RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-malley-test

Martin Peretz was Editor-in-Chief of The New Republic for 36 years and taught social theory at Harvard University for nearly half a century.

What does progressive foreign policy actually accomplish on the ground?

In the rhetoric of restoration-era Washington, D.C., reality is reclaiming a place. The post-insurrection hoopla was always going to deflate into the realpolitik of competing ideologies—and, in foreign policy, it already has. Robert Malley’s appointment as special envoy to Iran points to a deepening fissure within the Democratic Party: It is being hailed as a victory for those who reject the postwar liberal promotion of American capitalism and democracy and instead identify with the credo of institutional progressivism. This is an ideology increasingly endorsed by powerful American structures, in which correcting the West’s historical marginalization of people of color, people with different sexual identities, women, people from developing nations, and others is understood to be the determining goal of politics.

Malley is a policy expert and operative—he is a doer, not an active ideologue. But the policies he has promoted and facilitated over 20 years are consistently in the service of rapprochement with the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hamas, and Iran, which are held up by institutional progressives as the marquee victims of Western interventionism in the Middle East. To be fair, Biden’s entire foreign policy team, starting with Biden himself, supported and implemented the Iran deal, which was the cornerstone of Barack Obama’s second-term foreign policy and would now appear to be heading into its third term—with Malley, Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, Wendy Sherman, and Samantha Power all serving in nearly the same roles they occupied while ensuring the Iran deal’s implementation and passage. What’s new is the liberal Democratic establishment’s use of the new, harder progressive logic, which holds that any opposition to its policies is psychologically rooted in inherited racism, sexism, or trauma.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/05/mush-from-the-wimp-2021-the-dangerous-thin-gruel-of-joe-bidens-foreign-policy/

Forty-one years ago next month, the Boston Globe editorial page infamously allowed a joke headline for an editorial about a speech by President Jimmy Carter to slip through to the newspaper’s official print run. Some 161,000 copies of Beantown’s liberal newspaper giant sported the title “Mush from the Wimp” above a typically silly Globe exhortation to readers to follow the instructions of the nation’s clueless chief executive and “impose upon themselves the kind of economic self-discipline that President Carter urged …”

In 2021, mush has made a comeback in presidential rhetoric.

What’s more, to quote President Barack Obama as he taunted 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s focus on Russia, “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”

According to President Joe Biden in what was touted as the first major foreign policy address of his presidency on Thursday, America is faced with a “new moment of advancing authoritarianism,” namely Communist China and “the determination of Russia to damage and disrupt our democracy.”

Apparently, the reason we give the Pentagon $700 billion every year is to defend against the grave threat of Russian trolls setting up phony Facebook accounts to mislead American voters.

And how is the Arsenal of Democracy going to fight this mortal threat? Diplomacy! “We will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again,” the president assured us. The “accelerating global challenges, from the pandemic to the climate crisis to nuclear proliferation … will only to be solved by nations working together and in common. We can’t do it alone,” the new president said barely two weeks into his administration.

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/biden-foreign-policy-asssessment/

The Biden administration’s foreign policy is rapidly coming into view. Despite rhetoric designed to mollify Middle Eastern allies, the trajectory of decisions clearly favors a return to the Obama policy of elevating Iran at the expense of Israel and Sunni states. More broadly, key moves weaken the US stance against China while ensuring domestic turmoil. American allies will have to adjust to a period of American weakness and possibly even betrayal.

It is customary to give new US administrations a grace period before assessing their policies, but no administration in modern history has changed so much so fast. Literally dozens of executive orders signed by President Joe Biden have dramatically reversed the course of American foreign policy in a matter of days. The implications are potentially momentous, especially in the Middle East. 

Many predicted that a Biden administration would see a revival of Obama-era policies. This was more true than anyone could have imagined. With stunning speed, Biden has set about dismantling the legacy of the Trump administration across the board, including in foreign policy.

The manner in which this is occurring is classic Obama. On the one hand, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has stated repeatedly that the US is not in a rush to rejoin the JCPOA agreement with Iran, demanding that the latter first come into “full compliance.” But Iran has demanded the US do so first and provide compensation for sanctions, setting up a game of chicken where the party who desires the deal more will yield first.

At the same time, a series of US moves has signaled American desire to restore the status quo ante. The US has “temporarily paused” the sale of F-35s to the United Arab Emirates, describing the move as a “review,” which in Washington is usually code for quietly making a policy permanent. The sale of munitions to Saudi Arabia has also been suspended and comes after months of the Biden campaign criticizing Saudi human rights abuses, especially in Yemen. The ”reexamination” of the Trump administration’s designation of the Houthi movement as a terrorist organization also signals Biden’s re-acceptance of what Obama called Iran’s “equities.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17026/chasing-the-dragon

[The Biden Executive Order] order reverses a previous directive by the Trump administration last May, which found that “foreign adversaries are increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in the United States bulk-power system, which provides the electricity that supports our national defense, vital emergency services, critical infrastructure, economy, and way of life.” [Emphasis added.]

These systems are, of course, highly computerized and the Trump administration’s goal was to prevent the Chinese, America’s greatest geo-political and economic rival, from having their hands in it. Biden’s order strips that protection with the stroke of a pen.

So, where was the constituency for allowing the Chinese access to the market for providing critical equipment to run and manage the US power grid? Who was clamoring to undo protections from cyber-warfare directed against America’s power system?

[B]y cancelling the pipeline, Biden is not preventing any energy production of fossil fuels in Canada. He is simply shifting that consumption to China.

Economically, all Biden’s order does is damage America’s energy production and give the US less control of energy markets, and give China greater leverage.

With this one order, on his first day of work, Biden has given the communist government of China… a more favorable market for buying the oil that makes it the top producer of carbon-dioxide in the world. It is difficult to see how such moves, done unilaterally and without negotiating anything at all in return, make sense to the security of the U.S.

The timing alone raises questions about exactly which supporters Joe Biden was making happy.

On his first full day in office, President Joe Biden signed a massive executive order that, among other things, killed the Keystone XL pipeline project. Buried in that same order were two short sentences that will allow the Chinese government to get into the American electrical grid.

Located at Section 7(c), the order reverses a previous directive by the Trump administration last May, which found that “foreign adversaries are increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in the United States bulk-power system, which provides the electricity that supports our national defense, vital emergency services, critical infrastructure, economy, and way of life.” [Emphasis added.]

https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/02/arming-taiwan-against-china-is-a-smarter-strategy-than-sending-u-s-troops/

President Biden shouldn’t make empty promises. The strategy should be about bleeding China if they overstretch, rather than committing American lives to a potentially attritional war.

Largely unreported in corporate media, last week Chinese fighters apparently simulated sinking a U.S. carrier in an attack. On Jan. 23, according to intel sources, cockpit chatter highlighted a command to simulate targeting the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier group.

China has been in news over sporadic border clashes with India and a flyby of Taiwan on the day of President Biden’s inauguration. But a direct simulation of a strike on a U.S. carrier group signifies that Beijing now considers even a limited military clash with America over Taiwan within the realm of possibility.

That brings us to the biggest foreign policy question, which the Biden administration is likely not yet ready to face. What happens the day after China launches an invasion of Taiwan?

So far, the Biden administration’s reaction has signaled rhetorical continuity with the Trump era. American foreign policy wonks, despite all divisions, are bipartisan about the China threat. One might not hear it much in public, but despite being divided between realists who prefer a narrower national interest-based approach, and liberals and neoconservatives who prefer interventions and democracy promotion, foreign policy circles so far are united in their threat appraisal of the rise of China as the largest threat facing the United States.