Foreign Correspondent: The Challenge for Joe Biden-- If He’s Smart, The President-Elect Will Stop The Unpopular Endless Wars And Use The Money To Help Our Domestic Economy

 

-by Reese Erlich

I’m pissed. I’m pissed at Donald Trump for trying to shut down the vote count early and at Republicans seeking to steal the election using conservative-appointed federal judges.

But I’m also mad at Joe Biden and the Democratic Party big shots who got Biden elected but failed to win the Senate and lost House seats. It  should have been a blowout. The country faces a deadly pandemic, a massive recession, history’s largest budget deficit, and a frequently exposed system of institutional racism. What more would it take to trounce Trump, a plague of locusts?

Biden’s campaign was supposed to be the moderate alternative to extremist Trump. Lunch Pail Joe was supposed to win back the support of white, blue-collar workers who had defected to the Republicans. Campaign organizers said he would energize Black and Latinx voters. But there wasn’t much of a shift among non-college educated men. And those folks who did go Democratic largely voted against Trump, not for Biden. It’s as if Biden had undergone an enthusiasm bypass.

Trump’s populist appeal has strong racist and misogynist elements, but also reflects a genuine anger at economic inequality and endless wars. If Biden simply returns to mainstream Democratic Party governance, it won’t satisfy the Democratic Party base nor those Trump supporters with legitimate complaints.

So what is to be done?

Biden will have his hands full reversing Trump’s disastrous domestic policies. But he can also make serious changes in US foreign policy.

Biden can implement progressive and popular policies during his first 100 days in office, in many cases, programs that he already promised and which don’t require Congressional approval.

These include:

Stop the war in Yemen:

This years-long conflict, which benefits no one but the oil-rich rulers of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, has killed more than 100,000 people and caused the preventable deaths of 113,000 children. Biden could immediately freeze weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, forcing them to stop bombing civilians and withdraw their troops. It would be one step toward ending unpopular, endless wars.

Earlier this year, Democrats and anti-interventionist Republicans in the Senate voted to invoke the War Powers Act to stop funding the Yemen war. It was vetoed by Trump.

To his credit, Biden supported the war powers resolution. His campaign spokesperson Andrew Bates told the Washington Post, "Vice President Biden believes it is past time to end US support for the war in Yemen and cancel the blank check the Trump Administration has given Saudi Arabia for its conduct of that war."

Rejoin the Paris climate agreement:

Human-caused climate change is real. Lower temperatures are melting the polar ice caps and contributing to a host of disasters from intense hurricanes along the Gulf coast to wildfires in California. The Paris Agreement was ratified by nearly 200 countries in April 2016 with the goal of limiting global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The agreement, which the US officially exited on November 4, has serious flaws. For example, all carbon emission reductions are voluntary. Rejoining the agreement will send a message to the world that Washington takes the issue seriously. The administration should develop immediate plans for a much stronger international climate accord.

Biden’s Clean Energy Plan states that he “will not only recommit the US to the Paris Agreement on climate change, but will lead an effort to get every major country to ramp up the ambition of their domestic climate targets.” The plan advocates “a 100 percent clean energy economy [in the US] and net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”

Lift Trump’s unilateral oil blockade of Cuba and restore normal diplomatic relations:

Trump has gone further to economically attack Cuba than any other President. He cut off much of Cuba’s oil supplies from Venezuela by applying sanctions against international shipping companies. This, combined with a halt in foreign tourism, has wrecked the Cuban economy. Public transport doesn’t have enough gasoline; trucks can’t bring produce from the countryside.

The people of Cuba pose no danger to the US. During the later part of Barack Obama’s presidency, people from the US freely visited Cuba, to the benefit of both countries. During the campaign, Biden said, “As President, I will promptly reverse the failed Trump policies that have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.”

With a stroke of the pen Biden could lift the oil embargo, re-open US visits to Cuba, and fully staff the Embassy in Havana, which is now operating with a skeleton crew.

Rejoin the Iran nuclear accord:

Trump unilaterally withdrew from the internationally binding Iran nuclear accord and imposed harsh economic sanctions on the Iranian people. This policy of “maximum pressure” has failed to change Iranian domestic or foreign policy. Biden should immediately rejoin the accord and lift all sanctions related to nuclear issues.

In September, Biden wrote, “If Iran returns to strict compliance with the nuclear deal, the US would rejoin the agreement as a starting point for follow-on negotiations.” He added that the new administration would lift the “disgraceful” ban that prohibits Iranians and people from other Muslims nations from entering the US.

But Biden’s promises were couched in bellicose, Cold War rhetoric about Iran’s alleged threats to the US. Democratic and Republican hawks will certainly pressure Biden to take a hard line against Iran. But both countries would benefit from re-implementing the accord and lowering tensions.

End attacks on China:

Trump initiated a trade war against China. He tried to ban Chinese technology from being used in the US and even sought the arrest of a top Chinese corporate executive. But, of course, China retaliated. Trump’s policy against China has been a massive failure, with the US losing nearly 300,000 jobs as of September 2019.

China poses no military threat to the people of the US. China has one military base outside its territory; the US has about 750. China now has also developed the world’s second largest economy and competes successfully with US corporations. The trade war is aimed at promoting US corporate profits at the expense of Chinese competitors.

With executive action, Biden could end the trade war quickly. Unfortunately, Biden has “drunk the Kool-Aid” when it comes to China. He said, “My focus will be on rallying our friends in both Asia and Europe in... joining us to get tough on China and its trade and technology abuses.”

Biden must shift policies on China as part of recognizing that the world has changed a lot in recent years.

