It had not taken Joe Biden long after he entered the White House to rearrange the chairs in the Oval Office, but it was the new 46th president of the United States himself who was responsible for the urgent need to put makeup on the hostile grin of the White House. And these urgent measures were forced not only by the sharply negative reaction in many countries of the world to the Biden-initiated bombing of an independent state, Syria, on February 25, but also by a similar reaction within the United States itself. Senators from both US parties remained unhappy with United States President Joseph Biden’s own decision to launch airstrikes against Syria in late February and openly protested him.
Under these circumstances, the “image-makers” of the new US administration suggested that it should urgently make a series of public speeches aimed at creating a “respectable image of a peace-loving America”. So the White House is urgently making public, in early March, the transitional provisions of the national security strategy, with a special emphasis on the thesis that the United States allegedly does not want to engage in endless wars: “The United States should not and will not engage in ‘perpetual’ wars that cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. We will work responsibly to end the longest US war in Afghanistan.”
At the same time, the intention is declared to establish a dialogue between Washington, Moscow and Beijing on new military technologies. The United States, according to the published document, is open to new arms control agreements, the American side wants to restore its authority in this area.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a speech on March 3 on Washington’s strategic foreign policy priorities, was also quick to declare that the new US administration has no intention of implanting democracy in other countries through military interventions and the replacement of authoritarian regimes.
However, the guile of the Biden administration can be clearly seen with the naked eye. First, the approaches to world politics of the members of the team of the new US president were formed in the school of liberal interventionism, which consists in violent export of democracy in the American way to those countries that are considered “undesirable” in Washington. The 44th US President Barack Obama, from whose team Biden himself emerged, believed that it was necessary to change those regimes that threaten the United States even by their political existence, and in their place by all means (including force) to put new regimes that meet the expectations of the United States and its Western partners. And Biden’s continuity on this issue is fully confirmed by the bombing of Shiite militia camps in Syria at the end of February.
As for the White House’s declaration in Biden’s revised US national security strategy of an alleged desire to establish substantive dialogue with Russia and China on new military technologies, including strategic stability, even this is a blatant deception and distortion of reality. Suffice it to recall that at the same time as these statements, the United States announced that Russia was on the list of countries to which it is forbidden to export defense technologies and imposed other restrictions on Russia. Similar bans are imposed by Washington on China. So the question is: Is a dialogue between Beijing and Moscow and Washington possible under these conditions?
Given the situation, it is also appropriate to recall White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s statement of March 5 that “US President Joe Biden believes that it is necessary to update the policy of using US military force abroad”. — Does this mean that the new administration is not talking about abandoning military operations, but only about “renewing them”?
In these circumstances, one cannot help recalling the actions of Richard Nixon, who in his campaign speeches and in his first weeks in power claimed that he would bring order to the country, end the war in Vietnam that had been raging for twelve years. Nixon took office at the end of January, and in March the first US Army units began to leave Vietnam. It was not, however, an end to the war. Only the methods have changed: The US intensified its bombing of North Vietnam, and instead of US soldiers, the US sent its instructors to the region to train the South Vietnamese army. In this way, only a “strategy update” was carried out. The war continued, with trained and equipped South Vietnamese fighters fighting instead of American soldiers. Moreover, secretly from the public, Nixon began bombing Cambodia, where he believed there were Viet Cong bases. Then, as part of the covert Operation Menu, raids were conducted in Cambodia, with the US president hiding the true state of affairs, and official US Air Force press releases labeled the attacks as “routine operations in Vietnam”. Only two months later, The New York Times published what was happening in Cambodia… Then came Seymour Hersh’s article about the Mỹ Lai massacre by American soldiers, and the world learned about the tragedy perpetrated in March 1968 by Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army, which resulted in the death of up to half a thousand civilians!
Doesn’t all this sound much like current events and Biden’s behavior? Even the airstrikes on Syria, where the new administration (like Nixon in Cambodia) suspects the location of rebel bases opposing the presence of American soldiers in Iraq and starts bombing them. Are we really going to wait for a repeat of Mỹ Lai under the guise of Joe Biden’s fake sly smiles and Antony Blinken’s statements trying so hard to cover up the true aspirations of the new administration?
Vladimir Odintsov, political observer, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
