Biden administration’s foreign policy playing with dynamite

“A week is a long time in politics,” the late British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once observed.

The presidential election has been in a static state since the coronation of Vice President Kamala Harris at the Democratic convention. There has been only the usual trench warfare, with the Democrats talking mostly about abortion and the Republicans about inflation. But I hold to the opinion that there is an undercurrent that can burst forth at any time from public anxiety about a drift toward nuclear war, resulting from the Wilsonian politics and attitudes of the Biden-Harris administration with its blank checks to nationalists in smaller countries that are ostensibly American allies.

Like the undeclared wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Libya and Korea after the 38th parallel was regained, the new conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East lack the public support conferred by declarations of war. Whether Ukraine is partitioned, as Russia now seems ready to agree to, or whether a united Ukraine whose parliamentary proceedings resembled a rugby match more than those of a united nation is restored is of little moment to the United States. Similarly, the expulsion of Israel from its expansionist West Bank settlements would not prejudice American interests. Already, as recently noted by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, many Israelis have fled to Western and other countries, leaving room for repatriation to Israel proper of settlers who have known from the outset that their legal and political situation was precarious.

The Ukraine conflict was in some measure precipitated by blustering declarations by the United States proclaiming Ukraine’s right to join NATO, an unlikely prospect because of German and French opposition. Terrorist atrocities in Gaza derived from the unsupportable conditions that have resulted from Israeli policy over the last 75 years and from depleted Israeli defenses because of Israel’s settlements policy.

When it became obvious that Russia could not prevent the threat of NATO accession by swiftly extinguishing Ukrainian independence, mediation efforts by Turkey were rebuffed, and the United States encouraged Ukrainian nationalists to try to reclaim Crimea and areas of Donetsk and Luhansk absorbed by Russia in 2014.

The Netanyahu government was supported in refusing to negotiate with terrorists, although most postwar decolonization has involved negotiations with terrorists, and Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir had themselves led terrorist organizations, the Irgun and the Stern Gang.

U.S. policy has been led by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, complicit in promoting the “dodgy dossier” on Donald Trump that led to the Mueller investigation, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who solicited signatures for a manifesto declaring the Hunter Biden laptop to be part of a Russian plot. One cannot picture such behavior by Secretaries of State Charles Evans Hughes or George C. Marshall, who were not embarrassments to their country.

From playing with matches, Blinken and Sullivan have graduated to playing with dynamite. What else can be said of our silence about massive drone attacks on the outskirts of Moscow? “America stands with Israel (or Ukraine)” has taken the place of the principles of Washington’s Farewell Address.

It is not pleasant to think of the effects on our inflamed domestic polity of a strike by a Russian surrogate on an American oil terminal in, say, Long Island City, or of the return of American body bags from the Middle East.

Whatever else may be said of former President Donald Trump, an incipient Adolf Hitler in the language of his more inflamed critics, it is true that, as Richard Evans, the leading historian of Nazism, has noted, he has been an isolationist or non-interventionist and abstained from foreign military adventures. It is Trump who said of Ukraine, “You can never replace those cities and towns. And you can never replace the dead people, so many dead people.”

And while Blinken and Sullivan might not stay on under a Harris presidency, their replacements are more likely to be “humanitarian interventionists” of the school of Madeline Albright, Hillary Clinton, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Samantha Power, not advocates of realism and restraint. “Humanitarian intervention,” as Columbia University Professor Mark Mazower has suggested, causes “the boundaries between domestic and foreign, legal and illegal, civilian and combatant [to] become confused as never before … a vocabulary of permissions, a means of asserting power and control that normalizes the debatable and justifies the exception.” It is no accident that the most noted apologists for the undeclared second Iraq war, with its torture practices and detentions without trial, including William Kristol and the Cheneys, have flocked to the standard of Harris.

Trump is not an exponent of rational discourse, but he has not been an apostle in any context of a foreign policy based on the issuance of blank checks. He is an unlikely Prince of Peace, and a continuation of present policies is likely to elect him.

George Liebmann ([e-mail]), writing in his individual capacity, is president of the Library Company of the Baltimore Bar and the author of various works on law and politics, most recently “The Tafts” (Twelve Tables Press, 2023).