Read Jacobin’s retrospective on Joe Biden’s domestic policy here.
On the domestic front, Joe Biden’s record has been such a hodgepodge of contradictions that it’s difficult to properly rate it. There is no such ambiguity when it comes to his foreign policy, which was an abject disaster, both by the standards of any peace-loving person who wants a world with less war and chaos and on its own terms.
In theory, Biden and his team were trying to bring diplomacy “back at the center of our foreign policy” and to run a “foreign policy for the middle class,” one where US decisions on the world stage would revolve around whether or not they benefited ordinary working Americans, and not around the obscure priorities of Washington staffers and think-tankers pushing toy soldiers around a map. But old habits are hard to break.
Biden leaves office having mired the United States in two wars that didn’t exist when he entered, both of which have, several times, nearly escalated into wider conflagrations (one of them a nuclear-tinged one) where regime change has been the sometimes explicit goal, and both of which the United States avoided being pulled directly in by the closest of margins. His only innovation to this neocon-redux strategy has been to wage the wars indirectly, trying to dodge the political fallout of putting boots on the ground by feeding weapons and logistical and operational assistance to local client states to fight instead — and even then, not always, as in the case of Yemen, where the US-backed Saudi war ended only for the United States to start bombing the country directly, which it has been illegally doing for a year now.
Far from resuscitating diplomacy, this has been an…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
