Assessing a Biden administration's possibilities

The Democrats’ victory in the general election was made possible by the horrifying death toll of the Covid-19 pandemic and the criminal recklessness of the Trump administration, rather than an enthusiastic embrace of Biden’s policies, ideas, or his nearly half-centurylong record in public office. For millions of voters, this was not a choice between Biden and Trump — it was a referendum on Trump, and Biden’s name on the ballot was a stand-in for “No!”

[...]

Biden’s win was not a decisive victory born of the politics of the party establishment, no matter how hard that establishment wants to claim it. If anything, it showed that millions of Americans, including large numbers of progressives and young voters, were willing to put their own political principles and preferences aside in an effort to ensure Trump would be defeated.

[...]

Throughout the past two electoral cycles in particular, Democratic Party elites have openly embraced the principle that waging war against the left is crucial to maintaining their grip on power. They engaged in systematic red-baiting against Bernie Sanders in both 2016 and 2020. They railed against Medicare for All, supported massive corporate bailouts and giveaways, and backed bloated Pentagon budgets. While attacking the left, Democratic Party leaders have steadily embraced George W. Bush and other imperial Republicans as part of their imagined coalition of adults in the room. The past four years of Trump have brought remarkable public clarity to one of the most pernicious aspects of the two-party system: The traditional elites of the Democratic and Republican parties have more affection for each other than they do for the ordinary people whose fates they love to wield as rhetorical ornaments in their campaign speeches.

[...]

We know that there are more than 73 million people who watched the open corruption, gross incompetence, spiteful and dangerous policymaking, and the constant encouragement of racist violence and hatred overseen by this administration and chose to endorse it with their votes for four more years of Trump. The whole world can see how the Republican Party morphed almost overnight into one gigantic campaign rally celebrating the most insane directives and lies of a notorious charlatan who boasts of his mastery of bankruptcies. But Trump did not alter the ideological core of the Republican Party, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has frequently lamented while nostalgically dreaming of the golden era of Bush’s murderous eight years. If anything, Trump’s reign has quite dramatically exposed the GOP for what it really is and has always been.

[...]

We have also seen a great unmasking of the institutional Democratic Party. [...] We heard time and again the very Democratic Party politicians who warned us that Trump had been compromised by a hostile foreign power and represented the gravest danger to our Democratic system in history vote to give expanded and sweeping military and surveillance powers to that very president.

[...]

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s brief stint as a candidate mostly consisted of spending enormous amounts of money smearing Sanders in a relentless campaign of paid advertising and the peddling of scurrilous “oppo research.” Hillary Clinton continued to relitigate the 2016 primaries, including through a strategically timed release of a hagiography of her masquerading as a Hulu documentary. Biden and other candidates, prominently Pete Buttigieg, deployed red-baiting and frequently invoked decades-old comments Sanders made about the Cuban revolution and Fidel Castro, just as Clinton had used the Nicaraguan Sandinistas of the 1980s and Cuba of the 1960s in her attacks against Sanders in 2016.

[...]

After Sanders won the Nevada caucus with overwhelming union worker, youth, immigrant, and Latino backing, MSNBC host Chris Matthews compared the victory to the Nazi invasion of France. Chuck Todd quoted a conservative writer who compared the online supporters of Sanders, a Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors, to Nazi “Brownshirts.” The campaign to push Biden on the electorate also included high stakes, behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Barack Obama, Clinton, and other elite Democratic figures, and the simultaneous withdrawal of other establishment candidates who issued hurried endorsements of Biden on the eve of Super Tuesday.

[...]

The establishment camp of the Democratic Party and its online minions projected the myth that securing the votes of Republicans was a crucial necessity to beat Trump. They amplified the message that choosing Sanders would lose this vital demographic and ensure a Trump victory. It was always a fraud. Trump actually increased his share of Republican voters in the election versus 2016.

[...]

The dirty truth is that neoconservatives felt at home with the establishment Democratic Party, particularly on matters of national security policy, long before Trump came to power. More than a decade ago, as President-elect Obama and Biden built their national security and foreign policy teams from 2008 to 2009, they stacked their administration with Democratic hawks and cruise missile liberals and kept George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates in charge of the Pentagon. Conservative Republicans heaped praise on their appointments. Karl Rove called their Cabinet “reassuring,” and Boot, a neoconservative writer and former McCain campaign staffer, beamed about the foreign policy team: “I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain.”