Joe Biden is a mainstream Democrat who supported many of the foreign policy disasters of past presidencies. He backed the occupation of Afghanistan and the 2003 Iraq War, and he strongly supports Israel against the Palestinians.

But today, the US is considerably weaker, wracked by recession, and politically divided.  People are fed up with endless wars. Regional powers such as Turkey, Russia, and Iran are exerting influence in areas formerly under US domination.

If he’s smart, Biden will recognize the new reality, stop US interventions, and use the money being spent on foreign wars to help our domestic economy. I’m confident he will make some promised changes but progressives will have to build grass roots pressure to make the changes we really need.

Foreign Correspondent: What Bolivia Can Teach the U.S. About Fair Elections-- The South American Nation Sets An Example Of How To Undo A Coup

 

-by Reese Erlich

Imagine the following nightmare: The US faces a close vote in the presidential election. Trump claims voter fraud and seeks backing from the nation’s military, who then stage a coup to keep him in power.

Farfetched? The Trump Administration already did it in Bolivia last year.

In October 2019, officials in Washington, D.C., orchestrated phony claims of election fraud by Bolivia’s socialist government. The military forced the winner, President Evo Morales, to flee the country. It then installed an ultra-right regime that carried out civilian massacres and arrested opponents on trumped up charges.

But the people of Bolivia never accepted the coup regime. On October 18 this year they voted overwhelmingly to elect Luis Arce Catacora of the leftist Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), the party founded by Morales. Arce easily surpassed conservative, former president Carlos Mesa and far-right candidate Luis Fernando Camacho.

Thomas Field, associate professor Global Security and Intelligence at Arizona’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, tells me the US can learn from Bolivia’s 2019 election. The coup leaders claimed fraud based on a preliminary count and rejected the final count that included late reports from rural areas.

“You have to wait until all the votes are counted,” he says. “Late votes matter.”

In Bolivia, opposition parties accepted the 2020 election results, even the ultra-right wingers. Trump, however, has refused to agree to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses.

“If the far right in Bolivia is more democratic than Trump,” Field says, “we’re in deep trouble.”

Earlier elections

During a 2008 trip to Bolivia on assignment for NPR’s Latino USA, I covered attempts by right-wingers to oust Morales through a referendum. But he defeated the effort and was later reelected president three times.

In October 2019, Morales ran for a fourth term. The official vote count showed he beat his closest opponent by just over 10 percent. In response, the Organization of American States (OAS) insisted that a major discrepancy between the preliminary quick count and the final tally showed Morales couldn’t have won. The opposition claimed fraud.

The military backed street demonstrations in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, and forced Morales to resign. He fled the country and took exile in Argentina.

But the OAS attack on the elections quickly fell apart. As two election specialists wrote in the Washington Post, “the statistical evidence does not support the claim of fraud in Bolivia’s October [2019] election.”

Jake Johnston, a senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., wrote an eighty-five-page analysis of the 2019 elections.

“The OAS grossly misrepresented the facts,” he tells me in an interview. The organization manipulated the data in order to reach “a political conclusion aimed at justifying the removal of a democratically elected president.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, US Ambassador to the OAS Carlos Trujillo played a key role in “steering” the OAS “to report widespread fraud and pushed the Trump Administration to support the ouster of Morales.”

U.S. role

The ruling elite in Washington has long opposed the socialist policies of Bolivia for economic and geopolitical reasons. The MAS government established close relations with Cuba, Venezuela, and other leftist governments in Latin America. Bolivia is rich in natural gas and contains 70 percent of the world’s lithium, a key mineral used in electric car batteries.

MAS sought to break the traditional model of foreign corporations extracting minerals and shipping them abroad. Morales wanted to generate jobs by manufacturing lithium batteries and started a pilot project to make electric cars.

After the coup, however, the regime wanted to return to the old extractive model and wooed Elon Musk, founder of the Tesla electric car company. Musk publicly supported the coup.

In a twitter exchange, Musk wrote, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”

Socialism in Bolivia

MAS, which was first elected in 2006, produced impressive economic gains. Extreme poverty dropped from 36 to 17 percent. The socialists introduced a universal old age pension program and cut unemployment by 50 percent.

Bolivia went from being the second-poorest country in South America to a lower-middle tier country, according to an analysis by the World Bank.

For the first time in Bolivia’s history, the country’s Indigenous people saw significant economic improvements and steps towards political empowerment. In 2009, a new constitution provided rights for the country’s thirty-six Indigenous groups, including equal status for their judicial systems and government courts.

International election observers agreed that the October 18 vote was free and fair. All of the ballots were counted in public, according to Leonardo Flores, an official election observer and member of the US-based group Code Pink. The vote tally was posted publicly at all precincts, allowing for a quick count of the ballots.

“These elections are much more transparent than in the US,” Flores tells me in a phone interview from the capital city of La Paz.

Arce won a decisive 55 percent of the vote, a 21-point lead over his closest rival, Carlos Mesa.

2020 elections

MAS won the election, according to Bolivia expert Field, by mobilizing its strong, traditional base and picking up support from those disgusted with the coup regime.

The coup leaders carried out brutal massacres against the opposition when they came to power in 2019, and gave security forces immunity from prosecution.

“It will go down in history as one of the most brutal regimes in decades,” Field says.

Flores adds, “This was very much a vote against fascism and a vote for socialism.”

Flores notes that MAS is not a traditional political party because it works closely with grassroots unions, peasant associations, and neighborhood groups-- all of which promise to keep pressure on the new MAS government to maintain progressive policies.

Flores describes a recent meeting in which members of the Women’s Alliance criticized what they considered the demobilization of the social movements prior to the coup. Leftist street demonstrations had largely stopped during the Morales presidency, the women said, but, as one activist put it, “We will be willing to go to the streets now.”

