Joe Biden’s poisonous ‘gifts’ to the incoming Trump administration
Today’s breaking news in and around China was the U.S. delivery to Taiwan of a batch of advanced Abrams tanks. According to the Taiwanese defense ministry, the 38 tanks just received are from among the 109 tanks which they requested from the U.S. in 2019. These are the first new tanks to be delivered to Taiwan in 30 years.
The delivery, you note, is in Biden’s final weeks in office and it is a big provocation coming, as it does, after the major scandal in state-to-state relations caused by the visit of the Taiwanese president to the United States in the past week. The Chinese response to that outrage, which contradicts the One China policy concluded between Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung in the 1970s, was the largest ever deployment of its air and naval forces in the South China and East China seas for maneuvers demonstrating its power to control waterways out to the first island chain in defiance of American Pacific dominance.
Meanwhile, on the Ukrainian front, Washington is rushing to ship out vast new consignments of weapons and artillery shells to Kiev. This war materiel may have some limited impact on the ability of Ukrainian forces to resist the grinding daily advance of Russian troops westward in the Donbas. Or it may be destroyed by Russian missile attacks soon after crossing the border into Ukraine. However, its greater impact is psychological: to build Ukrainian confidence and willingness to fight to the bitter end and to provoke the Russians into escalatory retaliation that will make it impossible for Trump to proceed with plans to take the U.S. out of this war.
The common denominator of Biden’s final moves in office is to embroil the incoming Trump administration in foreign policy crises that will distract him from his stated ambition of bringing in an era of peace and will distract him from carrying out his pre-election promises of reversing U.S. domestic policy of the Biden years from top to bottom early in his tenure, when he has full control of Congress and the period of grace that each new president enjoys.
It is not a matter of concern to the outgoing Biden that what he is doing is totally irresponsible and may bring about a hot war which spins out of control. It is not a matter of concern to him that these very measures further consolidate the Russian-Chinese alliance which presents Washington with a two-front war that it cannot win. Moreover, both with respect to Russia and with respect to China, the Biden administration is precipitating a military conflict several years of its own schedule for raising military preparedness to the point where it has some chance of prevailing. In both cases, the target period Washington has designated for war with one or another of these adversaries is two or three years in the future. Stupid, very stupid, as Donald would say.
In closing, I point out that the issue of the Abrams shipment to Taiwan was the subject of a brief interview I had this morning with Press TV, Iran. If that is posted on the internet, I will add the link here.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024