by Hoffmann the Organizer
This week, the Democratic Party said goodbye to Joe Biden. As he once again delivered a laundry list of his accomplishments – many good things we can ponder as we scrub away at history’s washboard – we still need to remember his signature achievement: bringing us into the most dangerously militarized world in many decades. Even as the DNC rolled on to its climax, we discovered that Biden’s security apparatus has been planning for potential nuclear confrontation with Russia, China and North Korea, simultaneously, while Zelensky made renewed demands for the launch of our most powerful conventional weapons deep into Russian territory (NYT, 8/21/24).
Of course, Joe has to share the credit for this militarization with others: historic role models like Truman (Cold War, Korea), and Kennedy (Laos, the Bay of Pigs, Berlin, the Turkish-Cuban missile crisis), and Johnson (Vietnam); more recent firebugs like Dubya and Trump.
After all, the war with Russia came in stages: the warhead was armed in 2008, on Bush’s watch, with the new declaration of NATO expansion goals around Russia’s frontiers; it passed the fail-safe point in 2014, on Obama’s, with Maidan and Crimea; and it was given its final go-ahead with the unyielding US brinksmanship in the winter of 2021-2022. Biden may have only presided over the latter stage, but that was the hair trigger for the war that followed.
So too the new cold war with China. Trump banged that drum hard, but Biden went beyond theatrics and tariffs, mobilizing the Pacific rim for war as he escalated tension over Taiwan.
Just 20 years ago, the US and China were the Yin and Yang (or the Eloi and Morlocks, historian Niall Fergusen once quipped) of a single symbiotic political economy. Europe had a similar trade symbiosis with Russia while the US and Russia were cooperating in the War on Terror. None of this bore felicitous close examination, but it felt like there was some progress toward consciousness of our being “one world,” and that in turn offered hope for nuclear disarmament and addressing the environmental crisis, maybe even extreme economic inequality.
What a terrible detour we have been taken on by Mr. Biden. It belies all the hopes he heralded with Build Back Better. Instead, the funds he couldn’t get for home care and childcare were raised with vigor to arm three theaters of war, in Eurasia, the Pacific and the Middle East and enrich our arms industry. As we fuel the destruction of infrastructure in Gaza, our own infrastructure continues to decay (the same edition of the New York Times cites a hundred billion dollars needed for our inter-urban rail system, a familiar number from debates on the arms package this year).
But the worst outcome is the lost years in constructing a peaceful world and restoring a human-sustaining ecosystem. We must urgently walk back our wars with Russia and China and use the negotiations for ceasefire and conflict resolution to begin talks on nuclear disarmament and climate.
Meanwhile the next couple of months are about putting the Trump imp back in its bottle by electing Kamala Harris. Then she has to lead us back to a sane foreign policy . . . or, more likely, we will need to lead her.
