When
it comes to foreign policy,
the president of the United
States has two essential
roles. The first is to rein in
the military-industrial
complex, or MIC, which is
always pushing for war. The
second is to rein in U.S.
allies that expect the U.S. to
go to war on their behalf. A
few savvy presidents succeed,
but most fail. Joe Biden is
certainly a failure.
One
of the savviest presidents was
Dwight Eisenhower. In late
1956, he confronted two
simultaneous crises. The first
was a disastrously misguided
war launched by the United
Kingdom, France, and Israel to
overthrow the Egyptian
government and retake control
of the Suez Canal following
its nationalization by Egypt.
Eisenhower forced the allies
to stop their brazen and
illegal attack, including
through a U.S.-sponsored
United Nations General
Assembly resolution. The
second crisis was the
Hungarian Uprising against
Soviet domination of Hungary.
While Eisenhower sympathized
with the uprising, he wisely
kept the U.S. out of Hungary
and thereby avoided a
dangerous military showdown
with the Soviet Union.
Eisenhower’s
historic farewell
address to the American
people in January 1961 alerted
the public to the growing
power of the MIC:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Even Eisenhower did not fully
rein in the
military-industrial complex,
especially the Central
Intelligence Agency. No
president has done so
entirely. The CIA was created
in 1947 with two distinct
roles. The first and valid one
was as an intelligence agency.
The second and disastrous one
was as a covert army for the
president. In the latter
capacity, the CIA has led one
calamitous failure after
another from Eisenhower’s time
till now, including coups,
assassinations, and
stage-managed “color
revolutions,” all of which
have produced endless havoc
and destruction.
Following Eisenhower, John F.
Kennedy brilliantly resolved
the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis,
narrowly avoiding nuclear
Armageddon by facing down his
own war-mongering advisers to
reach a peaceful solution with
the Soviet Union. The
following year he successfully
negotiated the Partial Nuclear
Test Ban Treaty with the
Soviet Union, over Pentagon
objections, and then won
Senate ratification, thereby
pulling the U.S. and Soviet
Union back from the brink of
war. Many believe that
Kennedy’s peace initiatives
led to his assassination at
the hands of rogue CIA
officials. Biden has joined
the long line of presidents
that have kept classified or redacted
thousands of documents that
would shed more light on the
assassination.
Sixty years onward, the MIC
has an iron grip on American
foreign policy. As
I’ve recently described,
foreign policy has become an
insider racket, with the MIC
in control of the White House,
Pentagon, State Department,
the Armed Services Committees
of the Congress, and of course
the CIA, all in a tight
embrace with the major arms
contractors. Only an
exceptional president could
resist the endless
war-profiteering of this
mammoth war machine.
Alas, Biden doesn’t even try.
Throughout his long political
career, Biden has been
supported by the MIC and has
in turn enthusiastically
supported wars of choice,
massive arms sales, CIA-backed
coups, and NATO enlargement.
Biden’s 2024 military budget
breaks all records, reaching
at least $1.5 trillion in
outlays for the Pentagon, CIA,
homeland security,
non-Pentagon nuclear arms
programs, subsidized foreign
weapons sales, other
military-linked outlays, and
interest payments on past
war-related debts. On top of
this mountain of military
spending, Biden is seeking an
additional $50 billion in “emergency
supplemental funding”
for America’s “defense
industrial base” to keep
shipping munitions to Ukraine
and Israel.
Biden doesn’t have any
realistic plans for Ukraine,
and even
rejected a peace agreement between
Russia and Ukraine in March
2022 that would have ended the
conflict based on Ukrainian
neutrality by ending Ukraine’s
futile bid to join NATO
(futile because Russia will
never accept it). Ukraine is
big business for the MIC—tens
and potentially hundreds of
billions of dollars of arms
contracts, manufacturing
facilities across the U.S,,
the opportunity to develop and
test new weapons systems—so
Biden keeps the war going
despite the destruction of
Ukraine on the battlefield,
and the tragic and needless
deaths of hundreds of
thousands of Ukrainians. The
MIC, and hence Biden, continue
to shun negotiations, even
though direct U.S.-Russia
negotiations regarding NATO
and other security issues
(such as U.S. missile
placements in Eastern Europe)
could end the war.
In Israel, Biden’s failure is
even more on display. Israel
is led by an extremist
government that reviles the
two-state solution, according
to which Israelis and
Palestinians should live side
by side in two sovereign
peaceful and secure states, or
indeed any solution that
grants Palestinians their
political rights. The
two-state solution is deeply
embedded in international law,
including U.N.
Security Council and
General Assembly resolutions
and supposedly in U.S.
foreign policy. The
Arab and Islamic leaders are
committed to normalizing and
securing safe relations with
Israel in the context of the
two-state solution.
Yet Israel is led by violent
zealots who make the messianic
claim that God has given
Israel all the land of today’s
Palestine, including the West
Bank, Gaza, and East
Jerusalem. These zealots
therefore insist on political
domination over the millions
of Palestinians in their
midst, or their annihilation
or expulsion. Netanyahu and
his colleagues don’t even hide
their genocidal intentions,
though most foreign observers
don’t fully understand the biblical
references that the
Israeli leaders invoke to
justify their ongoing mass
slaughter of the Palestinian
people.
Israel now faces highly
credible charges of genocide in
the International Court of
Justice in a case brought by
South Africa. The documentary
record presented by South
Africa and
others is as clear as it
is chilling. Israeli politics
is not the politics of
pragmatism and certainly not
the politics of peace. It is
the politics of biblical
apocalypse.
Biden nonetheless provides
Israel with the munitions to
carry out its massive war
crimes. Instead of acting like
Eisenhower and pressing Israel
to end its slaughter in
contravention of international
law including the Genocide
Convention, Biden continues to
ship munitions, even bypassing
congressional review to
the maximum extent he can. The
result is U.S. diplomatic
isolation from the rest of the
world, and the growing
involvement of the U.S.
military in a war that is
rapidly and
all-too-predictably expanding
across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq,
Iran, and Yemen. In the recent
U.N. General Assembly vote
backing political
self-determination for the
people of Palestine, the
U.S. and Israel stood alone
save two votes:
Micronesia (bound by compact
to vote with the U.S.) and
Nauru (population 12,000).
America's foreign policy is
rudderless, with a president
whose only foreign policy
recipe is war. With the U.S.
already up to its neck in the
wars in Ukraine and the Middle
East, Biden also intends to ship
more arms to Taiwan despite
China’s strident objections
that the U.S. is thereby
violating long-standing U.S.
commitments to the One-China
policy, including the
commitment made 42 years ago
in the U.S.-PRC
Joint Communique that
the U.S. government “does not
seek to carry out a long-term
policy of arms sales to
Taiwan.” Eisenhower’s dire
prophecy has been confirmed.
The military-industrial
complex threatens our liberty,
our democracy, and our very
survival.