PARIS -- With Joe Biden's seemingly tenuous grasp on the cockpit controls, we're currently witnessing the result of U.S. foreign policy governance piloted by establishment civil servants. Is anyone really surprised that we're caught in a death spiral?
Sometimes pejoratively referred to as the "deep state", the U.S. foreign policy establishment tends toward interventionism, with few who rise to senior positions favoring a hands-off approach to the rest of the world. It's precisely that attitude -- that the U.S. has to constantly intervene militarily everywhere -- that contributed to the election of former President Donald Trump. The former Oval Office occupant is the only president in decades not to have started a new war.
What globalist interventionists deem beneficial to citizens of the world often isn't.
For instance, Trump's establishment detractors argued that his very existence was a boon to worldwide populism -- as though that's a bad thing. Consider the damage done by the straitjackets imposed in a supra-nationally coordinated manner on citizens of the so-called "free world" in the interests of "security" of all kinds, including climate, information, health, and the homeland.
Trump's establishment critics spent his entire presidency looking for ways to scrap with Russia while ignoring the general public's appetite for doing so. They blamed Moscow for Hillary Clinton's campaign loss to Trump rather than her establishment cronyism. The fact that Special Council Robert Mueller's report on alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election didn't jibe with their delusions hardly seemed to matter.
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Trump simply didn't appear interested in getting involved in military entanglements -- much to the dismay of the establishment war hawks, including his own former National Security Advisor John Bolton, whose inclusion in Trump's administration remains perplexing.
It's not like Trump completely avoided military force. Indeed, he ordered limited military strikes that risked unforeseen consequences. Those that resulted in the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. The Trump-ordered airstrike at Baghdad airport, prompted by Trump's apparent perception of the commander's role in the region, failed to recognize the role of western-backed forces in the region against which Soleimani was helping Iran's neighbors fight, and could have sparked a larger conflict. But the reality is that it didn't.
Trump's foreign policy blind spots seem to have been tempered by a gut instinct that favored negotiation, blustery rhetoric, or, at most, limited "symbolic strikes" over actual war -- much to the disappointment of neoconservatives of all political stripes.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, was supposed to be some kind of foreign policy mastermind with a deep bench of sophisticated diplomatic experts who were going to bring peace and prosperity to the U.S., its allies, and the world.
If that's the case, then why are we now regularly hearing terms like nuclear war or World War III being bandied about on Biden's watch?
Trump was fond of saying that he had a decent rapport with Russian President Vladimir Putin - which displeased establishment hacks, apparently oblivious that even Ronald Reagan had former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev over to his ranch in Santa Barbara not long after the end of the Cold War between the two superpowers.
And looking back now, was it really so bad that when Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House, Trump expressed a desire to see Russia and Ukraine get along and cooperate -- even as Zelenskyy appeared unenthused by the idea? "I really hope that you and President Putin get together and can solve your problem. That would be a tremendous achievement," Trump said to Zelenskyy.
It's hard to imagine that Trump would have authorized a U.S.-backed proxy war against Russia -- which is what Biden has effectively done -- with little return on investment for average Americans (or Europeans).
Under foreign policy guru Biden, we were supposed to at least be closer to normalized relations with America's nation-state competitors. As former President Barack Obama's vice president when the "nuclear deal" with Iran was negotiated to trade sanctions relief for limits on the country's nuclear program (and from which Trump withdrew), you'd think that by now Biden would have easily defused the Iran issue. But the Washington Post reported just last month that nonproliferation experts "have urged President Biden to successfully complete negotiations for a return to the nuclear deal with Iran, warning that Tehran is a week or two away from producing sufficient weapons-grade uranium to fuel a bomb."
Meanwhile, to illustrate just how rudderless Team Biden is, consider its stance on oil-rich Venezuela. Biden State Department officials are still calling Venezuelan opposition figure, Juan Guaido, "President Guaido", while simultaneously meeting with actual Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro -- perhaps just coincidentally in the wake of Washington deciding to ban Russian oil, gas, and coal imports.
Biden's administration is an example of what can occur when the Washington establishment isn't reeled in like it was under Trump. And the result is global chaos.
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