Serious problems ahead

The new government faces serious problems when it comes into office next month. The country is reeling from an international recession, low commodity prices and a spreading coronavirus pandemic.

MAS will have to revamp the institutions that provided unemployment, welfare, and pensions.

President Arce promises to re-nationalize key industries as a means of raising government funds. “We need public companies and also solid tax revenues to guarantee all the social programs we have,” he said in April.

Meanwhile, Flores hopes people in the US learn the lessons of Bolivia.

If Trump tries to stay in power despite losing the election,  Flores says, “Lawsuits and speeches by Democratic Party leaders” won't be enough. “You have to organize and take to the streets.”



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Reese Erlich’s Foreign Correspondent column appears every two weeks. Erlich is an adjunct professor in International Studies at the University of San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter, @ReeseErlich; friend him on Facebook; and visit his webpage.

Foreign Correspondent: Rightwing Populism Will Make You Sick-- Really... The World’s Worst Outbreaks Are Occurring In Nations With Authoritarian Leaders, Like Trump.

 

-by Reese Erlich
 @ReeseErlich

The four countries with the most confirmed COVID-19 infections in the world are all led by rightwing populists: the US, India, Brazil, and Russia. Throw in the United Kingdom, which has the largest infection rate in Europe, and you have a common pattern.

Leaders of these countries pose as men of the people battling the elites. In reality, they channel people’s darkest fears and prejudices into policies that benefit the ultra wealthy.

Rightwing populists initially downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus, adopting dangerous public health policies that ultimately infected themselves, close supporters, and aides. These were not mistakes or bad luck, but rather the inevitable outcome of putting Dr. Frankenstein in charge of health policy and making Igor chief of implementation.

A virus has no politics

When the virus began to spread globally in March, it had no inherent politics. Public health officials worldwide agreed to use traditional anti-epidemic protocols: widespread testing, contact tracing, and quarantine. There were no leftwing masks or rightwing ventilators.

But as many countries failed to contain the pandemic, a battle broke out between medical officials who want to minimize public interaction and the big business class, which wants to keep companies open.

In general, union workers sided with medical experts in seeking to make workplaces safe. Corporate executives sought to open factories regardless of health costs, or at least receive massive government subsidies during the shutdown.

The administration of Donald Trump, wary of openly siding with its corporate bosses, instead played the populist card. Last May, in Michigan and some other states, a few hundred small business people and workers held demonstrations demanding that the government allow the economy to reopen.

Trump promoted the small protests as proof of a grassroots rebellion. A barbershop owner became the symbol of Americans demanding an end to pandemic shutdowns. Armed militia members stood guard as the barbershop’s owner, Karl Manke, reopened in defiance of a public health order. As one article reported, they were “wearing Trump sweatshirts and Trump cowboy hats and waving Trump flags.”

Mask: symbol of tyranny

In short order, the Trump Administration made refusal to wear a mask a symbol of American independence. The President’s followers eschewed wearing masks or keeping six feet apart at public events, or even while grocery shopping.

Few Americans have qualms about businesses protecting their operations by posting signs reading “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service.” But when the same businesses require customers to wear masks, it’s totalitarianism.

Trump became trapped by his own rhetoric and egotism. He rarely wears a mask at the White House and many of his staffers follow suit. The administration has held super spreader events, such as a September 26 Rose Garden celebration of the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

This week, Trump advisor Stephen Miller became the thirty-fourth White House denizen to test positive for COVID-19. Nearly all members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are quarantined after one high ranking officer tested positive.

But Trump was not alone in endangering his staff and the public.

Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson, who comes from an upper-middle-class family and studied at Oxford, portrays himself as a quirky man of the people. He and the Conservative Party won Britain’s last parliamentary election by calling for a quick withdrawal from the European Union, a long-time demand of the British left and popular with many workers.

During the pandemic, Johnson played the populist card by claiming to represent ordinary people who just wanted to return to work. Johnson claimed the United Kingdom could quickly develop herd immunity, which would immunize a majority of its residents, save lives, and produce a prosperous economy.

It didn’t work. The United Kingdom has faced several waves of contagion, and today it has one of the worst records in Europe: 544,000 confirmed cases and 42,500 deaths.

Johnson also made the mistake of believing his own propaganda by not taking precautions at 10 Downing Street. Starting in March, top U.K. leaders became infected, including Johnson, the health secretary, chief advisor to the prime minister, and the country’s chief medical officer.

While spouting platitudes about how well he was recovering at the time, Johnson later admitted he came close to death.

As with Trump, who celebrated his return from the hospital by ripping off his mask before walking into the White House, the experience has not made Johnson noticeably wiser. His pandemic policies still flounder and popularity plummets.

Disasters in common

The world’s major rightwing populist leaders share some disastrous policies in common. They downplay the significance of the pandemic, fail to follow the advice of medical experts, and fire advisors who insist on fact-based policies.

In August, Trump appointed Scott Atlas as a special advisor on the pandemic. He is not an epidemiologist or a public health expert. But he is a doctor who frequently appeared on Fox News and works at Stanford University’s rightwing Hoover Institution. One hundred-some of his Stanford colleagues wrote an open letter sharply criticizing Atlas’s pro-Trump views on the pandemic.

“Many of his opinions and statements run counter to established science and, by doing so, undermine public-health authorities,” they wrote.

Making Atlas a coronavirus advisor is like appointing Dr. Frankenstein to head the city morgue. He helped create a monster who stalks the streets of the US all the way to the White House.

Trump is now betting on the quick development of a vaccine, claiming it will be publically available later this year. Once again “America First” ignores developments elsewhere. Both China and Russia are already distributing vaccines. But it will take many more months to prove their efficacy and begin widespread inoculations.