[...]

Obama and Biden dramatically expanded U.S. drone strikes, including systematic strikes in new countries. They initiated a secret bombing campaign in Yemen in late 2009 that eventually metastasized into the genocidal Saudi-led scorched-earth war that continues to this day. They facilitated regime change in Libya, surged troops in Afghanistan, and imposed or tightened deadly economic sanctions in a variety of nations. The Obama-Biden administration developed an almost clinical process for compiling kill lists and then sentencing people to death through a Frankenstein extralegal system of unofficial judges, juries, and executioners. Among their kills were several U.S. citizens, including a teenager who was never accused of any crime. Obama openly rejected calls to hold CIA torturers accountable and failed to close Guantánamo. No, Biden and the institutional Democratic Party didn’t need to convince these Never Trump Republicans to join their cause in 2020. They were already there.

[...]

Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, is a well-known interventionist who backed the disastrous regime-change war in Libya, advocated for more military action in Syria, and, while serving in the Obama administration, supported the criminally brutal war in Yemen and arming Saudi Arabia. In 2015, it was Blinken who announced that the Obama-Biden administration was bolstering its support to the Saudis specifically for their war in Yemen. “We have expedited weapons deliveries, we have increased our intelligence-sharing, and we have established a joint coordination planning cell in the Saudi operation center,” Blinken said during a visit to Riyadh in April 2015.

[...]

The nominee for director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, was a key player in developing the Obama administration’s global assassination program. She was a prominent defender of Gina Haspel, a central player in the CIA’s kidnap and torture program, and supported her nomination by Trump to serve as CIA director. Haines was reportedly so central to the drone assassination program that she would at times be awoken in the middle of the night to help decide whether to kill someone on the other side of the world with a Reaper or Predator drone. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s pick for national security adviser, is a Clinton acolyte who was a central player in the Obama-Biden Libya regime-change war and a well-known proponent of U.S. militarism.

[...]

Among the reported frontrunners to take the helm of the CIA is Bush’s former national security briefer Michael Morell. Like Haspel, Morell is career CIA and has defended the post-9/11 use of kidnapping and torture. He was also a major proponent of drone strikes and defended Haspel’s role in the destruction of CIA torture tapes. In the aftermath of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, Morell sought to place some of the blame on internet and communications companies “building encryption without keys” following Edward Snowden’s revelations about National Security Agency spying. “That is all, at the end of the day, back in Snowden’s lap, in my view,” Morell said.

[...]

Biden has yet to name a nominee for defense secretary, but former Undersecretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy has been repeatedly floated as a top candidate and enthusiastically promoted in D.C. foreign policy circles as the perfect candidate to become the first woman to serve in the post. Flournoy, a Clinton supporter, was a foreign policy adviser to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. After leaving the Obama administration in 2012, Flournoy — a notorious hawk who backed the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen and pushed for Obama to intervene in Libya — has worked for a variety of military consulting ventures. Among them was WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm she co-founded with Blinken to assist corporations in winning lucrative government contracts.

[...]

Flournoy also serves on the board of military and intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Among other unsavory projects, Booz has provided services to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman since 2015 when it aided him in his brutal campaign to consolidate his power. It also trained the Saudi navy, which enforced a catastrophic blockade of Yemen. [...] Flournoy joined a gaggle of mostly neocons at the notorious Project for the New American Century in criticizing the Bush administration for not being militaristic enough in its foreign policy and arguing for an increase in ground troops in the Middle East. [...] Flournoy has long had fans among the neoconservative camp, and Paul Wolfowitz and Kristol publicly campaigned for her to take over as defense secretary under Obama in 2012.

[...]

There are undoubtedly foreign policy areas in which the Biden administration will correct Trump’s egregious actions, particularly in the case of the Iran nuclear deal, which Sullivan played a key role in crafting. But there are also areas in which Biden could prove more hawkish than Trump, particularly on North Korea, Afghanistan, and the question of troop deployments. In all the beltway scuttlebutt around Biden’s Cabinet, there is no mention of open critics of U.S. war-making being considered for any key national security positions. This is not an oversight. This is how the business of protecting the militarized myth of American exceptionalism is performed by the establishment Democratic Party.

[...]

[Biden] is the epitome of the bipartisan D.C. foreign policy establishment.

  Jeremy Scahill