Monday, January 25, 2021

What Will America's Forever Wars Look Like Under President Biden

Joe Biden pauses while he delivers a speech at a campaign event for democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. (Evan El-Amin / Shutterstock) 


Expect the new president to eschew starting new wars while avoiding to end existing ones. 

Hard as it is to believe in this time of record pandemic deaths, insurrection, and an unprecedented encore impeachment, Joe Biden is now officially at the helm of the US war machine. 

He is, in other words, the fourth president to oversee America’s unending and unsuccessful post-9/11 military campaigns. In terms of active US combat, that’s only happened once before, in the Philippines, America’s second-longest (if often forgotten) overseas combat campaign. 

Yet that conflict was limited to a single Pacific archipelago. Biden inherits a global war—and burgeoning new Cold War —spanning four continents and a military mired in active operations in dozens of countries, combat in some 14 of them, and bombing in at least seven. That sort of scope has been standard fare for American presidents for almost two decades now. Still, while this country’s post-9/11 war presidents have more in common than their partisan divisions might suggest, distinctions do matter, especially at a time when the White House almost unilaterally drives foreign policy.


WNU Editor: President Trump is the first US President in my life time who did not start a new war and/or escalated an existing one. I do not expect President Biden will achieve the same result. What I expect in a Biden administration is an escalation of a war or two (Afghanistan is on the top of my list), and maybe the start of an insurrection/war here or there (a few African countries are on my list).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

CAR looks quiet. I am surprised. It actually looks like neighboring countries have sufficient muscle to keep things quiet.

No recent news out of Cameroon and I doubt English speaking Africans being murdered by French speaking Africans elitists an iota amongst the race baiters in America. No, they are probably cheering.

Congo is also not in the news.

Boko Haram is still killing a few hundred Christian in Nigeria here and there every year, but again DC does not care and are placing over under bets.

You could not get 51% of Americans to explain where there were atrocities in Africa in a detailed, coherent fashion. Not picking on Americans. It would be true of South America, SE Asia or Europe. The Americans have more immediate concerns of finding and holding a job than to have a big picture view of the world and Washington likes it that way. So as soon as people start rising in the Maslow hierarchy of needs, Washington will upset the apple cart. Mao used to govern this way. He was not good or great at anything. He was only cunning and cutthroat at politics. He was a congenital idiot.

But there is a need to sell expensive, hardened electronics, platforms and bombs. So if the same conditions exist this year as 5, 10, 15 or 30 years ago in some small to middling sized African nation, it will now be an emergent threat needing to be taken care of with the expenditure of military force with our betters taking their cut.

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