Yet Trump says a US vaccine will be ready soon. Why shouldn’t we believe him? He’s done such a great job so far.

Foreign Correspondent: Turmoil In Belarus-- Citizens Take To The Streets To Protest What They See As A Stolen Election.

 

-by Reese Erlich

In a surprise ceremony on Wednesday, embattled President Alyaksandr Lukashenko was reportedly sworn in for a sixth term after Belarus’s contested elections in August. Opposition leaders are calling the unannounced ceremony a “thieves’ meeting” and a “farce” and are urging condemnation of the action.

Victoria Martinchik, a twenty-one-year-old attorney in Belarus, is fed up with years of authoritarian rule under Lukashenko. So she and family members have joined tens of thousands of their fellow Belarusians to protest what they consider to be a blatantly rigged August 9 presidential election.

“We are tired of enduring this injustice,” she says in a phone interview from Minsk, Belarus’s capital city. For three days, “riot police threw grenades at us during the protests, beat people, and simply killed us.”

For years, Lukashenko angered Belarusians by mismanaging the economy and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Conn Hallinan, an old friend of mine who works as a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus.

“The demonstrations in the streets are genuine, not foreign-inspired, as claimed by Lukashenko,” says Hallinan in a phone interview. “But Western leaders certainly want to take advantage of the situation to expand their interests.”

Only a few years after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, President Bill Clinton promised Europe “prosperity and security” through the expansion of NATO. In reality, Eastern European countries and former Soviet republics got impoverishment, kleptocratic ruling elites, and in some cases, neo-fascist governments.

The United States and other foreign powers engineered “color revolutions” in these countries, including an “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine and “Rose Revolution” in Georgia. These were seen as steps toward breaking alliances with Russia and expanding Western economic, political, and military dominance.

Lukashenko was an outlier in that he sought to maintain friendly ties with Russia, even signing a pact aimed at eventually reunifying the two countries. State-owned industries still dominate the Belarusian economy. And while these industries provided much needed blue-collar jobs, profits often trickled up to Lukashenko and his capitalist cronies.

Belarus developed a thriving computer-game and software industry that provided jobs for middle income professionals. The government made a tacit agreement with this sector: if they stayed out of politics, they could enjoy relative economic prosperity.

But, for most Belarusians, the new state-capitalist system has meant a drop in their standard of living, particularly since the pandemic. Unemployment continues to climb, and the country’s GDP is expected to shrink by 3.4 percent this year.

The final straw came when Lukashenko joined other authoritarian leaders, including U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, in downplaying the COVID-19 pandemic. Lukashenko even suggested that the virus could be eliminated with saunas and vodka.

“Go to the sauna,” he advised his compatriots. “When you come out of the sauna, not only wash your hands, but also inside [with] 100 grams [of vodka].”

During the election in August, Lukashenko claimed to receive more than 80 percent of the vote, a figure most Belarusians are skeptical of. Rival presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who received 10 percent of the official vote, claims she won a majority.

Tikhanovskaya, who ran as an independent, and other opposition leaders in several parties receive support from Western countries and media as heroic “defenders of democracy.” But their shared political platform, known as the “Reanimation Reform Package for Belarus” is so conservative it could have been written by the International Monetary Fund, or the World Bank.

“The labour market is over-regulated,” states the joint reform package, referring to laws that protect workers’ rights. “The difficulties of hiring and firing workers, the presence of a large number of administrative restrictions, block the modernization of the labor market.”

The party calls for creating a favorable business climate to encourage multinational corporate investment. That includes fully or partially privatizing state-owned enterprises and vastly reducing economic ties with Russia.

Belarusians, most of whom speak Russian, don’t harbor the anti-Russian nationalism of other former Soviet republics, such as Ukraine.

But if the opposition parties were to seize power in Belarus, European countries such as Poland and Lithuania would exert tremendous pressure on Belarus to break with Russia and join NATO.

So far, the Trump Administration has shown little interest in the Belarus crisis, allowing European Union countries to make the usual denunciations of Lukashenko.

It’s not entirely clear whether Trump is making a conscious decision or is just ignorant. “I don’t think Trump knows where Belarus is,” says analyst Hallinan.

As the crisis continues, Lukashenko has sought support from Moscow, which officially is calling for a dialogue between the government and opposition. So far, Russian President Vladimir Putin is backing Lukashenko as the leader who will keep Belarus out of the Western camp and maintain friendly ties with Russia.

If the opposition ousts Lukashenko, there is, I think, a real possibility of some sort of Russian intervention.

Leftist parties in Belarus and internationally have taken sharply different positions on the crisis. The Communist Party of Belarus (CPB), an orthodox Marxist-Leninist group with ideological origins in the USSR, sees the demonstrations as yet another color revolution.

The CPB points to the neo-liberal policies advocated by the major opposition parties and argues that, under Lukashenko, “the state has maintained a system of strong social guarantees for children, young families, the disabled, veterans, and people with low incomes.”

A Just World Party, which split from the CPB in 1996, opposes both Lukashenko and the pro-Western opposition. The Russian Socialist Movement, affiliated with the Trotskyist Fourth International, supports the Belarus demonstrations and denounces any Russian intervention.

Belarusian political activists face a difficult situation, caught between a ruthless dictator and a potential Western takeover of their country. Some ally with Lukashenko as a lesser evil. Others side with the demonstrators, arguing that breaking Lukashenko’s grip on power is necessary before progressive change can take place.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Belarusians continue to peacefully demonstrate every Sunday. The government continues to arrest dozens of activists in an effort to stop the protests. And though blue-collar strikes at factories-- an early sign of popular support for the opposition, have stopped-- Lukashenko continues, at least for now, to have support among workers in state-owned enterprises, and among the police, the military, and intelligence agencies.

