I have made my thoughts known on a Biden foreign policy before and after he was elected…..https://lobotero.com/2021/02/08/biden-on-foreign-policy/ ……(Thoughts about a candidate Biden foreign policy contained in this post)

Step back in time some 20 years and a statement made by then Sen. Joe Biden…..”In short,” said the senator, “Congress decides whether to make war, and the president decides how to do so…. We have been told that the congressional debate on war could tie the president’s hands or limit his discretion….. Exactly right. Americans once lived under a system where one man had unfettered choice to decide by himself whether we could go to war or not go to war, and we launched a revolution to free ourselves from the tyranny of such a system.”

And yet he goes against his own principle and ordered a strike as his first foreign policy action.

In his first foreign policy speech he states that “diplomacy is back”…..which is just another slogan…..

“Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy,” President Biden told a happy crowd at the State Department soon after taking office. “We must start with diplomacy.”

 

In the four weeks since making that speech, Biden has bombed Syria, failed to begin talks with Iran, and given Saudi Arabian leaders a pass for murdering a journalist who lived in Washington. He seems likely to repudiate the accord under which American troops must leave Afghanistan in May. If this is diplomacy, what would militarism look like?

The report that Biden’s new defense budget will look a lot like the old defense budget brought sighs of relief to defense hawks who’d spent the last two years prepping for deep cuts in military outlays, reflecting the economic cratering that has accompanied the global pandemic as well as growing unease over the “Trump bump,” which saw defense expenditures rise by $100 billion over three years. “With slim Democratic majorities in the House and Senate and resistance among moderate Democrats to cutting defense significantly, a major reduction in the budget is unlikely,” a Center for Strategic and International Studies paper recently noted.

Why does the Democratic Party want the Cold War back? Senator Mark Warner and Representative Adam Schiff tell us that Russia is the destroyer of democracy at home and abroad. Vladimir Putin, in their view, is seeking more than reasonable elbow room in Eastern Europe. He aims to subvert and conquer America. In a podcast conversation with Nancy Pelosi after the January 6 Capitol riot, Hillary Clinton said she would “love to see” Trump’s phone records from that day to find out if he was consulting with Putin. This fantastical supposition was greeted by Pelosi with instant credulity: “All roads lead to Putin.”

Where would they be without an enemy? These Democrats have already formed an implicit alliance with Republicans Liz Cheney, Tom Cotton, and Nikki Haley, as well as assorted media friends of the war party dating back to Iraq, such as Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin. There are reasons to hope that Joe Biden’s foreign policy team will have a sounder balance, but the dramatis personae thus far leave an uneasy impression. Susan Rice, a careerist of the foreign policy elite who stopped just short of the highest rung under Barack Obama—having been denied promotion to secretary of state, owing to her association with the Benghazi disaster—has been put in charge of domestic policy. Yet she is hardly likely to stay away from the discussions that interest her more. Antony Blinken at the State Department, Jake Sullivan at the National Security Council, and Samantha Power as head of the US Agency for International Development will administer democracy-promotion initiatives that in the past have been known to include shipments of “armed doctrine.”