Foreign Policy Under the Biden Administration and the Limits of Frontier.
Donald Trump was, like all presidents, yet an instrument in a larger machine, where the guiding forces of Capitalism and Militarism, in their various forms, articulate the true mechanisms of power by perpetuating forever wars, increasing military budgets, worldwide exploitation of resources, and never ending profit motives. His 2016 Presidential Campaign was a conglomeration of racist rhetoric, general demagoguery, and anti establishment appeal. He tapped into all the old bases of the Republican party with his racist comments and forward into his racist policies. But, he also tapped into a general malaise felt throughout the country that other Republicans did not. He spouted that he was against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that both the Obama and Bush Administrations had now mired us in indefinitely. He criticized the disastrous trade deals and neoliberal economic policies that The Clinton Administration ushered in, which would further hollow out the last pockets of industrialism in the United States. All of this was mealy mouthed however. Not a word of it was meant and it was foreseeable from the get go. A con artist by heart, he saw these legitimate yearnings for anti establishment sentiment and focused in on it, using it to his advantage to ascend to the presidency despite him not giving a shit about any of those pains that arose from the increasing anomie amongst rust belt enclaves. Trump was, before and after his presidency, a stooge for the military industrial complex and the other groups of Capitalist power that make up what C Wright Mills called “The Power Elite".
Pointing out Trump’s fake populist and fake anti establishment appeal and how, as president, he was as useful to the established order as those who preceded him were, makes it clear how power is truly exercised and carried out in this country. The same is true of examining the now current Joe Biden Administration. Any given president’s “foreign policy initiatives" closely examined reveal that all presidents are but figureheads for a corporate controlled world. By examining U.S foreign policy the raw nature of power and the grotesque belly of empire are truly shown. So let’s explore Joe Biden’s foreign policy and what his Administration’s policies toward the rest of the world mean in a larger context. Biden has been a war hawk for his entire career. He cheered on the Iraq & Afghanistan invasions respectively during his years as a senator. Later he would carry on not only both of those illegal occupations, but also helped his cohort in Barack Obama increase our illegal military interventions to over seven, with covert and overt operations being carried out in the likes of Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Now as president, he has oversaw the continuation of occupations in the Middle East by supporting the genocide in Yemen, a dirty war and funding of jihadist’s in Syria, the continual selling of arms to Apartheid Israel, and now the bombing of Somalia among other things. Like all presidents, Biden has been an interlocutor for corporate power who does the bidding of international capital and the codified complexes of Capitalist power such as the military industrial complex. However, as I write this the wind has changed directions. It appears as though the U.S military machine is leaving Afghanistan. Like many times before it seems dubious that they would truly leave because of the overwhelming noise the media apparatus made in resistance to a end of the occupation of Afghanistan. Even in the process of withdrawal the Biden Administration sent thousand more troops in to evacuate. At the end of the day however, so it appears, the U.S has left its ground occupation of Afghanistan and it’s Afghan security forces, that were claimed to have numbered around “300,000" troops, has evaporated in the span of a week in the face of the now governing Taliban.
Of course it is dishonest to call our withdraw from Afghanistan a “failure" due to some kind of mismanagement of the occupation. Our goal was never to go in and “get Al Qaeda" or even to nation build and create a functional colony in Afghanistan. The occupation was naturally useful for imperial extraction of mineral resources in the Hindu Kush and for the production and distribution of Opium. The U.S empire is also deeply interested in the occupation as a part of the global chessboard of the burgeoning “New Cold War". Afghanistan being a key region of Western Asia where oil pipelines, trade routes, mass travel, commercial development, and ultimately more efficient extraction of the regions natural resources is going to be in the future. The U.S would like to mitigate any influence and control of China and the Eastern Powers as part of the its imperial game. All these reasons aside, as Julian Assange exposed via numerous documents from WikiLeaks on the Afghanistan War, the main reason behind the Afghanistan Occupation was to “funnel money from tax bases in the U.S into the hands of a wealthy elite". In other words, Afghanistan and the U.S’s subsequent 20+ year occupation was akin to a giant laundering machine where tax dollars and national budgets are put in and out the other side comes death, destruction, and misery, and most importantly the funneling of money up to the 1%. A reading of the “Afghanistan Papers" put out by the Washington Post, one of those very outlets that now cries at the idea of leaving the forever war, also makes this reality clear given the countless examples of billions and ultimately trillions of dollars being dumped into Afghanistan. Even now after the takeover of the Taliban in Kabul, the former President of Afghanistan propped up by the U.S, Ashraf Ghani, has been seen in the U.A.E reportedly carrying with him 169 million dollars in cash, a complete affirmation of this clown show and how the U.S flooded money in to enrich the coffers of the wealthy. To further this affirmation it seems as though the entire 20 years of occupation is summarizing itself in these last days. A bomb set off in a crowd full of civilians at the Kabul international airport killed at least 170 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S service members. ISIS-K, a group created, funded, and transported by the CIA, claimed responsibility for the bomb attack. Meanwhile, a BBC report on the ground shows numerous Afghan Civilians were likely killed by U.S Forces firing into the crowd. Now Biden has promised to (in reference to news of a bombing at Kabul Airport) “we will not forgive, we will not forget, we will hunt you down and make you pay.” And now has followed suit by drone bombing what the DOD says are terrorist targets, but in actuality killed at least 9 civilians, 6 of them children.
Even in what appears to be a full withdraw of U.S Troops from Afghanistan, Joe Biden and the bloodthirsty American War Machine can’t help but pile more bodies on top of the 1.2 million civilians that have already been killed in the last 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan alone. This shows that the withdraw from Afghanistan is just a momentary change as far as American Foreign Policy is concerned. Surprisingly the massacre at Kabul Airport did not stop the withdrawal of troops and this is a good thing. However it was used as pretext for yet another illegal drone strike that, thanks to the brave leaks by whistleblower Daniel Hale, we know kills innocent civilians 90 percent of the time, including this incident. Disgusting murderous acts like this by the U.S are commonplace and something that will continue on despite the veneer of a 2 decades long occupation finally ending. So what does the end of U.S occupation of Afghanistan really mean if it doesn’t mean a direct end to the daily slaughter that takes place is Western Asia and the Middle East? I think, simply put, if the U.S could continue the occupation of Afghanistan forever for the purpose of extraction, geo-political strategy, and the siphoning of capital into the hands of a wealthy elite, it would. However, that time has passed for the United States and now it is an empire going into a fast tailspin. The American Empire has lost its prestige worldwide and the rest of the world sees this. Those who control the levers of the U.S Empire think that they can scale back some wars, resume others, and manage the machine so that our imperial reign may be hegemonic for another 60 years. This is not the case. The United States imperial domination has sewn the seeds to its own demise. Cheers to that!
