A Biden Administration Would Bring Back the Dreaded Foreign Policy Blob

Renowned foreign affairs journalist Pepe Escobar believes that a Biden/Harris administration would bring more of the same neoliberal interventionism that characterized the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations.

In his piece for Asia Times titled, “A Dem Presidency Means The Return Of The Blob” Escobar made the case that should Biden pull off a victory against President Donald Trump, that a Democratic administration would bring back the “Blob”, which Escobar describes as the “incestuous Washington, DC foreign policy gang, think tanks, academia, newspapers (from the Washington Post to the New York Times), and that unofficial Bible, Foreign Affairs magazine.”

Escobar highlighted Biden’s career path when he started out as a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1997 and then became the chair from 2001-2003, to later return as chair from 2007-2009.  It’s often forgotten that Biden was major Iraq War booster and as Escobar explained in his article, “even defended a “soft partition” of Iraq, something that fierce nationalists, Sunni and Shi’ite, from Baghdad to Basra will never forget.”

Escobar listed off some of Biden’s accomplishments in the Middle East while he served as Vice President during the administration of Barack Obama:

Obama-Biden’s geopolitical accomplishments include a drone war, or Hellfire missile diplomacy, complete with “kill lists”; the failed Afghan surge; the “liberation” of Libya from behind, turning it into a militia wasteland; the proxy war in Syria fought with “moderate rebels”; and once again leading from behind, the Saudi-orchestrated destruction of Yemen.

Additionally, Escobar highlighted some of Biden’s Blob connections that could end up playing a big role in a Biden/Harris administration:

Among his former, select interlocutors, Biden counts warmonger former NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen – who supervised the destruction of Libya – and John Negroponte, who “organized” the contras in Nicaragua and then “supervised” ISIS/Daesh in Iraq – the crucial element of the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy of instrumentalizing jihadis to do the empire’s dirty work.

On the NATO front, Escobar believes that a Bidden/Harris administration would expand NATO across the globe:

It’s safe to game that a Biden-Harris administration will oversee a de facto NATO expansion encompassing parts of Latin America, Africa and the Pacific, thus pleasing the Atlanticist Blob.

Kamala Harris, while seen as a mostly domestically focused politician, has hawkish views with regards to countries such as Russia and North Korea. Escobar highlighted that she did not even co-sponsor legislation to prevent bellicose action against Venezuela nor North Korea.

The case with Harris is interesting, because as Escobar outlined, she is popular among Never Trumpers such as Robert Kagan, who is not only a major interventionist hawk, but his wife Victoria Nuland was one of the primary architects of the Euromaidan Color Revolution in Ukraine back in 2014. Kagan was one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and is a big Iran hawk. Other notable hawks such as former national security adviser Susan Rice are rumored to be in the running for Secretary of State.

In sum, a Biden administration would be a wet dream for the defense industry and not represent a significant change in America’s misguided foreign policy. Trump has shown through his nominations of William Ruger and Douglas Macgregor to ambassador positions that he is in favor of restraint.

The rest of Escobar’s article can be read here for those who want to undertand how a Biden presidency represents the status quo as far as foreign policy is concerned.

 

 

 

 

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