Activists like Martinchik, despite the confusion and turmoil, remain hopeful.

“I fall asleep with tears and wake up with tears,” she says. “Yesterday, against all this background, it seemed that we were losing. But after all darkness comes light.”

Foreign Correspondent: Trump Plays Both Sides Against the Middle-- Is He A Hawk? Is He A Peacenik? The President Keeps Us Guessing.

-by Reese Erlich
@ReeseErlich

President Donald Trump has convinced Republican isolationists and hawks that he supports their views. That’s a neat trick, since the two groups hold opposing positions.

Trump gets support from hardline interventionists for his efforts to overthrow governments in Iran and Venezuela, while backing the aggressive policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In a speech for the Republican National Convention that was recorded in Jerusalem, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed Americans “are more safe, and their freedoms more secure, because President Trump has put his America First vision into action. It may not have made him popular in every foreign capital, but it has worked.”

On the other hand, libertarian Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, describes Trump as the first President in a generation “to seek to end war rather than start one.” Paul went on to tell the Republican National Convention that “We must not continue to leave our blood and treasure in Middle East quagmires.”

While Trump hasn’t halted any Middle East wars, he has ordered modest troop reductions in Syria and Iraq, and negotiated a fraught agreement in Afghanistan. However, on any given day, the US has 45,000-65,000 soldiers and sailors stationed in the Middle East, more than at the beginning of Trump’s term.

So Trump pursues interventionism in practice while claiming he’s against the forever wars. He purposely takes contradictory positions, according to Scott Horton, a libertarian Internet radio host and editorial director of AntiWar.com. [Disclosure: “Foreign Correspondent” is carried by AntiWar.com.]

“He takes all sides of all issues, so there’s something for everyone,” Horton says in an interview. “Trump is seen as outside the political establishment. He’s a disruptor.”

In reality, Horton says, Trump’s foreign policy has been a disaster. He escalated the air war in Afghanistan and the war in Yemen. He escalated fighting in Somalia. NATO added new members from Eastern Europe and increased spending. As Horton dryly puts it, “He hasn't started any new wars because we already at war with every country we could be at war with.”

Impulsive, transactional decisions

Trump doesn’t adhere to any particular ideology, according to Stephen Zunes, professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. Rather he makes impulsive, transactional decisions.

 “I don’t think Trump has a coherent foreign policy,” Zunes tells me. “The Trump Doctrine can be summed up as ‘What’s in it for me?’”

Trump’s past attempts to break with some interventionist policies was met with strong opposition from the foreign policy establishment and ultimately floundered.

In 2018, Trump opened direct talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. By 2019, the administration indicated it could accept North Korea as a nuclear power, as part of negotiations toward a comprehensive peace accord.

Hawks in both parties attacked Trump for cozying up to a dictator. Trump’s advisors, such as uber-hawk former National Security Advisor John Bolton, opposed any agreement. Trump backed off when it became apparent his image was being tarnished.

Now Trump is having trouble making deals even with his own Pentagon brass. A recent scathing article in The Atlantic quotes military leaders and advisors who say Trump disparaged Marines buried at a World War I cemetery as “suckers” for getting killed.

That’s consistent with his public attacks on the late Senator John McCain as a “loser” because he was captured during the Vietnam War.

On Labor Day, Trump held a press conference that set a new low for hypocrisy. The Commander in Chief denied making the disparaging remarks, then opened fire on Pentagon leaders.

Top military leaders, Trump said, “want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”

Once again, Trump strikes a populist stance to attack others while ignoring his own, far worse record. The President regularly boasts of his success in promoting arms sales, notably to dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia. He has surrounded himself with military men tied to the arms industry, including current Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, a former Raytheon lobbyist.

Apparently you’re not part of the military-industrial complex until you disagree with Trump.

My guess is that some military brass are leaking stories about Trump to thwart his possible use of the Insurrection Act to mobilize regular troops after a Trump loss in the November election. If the election is close, and demonstrations break out, Trump could violate the Constitution and use the military to stay in power. The leaks are coming from those generals who won’t play ball.

Electoral rhetoric

Most Americans oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s why Trump is ramping up his anti-interventionist rhetoric, trying to outflank Joe Biden from the left. But many independents and even some Republicans recognize Trump’s rhetoric as phony.

Meanwhile, Trump has angered the foreign policy establishment-- both Democratic and Republican-- for questioning US participation in  NATO and being “soft on Russia.” Seventy Republican national security officials signed an open letter criticizing Trump and declaring their intention to vote for Joe Biden.

“The power elite is terrified of him because he is not one of them,” says radio host Horton. “They’ve gone to war against him.”

But that doesn’t necessarily translate into votes for Biden. Professor Zunes says the foreign policy experts themselves are upper-middle-class, mainstream Protestants, who don’t have much mass influence.

“Biden may take a small chunk out of Trump’s Episcopalian vote,” says Zunes. “They don’t represent many actual votes in key states that Biden will have to win.”

Zunes, a strong critic of Biden’s interventionist foreign policy, says Biden is still better than Trump. Biden voted against the 1991 Gulf War, and opposed the wars in Libya and Yemen.

Most importantly, Zunes says, Biden is more malleable and subject to grassroots pressure.

“Biden may be forced to take more seriously the anti-war majority in the Democratic Party,” he says.

We’ll see.

Foreign Correspondent: Biden’s Troubling Foreign Policy

An important behind-the-scenes battle is being fought over the Democratic nominee’s conservative positions.

