By Atilio A. Boron on January 21, 2022 from Buenos Aires
Today, January 20, marks the first year of the Biden Administration. It is a good time to take an X-ray of his administration. There is a fairly widespread consensus that, as synthesized by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, “the kindest word that can be said about Biden’s first year as president is ‘disappointing.’ “ Certainly it is the kindest, because there are other, much harsher words that appear among analysts and commentators. “Failure,” “fiasco,” “claptrap” and the like are used to describe Biden’s first year.
In reality, it was absurd to expect much more. I would even say that in some aspects he made more progress than expected, but in comparison to the monumental tasks he has to perform, what he has done is clearly insufficient. Biden, not to be forgotten, is a man who has lived “from politics” and not only “for politics” almost all his life. Except for a brief activity in a law firm, he began to participate in public life in 1970, at the level of councilman in New Castle, Delaware. In 1972 he won a Senate seat, surprisingly defeating Republican J. Caleb Boggs, who had been in office for 12 years. From that point on, his career was meteoric: one of the youngest senators in U.S. history, he was re-elected to the Senate in five consecutive elections: 1978, 1984, 1990, 1996 and 2002.
Already as chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee he lent his support to President George W. Bush’s policies and his mission – according to him personally dictated by God – to travel the world to “flush terrorists out of hiding in more than sixty countries.” Impressed by the heavenly voices heard by Bush, Biden accompanied him in all his imperial adventures, starting with Iraq, continuing with Afghanistan and then, as Barack Obama’s vice president, in the aggressions he perpetrated in Libya, in Syria and accompanying the infamous presidential declaration that Venezuela represented an exceptional and imminent danger to the security and interests of the United States. Not to forget that from his position in the Senate he fervently supported Margaret Thatcher in the Falklands War. And one more detail: unlike some of his predecessors, he was a bad student at university. His biographers claim that at the University of Delaware at Newark Biden earned his B.A. in 1965 with a double major in History and Political Science. His average was a modest “C” (“sufficient”, the grade immediately above failing) and he ranked 506th out of 688 in his class. He then entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Syracuse, and confirmed that he was not in the world of ideas: he graduated with the degree of Juris Doctor, even though he ranked 76th out of 85 in his class. But the man is a strong-willed and, against all odds, he made it to the White House.
This biographical background is relevant to know the character and the roots of his behavior. In practical terms, his administration has two achievements that cannot be underestimated: in March 2021 he achieved the approval of a 1.9 billion dollar aid package to bring relief to millions of families affected by the pandemic. Biden scored another victory at the end of the year, winning Republican backing for an infrastructure plan worth just over $1 trillion. In both cases the amounts were less than requested but still very significant.
But his administration, preceded by the very serious riots on Capitol Hill on January 6, was very poor in other areas. The fight against the pandemic was far from being as effective as he had promised and many claim that it is out of control; inflation of 7% per year is unusually serious when one considers the U.S. historical record on this issue. In fact, it is the highest in 39 years, adding to the deepening “rift”, or political polarization, evidenced in recent years in the United States. Keep in mind that nearly 75% of Republicans doubt, in a recent poll, the legitimacy of Biden’s triumph in the presidential elections. And speaking of polls, Biden’s approval rating stands at a comparatively low 41% at the end of his first year in office, versus 54% who disapprove of him. Additionally, the Gallup pollster found that 62 % of Americans think that “things in America are going badly”; nearly 60 % think that Biden does not have the right priorities for fighting violent crime, inflation and the supply chain; only 46 % think that Biden is getting it right on Covid-19 and 54 % disapproved of the way Biden wanted to help the middle classes.
And in foreign policy, the elements of continuity between Trump and Biden have been highlighted even by the most sober observers of the academic and diplomatic establishment. In an article published in the year-end edition of Foreign Affairs, Richard Haas, one of its most eminent international analysts, states that despite some differences “there is much more continuity between the foreign policy of Joe Biden and Donald Trump than is usually recognized”. Prominent in this field is the irresponsible warmongering policy deployed against China and Russia, to which must be added the maintenance of sanctions and blockade policies against Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and, in the Middle East, Iran. The disastrous end after twenty years of war in Afghanistan, where US troops practically fled in the midst of an enormous disorder, and the permanent instability of the “liberated” Iraq have had a profound impact on US public opinion, which is wondering where the trillions of dollars that cost both wars went to put an undignified end to them and return home empty-handed. A sentiment that prevails when judging the tug-of-war between Washington and Moscow over the situation in Ukraine, and between the former and Beijing over Taiwan.
Biden’s policy towards Latin America and the Caribbean is in line with that designed under Trump, with his evil intensification of the blockade in the framework of the pandemic. In the case of Cuba Biden moves back several boxes in relation to the normalization of diplomatic relations achieved by Obama during the end of his presidency, of which the current first president was his vice president. And nothing indicates that the State Department and the Southern Command have changed their traditional conceptions one iota: “Monroism” continues to be the compass that guides policies towards this part of the world, spurred in recent years by the growing presence of China and Russia in the region, which has awakened an unhealthy paranoia in Washington. On this point Biden has been a major fiasco, exemplified in his year-end propaganda operation calling for a Summit for Democracy, where none other than the corrupt and proven criminal Juan Guaidó was invited to speak on behalf of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
The complicity of the U.S. government with the fraudulent loan granted by the IMF to the government of Mauricio Macri cries out to heaven and discards any illusion of an “aid” that some naive spirits in Argentina expected to come from Washington. Biden and his collaborators are mostly worried that a new wave of moderate leftists will take hold of the region. The latest election results of 2021 are not flattering for the empire and to reverse them they are willing to do anything, appealing to “soft power” but also to the most criminal forms of “hard power”. The United States is a wounded lion and as Violeta Parra recalled “the lion is bloodthirsty in every generation.” Its undisguised decline as an imperial power, recognized today even by its most enthusiastic publicists, only augurs more violence in international relations. And Washington’s diplomacy will be to attract our countries to make our wars against Russia and China our own. That is why the unity of Latin America and the Caribbean to neutralize these initiatives and guarantee that Our America remains a Zone of Peace is more important than ever.
Source: Pagina 12, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English