon Valley tech giants, billionaire-funded foundations, and big banks.
Flournoy joined the Obama administration and was appointed as under
secretary of defense for policy, the position considered the "brains" of the
Pentagon.
She was keenly aware that the public was wary of more quagmires. In the 2010
Quadrennial Defense Review, she crafted a new concept of warfare that would
expand the permanent war state while giving the appearance of a drawdown.
Flournoy wrote that "unmanned systems hold great promise" - a reference to
the CIA's drone assassination program.
This was the Obama-era military doctrine of hybrid war. It called for the
U.S. to be able to simultaneously wage war on numerous fronts through secret
warfare, clandestine weapons transfers to proxies, drone strikes, and
cyber-attacks - all buttressed with propaganda campaigns targeting the
American public through the internet and corporate news media.
Architects of America's Hybrid wars
Flournoy continued to champion the endless wars that began in the Bush-era
and was a key architect of Obama's disastrous troop surge in Afghanistan. As
U.S. soldiers returned in body bags and insurgent attacks and suicide
bombings increased some 65% from 2009 and 2010, she deceived the Senate
Armed Services Committee, claiming that the U.S. was beginning to turn the
tide against the Taliban.
Even with her lie that the U.S. and Afghan government were starting to beat
the Taliban back, Flournoy assured the senate that the U.S. would have to
remain in Afghanistan long into the future.
Ten years later - as the Afghan death toll passed 150,000 - Flournoy
continued to argue against a U.S. withdrawal.
That's the person Joe Biden has tasked with ending the forever war in
Afghanistan. But in Biden's own words, he'll "bring the vast majority of our
troops home from Afghanistan" implying some number of American troops will
remain, and the forever war will be just that. Michele Flournoy explained
that even if a political settlement were reached, the U.S. would maintain a
presence.
In 2011, the Obama-era doctrine of smart and sophisticated warfare was
unveiled in the NATO regime-change war on Libya.
Moammar Gaddafi - the former adversary who sought warm relations with the
U.S. and had given up his nuclear weapons program - was deposed and
sodomized with a bayonet.
Flournoy, Hillary Clinton's State Department, and corporate media were in
lockstep as they waged an extensive propaganda campaign to deceive the U.S.
public that Gadaffi's soldiers were on a Viagra-fueled rape and murder spree
that demanded a U.S. intervention.
All of this was based on a report from Al Jazeera - the media outlet owned
by the Qatari monarchy that was arming extremist militias to overthrow the
government.
Yet an investigation by the United Nations called the rape claims
"hysteria." Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch found no credible
evidence of even a single rape.
Even after Libya was descended into strife and the deception of Gadaffi's
forces committing rape was debunked, Michele Flournoy stood by her support
for the war.
Tony Blinken, then Obama's deputy national security advisor, also pushed for
regime change in Libya. He became Obama's point man on Syria, pushed to arm
the so-called "moderate rebels" that fought alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS, and
designed the red line strategy to trigger a full-on U.S. intervention.
Syria, he told the public, wasn't anything like the other wars the U.S. had
waging for more than a decade.
Despite Blinken's promises that it would be a short affair, the war on Syria
is now in its ninth year. An estimated half a million people have been
killed as a result and the country is facing famine,
Largely thanks to the policy of using "wheat to apply pressure" - a
recommendation of Flournoy and Blinken's CNAS think tank.
When the Trump administration launched airstrikes on Syria based on mere
accusations of a chemical attack, Tony Blinken praised the bombing, claiming
Assad had used the weapon of mass destruction sarin. Yet there was no
evidence for this claim, something even then-secretary of Defense James
Mattis admitted.
While jihadist mercenaries armed with U..S-supplied weapons took over large
swaths of Syria, Tony Blinken played a central role in a coup d'etat in
Ukraine that saw a pro-Russia government overthrown in a U.S.-orchestrated
color revolution with neo-fascist elements agitating on the ground.
At the time, he was ambivalent about sending lethal weapons to Ukraine,
instead opting for economic pressure.
Since then, fascist militias have been incorporated into Ukraine's armed
forces. And Tony Blinken urged Trump to send them deadly weapons - something
Obama had declined to do.
Trump obliged.
The Third Offset
While the U.S. fuelled wars in Syria and Ukraine, the Pentagon announced a
major shift called the Third Offset strategy - a reference to the cold war
era strategies the U.S. used to maintain its military supremacy over the
Soviet Union.
The Third Offset strategy shifted the focus from counterinsurgency and the
war on terror to great power competition against China and Russia, seeking
to ensure that the U.S. could win a war against China in Asia. It called for
a technological revolution in warfighting capabilities, development of
futuristic and autonomous weapons, swarms of undersea and airborne drones,
hypersonic weapons, cyber warfare, machine-enhanced soldiers, and artificial
intelligence making unimaginably complex battlefield decisions at speeds
incomprehensible to the human mind. All of this would be predicated on the
Pentagon deepening its relationship with Silicon Valley giants that it
birthed decades before: Google and Facebook.
The author of the Third Offset, former undersecretary of defense Robert
Work, is a partner of Flournoy and Blinken's at WestExec Advisors. And
Flournoy has been a leading proponent of this dangerous new escalation.
In June, Flournoy published a lengthy commentary laying out her strategy
called "Sharpening the U.S. Military's Edge: Critical Steps for the Next
Administration".
She warned that the United States is losing its military technological
advantage and reversing that must be the Pentagon's priority. Without it,
Flournoy warned that the U.S. might not be able to defeat China in Asia.
While Flournoy has called for ramping up U.S. military presence and
exercises with allied forces in the region, she went so far as to call for
the U.S. to increase its destructive capabilities so much that it could
launch a blitzkrieg style-attack that would wipe out the entire Chinese navy
and all civilian merchant ships in the South China Sea. Not only a blatant
war crime but a direct attack on a nuclear power that would spell the third
world war.
At the same time, Biden has announced he'll take an even more aggressive and
confrontational stance against Russia, a position Flournoy shares.
As for ending the forever wars, Tony Blinken says not so fast.
The end of forever wars?
So Biden will end the forever wars, but not really end them. Secret wars
that the public doesn't even know the U.S. is involved in - those are here
to stay.
In fact, leaving teams of special forces in place throughout the Middle East
is part and parcel of the Pentagon's shift away from counterinsurgency and
towards great power competition.
The 2018 National Defense Strategy explains that "Long-term strategic
competitions with China and Russia are the principal priorities" and the
U.S. will "consolidate gains in Iraq and Afghanistan while moving to a more
resource-sustainable approach."
As for the catastrophic war on Yemen, Biden has said he'll end U.S. support,
but in 2019, Michele Flournoy argued against ending arms sales to Saudi
Arabia.
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Buying It
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Biden pledged he will rejoin the Iran deal as a starting point for new
negotiations. However, Trump's withdrawal from the deal discredited the
Iranian reformists who seek engagement with the west and empowered the
principlists who see the JCPOA as a deal with the devil.
In Latin America, Biden will revive the so-called anti-corruption campaigns
that were used as a cover to oust the popular social democrat Brazilian
president Lula da Silva.
His Venezuela policy will be almost identical to Trump's - sanctions and
regime change.
In Central America, Biden has proposed a 4 billion dollar package to support
corrupt right-wing governments and neoliberal privatization projects that
create even more destabilization and send vulnerable masses fleeing north to
the United States.
Behind their rhetoric, Biden, Flournoy, and Blinken will seek nothing less
than global supremacy, escalating a new and even more dangerous arms race
that risks the destruction of humanity. That's what Joe Biden calls
"decency" and "normalcy."