-by Reese Erlich
@ReeseErlich

Last spring, the Biden campaign decided to hit back hard against accusations of being soft on China. So the campaign produced a blistering ad [above] attacking Trump’s failure to confront China in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Biden ad was xenophobic and racist.

“Trump let in 40,000 travelers from China into America,” says the ad’s narrator as ominous music plays in the background. “He rolled over for the Chinese... Donald Trump left this country unprepared and unprotected.”

Hundreds of major Asian American organizations and prominent individuals expressed outrage in an open letter. They wrote that blaming China for the pandemic helps foster violence and discrimination against Asian Americans. Prominent Asian American activists met remotely with Amit Jani of the Biden campaign in early May, asking that the ad be dropped.

“Jani seemed sympathetic to the anti-racism argument,” says meeting participant Calvin Cheung-Miaw in a phone interview.

“But we were there with a wider message. We don’t want Biden to outdo Trump in attacking China. It’s bad for the campaign and bad for the planet.”

Jani forwarded a request for an interview to Biden’s campaign staff, which had not responded as of press time.

That incident reflects just one battle being waged against Biden’s conservative foreign policy positions. Most supporters of progressives such as Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, remain committed to voting for Biden in order to defeat Trump. But they are also launching grassroots efforts to push a future Biden Administration to adopt internationalist and anti-interventionist policies.

Biden's checkered record

Biden’s record on foreign policy is checkered. As a leading member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for many years, he supported the US occupations of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 and the drone war in Pakistan. He also staunchly supports Israel at the expense of Palestinians.

But, on the whole, Biden’s policies are better than Trump’s. Biden opposed the 1991 US invasion of Iraq, opposed the 2007 Iraq troop surge, and supported the 2011 US troop withdrawal from Iraq. As Vice President, Biden opposed the wars in Libya. In 2019 he came out against the Yemen war. He calls for restoring normal relations with Cuba.

If Biden wins, it seems likely he will end Trump’s tariff wars with allies, re-engage in the Paris climate agreement, and reverse Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran.

Matt Duss, the top Sanders’ foreign affairs advisor, expresses optimism about the Democratic Party platform, which calls for ending forever wars and stopping US support for the war in Yemen.

“There is no denying the fact that the party is moving in a very positive direction on these questions,” he told Foreign Policy.

But there’s a very large gap between a party platform and policy implementation.

Questionable advisors

Biden’s choice of foreign policy advisors is revealing. He is likely to rely heavily on former Obama staffers such as Susan Rice, Tony Blinken, and Samantha Power, according to Daniel Bessner, a foreign policy advisor to the Bernie Sanders’ campaign and professor at the University of Washington.

“I don’t think they would challenge the US armed presence in the world,” he tells me in a phone interview, saying Biden may well rely on military advisors in deciding whether to maintain troops overseas.

“Biden is likely to keep some troops abroad,” says Bessner. “He’s unlikely to close military bases or reduce the military budget.”

A number of Biden’s top aides come from WestExec Advisors, a strategic planning firm, which employs former government officials who use their connections to benefit corporations and foreign governments. WestExec clients include at least one arms manufacturer and other major corporations.

The Biden transition team for foreign policy and national security is headed by Avril Haines, a former deputy CIA director who also worked at WestExec. Haines helped oversee the illegal US drone war against Pakistan, although she’s considered a moderate because she reduced the number of strikes. She helped cover up the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program and helped redact incriminating sections of the Senate report about CIA crimes.

Michèle Flournoy, WestExec co-founder, has been mentioned as a possible Secretary of Defense. Progressives have already launched a campaign against Flournoy, based on her support for continued arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Democrats in Congress voted for passage of a war powers resolution that would have cut off aid to the Saudis’ war in Yemen.

“Somebody like Flournoy, should have no place in a Democratic administration,” says David Segal, a leader of Demand Progress, a progressive lobbying group in Washington, D.C. “She has a more militaristic stand towards Saudi Arabia than many Republicans,” he tells me in a phone interview.

Segal says some Biden advisors want to end the forever wars; others do not. Changing US foreign policy, in his view, “will require ongoing activist engagement that targets the administration and Congress.”

Times are changing

Biden faces a very changed world heading into the November elections. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a massive recession in many countries. The United States has shown itself unwilling or unable to provide either medical or economic relief. Many other countries-- including European allies, Russia, and China-- are ignoring the weakened superpower and charting their own future.

“A world totally dominated by the United States will probably never exist again,” says Bessner.

Trump’s defeat could lay the groundwork for a significantly better foreign policy based on peace and non-intervention. But that will take a big struggle inside and outside of the Democratic Party. Chinese American activist Cheung-Miaw says Biden’s efforts to sound tough on China damages his campaign and alienates voters. People of color and young voters, he says, want a break with aggressive foreign policy.

“We are strongly and firmly committed to defeating Trump,” says Cheung-Miaw. “But we have to keep up grass-roots pressure on the Biden campaign.”

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Let me take the opportunity of Reese's post this week to link an open letter from over 450 elected DNC delegates to Joe Biden, asking him to hire new-- better-- foreign policy advisors. Particularly singled out are former White House aides who have "demonstrated poor judgment" on national security issues: Antony Blinken, Nicholas Burns, Avril Haines, Samantha Power, Michele Flournoy, Susan Rice, and the aforementioned Amit Jani. They wrote that "It is time to reject a foreign policy based on patronage of authoritarians, regime change, failed military interventions and world policing. The people of the United States are tired of squandering our resources on perpetual war and occupation that result in carnage, breed global resentment and drain our treasury of funds needed to address environmental sustainability, health care, housing and education at home."

