By MOA
July 30, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- Yesterday, on
July 28/29 2022 three independent entities
stated the obvious fact that the president
of the United States is just a front puppet
who has no power to fulfill the promises he
makes during various interactions with
foreign leaders. The dangers evolving from
this state are enormous but rarely noted.
Andrew Bacevich, the head of the Quincy
Institute,
writes:
Something much bigger than POTUS —
call it the MIC or the deep state — has
de facto veto power on all matters
related to national security.
Writing in the New York Times,
veteran foreign correspondent
Edward Wong
reports that the Biden
“administration’s approach to strategic
priorities is surprisingly consistent
with the policies of the Trump
administration.”
What ought to be surprising at this
juncture is Wong’s surprise.
...
In practice, the power wielded
by the most powerful man in the world
turns out to be quite limited. Factors
at home and abroad constrain
presidential freedom of action.
...
Two factors stand out, one structural
and the other ideological.
...
The structural factor refers to the
institutions whose wellbeing is
dependent upon maintaining arrangements
that devolved during the Cold War and
survived the Cold War’s passing. Call it
what you will — the Blob, the Deep
State, the
military-industrial-congressional
complex — it exercises a de facto veto
power on all matters related to basic
U.S. national security policy.
...
The ideological factor rests on explicit
or tacit claims of American
Exceptionalism: That it is incumbent
upon the United States to lead the
world, with leadership tending in
practice to become a synonym for global
primacy and primacy tending to be
expressed in military terms.
With regards to Joe Biden's recent call
with China's president Xi Jinping, Yves
Smith at Naked Capitalism
makes a similar argument:
National leaders never have complete
freedom to act; even autocrats have
constituencies or power blocs they have
to appease. In the US, it has
become clear that the President has
limited degrees of freedom on foreign
policy matters; the military/intel
interests call the shots. Mind
you, there are factions so a President
can push the needle to a degree; that’s
why, for instance, Obama was able to
check Clinton’s plans to escalate in
Syria. But the flip side is that
Presidents who want to improve relations
with pet enemies get nowhere. In the
Oliver Stone interviews, Putin
recounts how he had productive
discussions with Bush and they agreed on
concrete de-escalation measures. Follow
ups were unanswered. Eventually
Putin got a written bafflespeak
climbdown. That and other examples led
Putin to conclude that US presidents are
hostage to bureaucratic and commercial
interests.
Biden is a visibly very weak
president. And it appears that that has
enabled the neocons to have an even
bigger say over foreign policy than
usual.
One assumes Xi has to understand
that. Yet the Chinese readout has Xi
starting from lofty first principles to
contend that the US and China, as
leading world powers, have a duty to
promote peace, global development, and
prosperity. From that, Xi reasons that
seeing China as a strategic rival is
“misperceiving” US-China relations and
misleading the world community.
Who is Xi talking to when he goes on
like that? It certainly is not to Biden.
On the very same day as Yves published
the above, the Global Times, the
prime international outlet of the Chinese
Communist Party, acknowledged Biden's
inability to keep promises by publishing an
editorial which
makes the same observation:
China-US relations have not only failed
to get out of the plight created by the
previous US government, but have
stagnated and even deteriorated.
The root lies in that these positive
statements by President Biden have not
been translated into the US' practical
actions. In other words, from the
perspective of many Chinese, there is
something wrong with Washington's
execution.
...
For the next step, the US side should
translate the positive momentum formed
in this latest exchanges into dynamics
that fully reflects the execution
capability, seriously consider China's
statements on strategic track which are
rational and in line with the two
countries' interests and concerns, truly
meet China half way, properly manage and
develop China-US ties. Particularly, the
US needs to show positive execution
capability on cores issues that have
major impact on bilateral ties.
In this context it is interesting to see
the lectures given by Russia's foreign
minister Sergei Lavrov to the minion in
Washington who plays his counterpart:
The ministers discussed current
developments in Ukraine. Sergey Lavrov
laid out Russia’s principled approaches
in the context of the special military
operation in the Donetsk People’s
Republic, the Lugansk People’s Republic
and Ukraine. He emphasised that its
goals and tasks will be fully achieved.
...
Mr Lavrov said that US sanctions were
aggravating the situation and that
US promises to make
exemptions for Russian food shipments
had not materialised.
...
As for the potential prisoner swap
between the countries, Mr Lavrov
strongly advised a return to
professional dialogue in the
context of “quiet diplomacy” without any
dubious media leaks.
Ouch.
Reviewing the Blinken-Lavrov call the
former Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar
asks:
Shouldn’t Biden be talking directly to
Putin?
Such conversations as yesterday’s suffer
from being totally opaque. Blinken can’t
even articulate the substantive issues
bothering Biden —the cracks in the
western unity.
Curiously, the Biden faces two crisis
situations with explosive potential at
the moment — in Ukraine and over Taiwan.
Indeed, it is crystal clear that both
have been precipitated by Washington.
Yet, the manner in which Biden is
handling them couldn’t be anymore
dissimilar.
In the case of Taiwan, Biden didn’t
hesitate to call up Chinese President Xi
Jinping to calm the tensions. But he has
chosen a different path to communicate
with President Vladimir Putin.
For sure, into the six month of the
conflict in Ukraine, Biden has finally
decided to bite the bullet and resume
high-level contact with Moscow. But he
opted to get through to Putin through
his state secretary!
The problem here is, although
US-China relations are tense, Biden
never took it to a personal level. He
never used derogatory language to spite
Xi Jinping, as he did to Putin
repeatedly.
Did Biden deliver on Taiwan? It is
obvious that he did not. A call with him is
rather useless.
The problem of a call to Moscow is not
that Biden denigrated and insulted Putin.
The Russian president is a professional. He
doesn't take such things personally. What he
cares about is that stuff gets done, that
promises once made are being held. The real
problem, as the three first writers quoted
above state, is that Biden has no say in
pretty much anything.
Biden could prevent Nancy Pelosi's fancy
but dangerous travel to Taiwan by simply
canceling her passport for national security
reasons. There is supreme court sanctioned
precedence for doing that. Instead he is
risking a
full blown military response by China.
As for Blinken - for the last two decades
he has been little more than Biden's
errand-boy, a grifter with no real influence
in the deep state bureaucracy. There the
Victoria Nulands and other scheming neocons
are running the real show. They are carrying
their grandparents subjective grievances and
are out to revenge those - no matter the
costs.
Any president who wants to really run
U.S. policies must be a hard nosed brut. He
must ruthlessly fire people left and right
whenever they even think about sabotaging a
stated policy. This must be done down to the
third and fourth level of the state
department, intelligence and pentagon
bureaucracies. The justice department and
the internal revenue services must be used
to keep congress under control. Any
senator, representative or staff who tries
to resist the agenda has to be publicly
exposed as the
utterly corrupt egoist they all are.
That would be a 'dictatorship'?
Well, look how Xi Jinping and Vladimir
Putin run their businesses, largely to the
benevolence of their people. Both got
reelected by their relevant constituencies.
There is no way Joe Biden will achieve
that.
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