Remember when, during the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden said that he would return us to the Iran deal (or JCPOA)? Yeah, that was awesome. Except that they haven’t done that, which is not so awesome. In fact, it’s infuriating. But it’s also exactly what we should have expected out of him, frankly – namely, that instead of reversing Trump’s most heinous foreign policy initiatives, Biden would adopt and even extend them into his own term.
Some readers may remember my posts from during the Biden/Trump race regarding Biden’s lack of focus on foreign policy issues. I wrote at the time about how his campaign site issues section didn’t have a single item on global affairs, other than some dreck about immigration from the southern cone nations. My contention at the time was that he had little good to say about it, and that he assumed his voters didn’t care about those issues. Perhaps he was right, but I have to think a section of Democratic party voters are a bit taken aback by some of his policies.
The toxic alliance
The JCPOA is the most glaring example of this. Biden could have reinstated this agreement with the stroke of a pen in the first days of his presidency. Instead, he chose to consult with then Israeli PM Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia – both openly hostile to Iran – before proceeding. Our State Department is balking on sanctions relief, and there’s little sign of progress over the past year. This agreement, very favorable to the U.S., is essentially dead in the water. Why?
Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute, who appeared on Majority Report last week, talked about Biden’s apparent support for strengthening the alliance of nations that are signatories to the Abraham Accords, a Trump initiative to defuse support for the Palestinians and isolate Iran. Parsi suggests that the JCPOA is a casualty of the administration’s desire to build a common front against the Iranians, pulling Israel together with some of the more pugnacious gulf states – an alliance built on common enmity. What a good idea.
Continuity: not our friend
Okay, so … why is our government – the government of normie Joe Biden, not crazy-ass Donald Trump – encouraging conflict in the Middle East instead of working toward peaceful outcomes of the sort the JCPOA was designed to produce? Well, this is nothing new in American foreign policy. Yes, they are extending one of Trump’s worst decisions. But they are also doing the same sort of thing the U.S. always does in various parts of the world.
Other examples aren’t hard to find. The first that comes to mind is another Trump reversal of a late Obama administration policy, the opening to Cuba. Trump shut that down entirely, and Biden has failed to even act as though he’s willing to reinstate it. The domestic political motivations are obvious, but again – why perpetuate conflict when normalization would bring greater stability and, of course, more benefits to Cubans living in the U.S.?
The other obvious example is Korea. Here is one instance when Trump’s instincts were, at a certain point, better than Biden’s. Why have we failed to settle the Korean conflict when the solution is almost entirely in our hands? Same reason with all of the other endless conflicts: we want to remain a force to be reckoned with in all of these regions. We want to keep potential economic rivals – like an integrated Asia – from emerging. Same old, same old.
The way forward
There are a handful of members of Congress who understand these issues. We need more like them. I know elections are not the only thing, but they’re worth the modicum of effort we all need to put into them. Look at the candidates vying for your district’s House seat, find the most progressive, and vote. We need allies in government before we’ll see some movement on backing off of the bipartisan neoimperialist agenda.
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The Sharpie ink was barely dry on Trump’s memorandum to leave the JCPOA before Israel began threatening more action against Iran and Syria. Just the previous week, an official had threatened a decapitation raid on Syria if Assad would not stop hosting Iranians. Now they are firing missiles at “Iranian” targets in Syria supposedly to protect Israelis in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights. The Trump administration, of course, is reflexively supporting Israel in this, but it’s obvious what’s happening here. Netanyahu and his allies are turning up the heat on Iran in order to provoke a larger than usual response; this in the hopes of triggering a sizable American military attack on Iranian forces in Syria or on Iran itself.
It’s a war that Bibi doesn’t want to fight, and with good reason. Sure, they have undeclared nuclear weapons – hundreds of them – but those are pretty much useless beyond their value as an end-of-the-world threat. The fact is, Israel can’t win a conventional war with Iran, and they know it. Iran would be a difficult adversary, as well as a vast territory to subdue and occupy – it has “strategic depth”, as Col. Lawrence Wilkerson has pointed out. But honestly, when was the last time Israel won an actual war? 1973? Don’t say Lebanon – sure, they drove the PLO out of Beirut (at an enormous cost to the population), but by no means did that end positively for them. Their armed forces have suffered from too much colonial population control – thugging the Palestinians, in essence. But they still want to overthrow the Iranian regime. That’s where we come in.
It’s not hard to see why Trump is on the same page as practically every political leader in America in treating Iran like a muck room rug. Israel wants us to attack them. Saudi wants us to attack them. The UAE wants us to attack them. And the majority of Americans are under the spell of the propaganda campaign about the incomparable evils of Iran. We’ve been fed this with a fire hose since the immediate aftermath of the Iranian revolution and the “hostage crisis” – basically my entire adult life. It has been reinforced over the intervening decades, through the Iran-Iraq war years (recall the “hostages” in Lebanon), the confrontations in the 90s, their inclusion in the “Axis of Evil”, and so on. Trump is a product of the same smear campaign.