As DNC delegates, we ask you not to rely on foreign policy advice from those who may have a conflict of interest as a result of their relationships and lobbying on behalf of merchants selling weapons and surveillance technology.

We ask you to appoint top foreign policy advisors whose records reflect good judgment and an understanding of the importance of diplomacy and international cooperation, particularly in the face of global climate catastrophe that poses an existential challenge. Going forward, we need to marshal our resources not to topple governments or to maintain 800 military bases overseas, but to ensure our planet survives the greatest environmental challenge of our time.

Foreign Correspondent: Is Kamala Harris A Hawk? Biden’s Veep Pick Has At Times Embraced Militarism And Even Attacked Trump From The Right

The Challengers by Nancy Ohanian

-by Reese Erlich

Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin hasn’t forgotten a 2017 meeting with members of Senator Kamala Harris’s staff to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The Israeli land and sea blockade was causing massive unemployment as well as shortages of food and electricity. Benjamin and other progressive activists wanted the Senator to criticize Israel’s policies and end the siege.

“You could just see the blank stares from her aides as we spoke,” Benjamin recalls in a phone interview from Washington, D.C. “They argued that Israel has the right to defend itself. There was no sympathy for the Palestinians.”

This week, activists are recirculating a photo of a smiling Kamala Harris standing next to ultra-rightwing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in November 2017.

“She’s proud of her ties with Netanyahu and [the] Israeli government,” Benjamin says.

This week, Joe Biden picked the California Senator as his vice presidential running mate. Just as her history as a law-and-order prosecutor is now getting closer scrutiny, so should her foreign policy views.

Harris closely adheres to Democratic Party mainstream policies, which under President Barack Obama brought us wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, as well as escalated wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“She has views close to the Obama Administration, nothing that would be an exciting departure from US militarism,” says Benjamin, a contributor to The Progressive. “They are certainly different from Bernie Sanders’s.”

Trump criticized

Harris, like most Democrats, has often been at odds with Trump’s foreign policy.

“The current President,” she wrote in a 2019 candidate questionnaire to the Council on Foreign Relations, “seems intent on inflicting further damage to US credibility by disregarding diplomacy, withdrawing from international agreements and institutions, shunning our allies, siding with dictatorships over democracies, and elevating sheer incompetence in his decision-making processes.”

But instead of offering a progressive alternative, Harris often attacks Trump from the right, criticizing him for cozying up to leaders in North Korea, Russia, and China. For example, she supports sanctions against Russia for meddling in Ukraine and annexing Crimea.

Marco Carnelos, a former Italian ambassador to Iraq, tells me from Rome, “I understand that Russia may be sanctioned over Crimea. Are we sure that the same zeal will be applied to Israel if it should annex the West Bank?"

Carnelos also highlighted Washington’s recent outpouring of sympathy for Uighurs, a Muslim minority in China. “I’ve never seen such concern for this specific Muslim population from the US,” he says. “A few years ago, no one cared. Now that the US is in conflict with China, it’s a little bit suspect.”

Carnelos believes that the US uses human rights and national security issues to protect US business profits from Chinese competition. He notes the ramped-up attacks on Beijing coincide with fierce competition from companies like phone manufacturer Huawei.

“It is absurd that after thirty years,” he says, “the US discovered China is ruled by a Communist Party!”

No plan to end wars

Harris denounces Trump’s “endless wars” but offers no specific plans to end them. During her presidential primary campaign, she failed to commit to withdrawing all US troops from Afghanistan, even by the end of a first term in 2024.

On Iran, she told the Council on Foreign Relations, the US must rejoin the nuclear accord “so long as Iran also returned to verifiable compliance.” She would also seek changes in the agreement to “supplement some of the nuclear deal’s existing provisions, and work with our partners to counter Iran’s destabilizing behavior in the region, including with regard to its ballistic missile program.”

Neither Harris nor Biden have specified whether they would immediately lift US sanctions once Iran returns to the agreement, from which the Trump Administration unilaterally withdrew in 2018.

Harris has taken some progressive stances. She co-sponsored bills in 2018 and 2019 with Bernie Sanders calling for an end to US support for the war in Yemen. She criticized the regime in Saudi Arabia for waging that war and for its human rights violations, including the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

“The US and Saudi Arabia still have mutual areas of interest, such as counterterrorism, where the Saudis have been strong partners,” Harris has said. “But we need to fundamentally reevaluate our relationship with Saudi Arabia, using our leverage to stand up for American values and interests.”

Tom Gallagher, a former member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and once a progressive challenger to Representative Nancy Pelosi, acknowledges that “Harris is no gem on the Middle East.” But, he adds, “a future Biden Administration won’t be as ridiculously one-sided as Trump.”

Harris opposes the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, commonly known as the CPTPP. She calls for an end to Trump’s “tariff wars” and supports “pro-labor, pro-environment trade deals.”

“That’s a plus,” says Gallagher. “On trade matters, the Democrats have gotten the message. Labor and environmentalists have impacted the mainline leaders.”

Hope for the future?

The activists I interviewed think Harris is a better choice than über-hawk Susan Rice, who was also in the running. Rice pushed for the disastrous Libyan war and praised the air wars in Somalia and Yemen.. They also note that Harris has at times engaged in dialogue with progressives.

“Even though I disagreed with her politics,” says Code Pink’s Benjamin, “I found her accessible and charming. At demonstrations, she would sometimes come out to chat with us.”

Friendly chats won’t be enough, however, to change the foreign policy of a future Biden Administration.

“There’s already been a lot of pressure on Biden,” as progressives fight over the Democratic Party platform, Benjamin says. “We’ve seen a coming together of groups who don’t normally work together.”

In the past, she notes, some liberal and progressive groups were reluctant to criticize the Obama Administration’s militarism. “I don’t think people will make that mistake again.”

Trump’s Desperate, Last-Ditch Effort To Hike Tensions With Iran-- This Might Be The Final Stretch For His Failed Policy Of Maximum Pressure

Iranian civilians are endangered by recent sabotage carried out  against both military and civilian targets. Here a woman sells spices in the bazaar. Photo: Reese Erlich

-by Reese Erlich
author, The Iran Agenda Today: The Real Story Inside Iran and What's Wrong with U.S. Policy.

During the past month, Iran has suffered a half-dozen explosions and fires at military and civilian sites. A bomb blew up near the Parchin missile base outside Tehran, Iran’s capital. Fires broke out at an electric power station and aboard seven ships in a southern port city.

Iranian government authorities say some of the incidents were accidents. But the most serious, it appears, was an act of sabotage.

On July 2, a blast ripped through the main assembly hall at Natanz, a facility that produces centrifuge parts essential for enriching uranium for Iran’s nuclear power program.

No one officially took credit for the sabotage, but the New York Times reported that a “Middle East intelligence” source admitted that Israel was behind the bombing. An Israeli newspaper later identified the source as Yossi Cohen, head of the Mossad intelligence agency.

Analysts say such a brazen attack, which constitutes an act of war, would need the approval of officials in Washington, D.C.

“If the US did not participate in the attack directly, at the very least it gave Israel its consent,” Muhammad Sahimi, a professor at the University of Southern California and Iran expert, says in an interview.

Washington and Tel Aviv think such attacks, along with the unilateral U.S. sanctions, are a low-risk means of pushing back on Iran. They are an escalation of Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign—which has notably failed and will likely be abandoned after the U.S. presidential election.

“There’s a sense that there’s a bit of desperation right now” in both capitals, says Trita Parsi, executive vice president and co-founder of the Quincy Institute, an anti-interventionist think tank in Washington, D.C. He likens the attempts to those of medieval archers fighting a losing battle: “Empty your quiver... shoot all your arrows.”

October surprise?

Some analysts speculate that the Trump Administration is seeking to provoke Iran into military retaliation. Trump could then launch a war, rally support at home, and win the election. It’s a classic “October Surprise” or even a “Wag the Dog” scenario.

But Foad Izadi does not agree with that analysis.

“Iran is not Iraq,” Izadi, an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Tehran, tells me by phone from Tehran. “Any overt war runs the danger of serious US casualties. He should know, after being President for almost four years, attacking Iran has consequences.”

Izadi does not think that “starting a new war with Iran a few months before the election” is in Trump’s interest. “Even a limited war is not useful for him.”

But that doesn’t preclude other forms of U.S. aggression.

On July 23, a U.S. fighter jet flew close to an Iranian civilian airliner on a routine flight from Tehran, as it crossed Syria on its way to Beirut, Lebanon. The U.S. military claimed to be conducting a “visual inspection” of the plane in order to “ensure the safety of coalition personnel at At Tanf garrison,” says Captain Bill Urban, spokesperson for US Central Command.

Urban claimed the F-15 fighter jet kept 1,000 yards away from the airliner. But a video shot by passengers shows a jet flying much closer. The proximity of the F-15 forced the Iranian pilot to drop 14,000 feet in four minutes, injuring several passengers.

According to Izadi, the US military has no business “inspecting” a civilian airliner flying in a normal civilian air corridor over Syria. In fact, he says, the United States “has no right to be in Syria at all.”

The Trump Administration keeps several hundred troops in Syria in defiance of the Syrian government and without authorization from the United Nations or any other international body.

Iranians are particularly sensitive about US interactions with civilian planes. In 1988, the U.S. Navy shot down an Iranian airliner, killing all 290 passengers and crew. After initially providing false information about where and how fast the plane was flying, Washington admitted to shooting down the airliner and paid compensation to the victims’ families.

“These things unify the Iranian people,” Izadi says. “Whether they like the government or not, Iranians don’t want to be on a plane that will be shot down.”

Iranian response

To date, the Iranian government has not overtly responded to the U.S. provocations. It seems more likely that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is waiting for the U.S. election on November 3, which could result in the election of Joe Biden.

“Iranians are holding their fire, playing the long game,” Parsi says. “They fear it may be a trap to give Trump an excuse to go farther.”

Iran’s conservative hardliners, meanwhile, denounce Rouhani as vacillating in the face of a US and Israeli onslaught. But Parsi says these hardliners “are playing a political game. They understand the logic of not doing anything for now, but that doesn’t prevent them from calling Rouhani weak.”

Sahimi, a close observer of Iranian politics, agrees that “there is a lot of ‘hot’ rhetoric against President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif by the hardliners. But I do not expect any practical action in the near future.”

Depending on what policy the United States adopts after the elections, Sahimi expects “the response to come at a later time and in a manner and at locations where neither Israel nor the US would expect.”

Biden has pledged, if elected, to reverse course on Iran. Izadi believes a Biden Administration would change the Trump policy of maximum pressure. “Whether doing it through rejoining the nuclear agreement or coming up with some other policies, we have to wait and see,” he says.

Parsi, who is familiar with the views of Biden’s Iran advisors, says the new administration would likely call for “compliance for compliance.”

“Biden could lift sanctions by executive order without rejoining the nuclear accord,” he says. “That’s a necessary step, but not sufficient.” The new administration will also have to work with Congress and lay the groundwork for restoring the nuclear accord.

Despite the current crisis, Izadi says, “I’m optimistic. Trump’s policies are not working. The U.S. will have to change, and the change will be for the best.”