Biden’s overall record is one of
foreign policy interventionism, with th
e notable exception of a vote against the 1991 Persian Gulf War — and he says that regrets that vote now.
He was a supporter of the 1999 war on Serbia, which nearly brought the US and Russia into direct conflict and discredited the relatively easy-going foreign policy of Boris Yeltsin, an important element in the rise of Vladimir Putin and a more assertive Russian strategy.
Obama himself was less hawkish than Biden, however — and he still chose to go to war in Libya. Biden seeks to camouflage his military interventionism by pointing to his checkered voting record: sure, he voted for the Iraq War, but he also voted against the 2007 surge. Isn’t that enough to earn him a pass? ‘Come on, man,’ as Biden likes to say.
But the only thing coming on if Biden wins is another round of hopeless foreign interventionism and nation-building.
His individual votes are damning enough. Still more damning is the philosophy behind them.
Joe Biden is an archetypal liberal interventionist of the post-Cold War variety. He understands war in the same terms as domestic policy: as an occasion to expand the power wielded by experts in Washington, whose moral and rational qualifications are beyond question — no matter how disastrous the consequences of their policies.
Indeed, foreign policy sees modern liberalism at its most extreme: in domestic politics there is always the risk that technocrats will be frustrated in their attempts to remake other people’s lives by opposition from Congress or the states or public opinion or the rule of law itself.
But in foreign policy, such constraints are weak, when they exist at all. Congress is rarely effective at stopping wars before they begin — the one contemplated by Obama in Syria is an arguable exception — the public is also less likely to resist instinctively to technocratic overreach that has no immediate, direct effect on most citizens’ lives.
The states have no say in foreign policy, and the rule of law among nations is a fiction that can never check the abuses of liberal imperialists; on the contrary, they abuse the notion of such law to authorize their bloody experiments upon hapless foreign peoples. It’s a curious thing:
liberals themselves inflict arbitrary violence upon peoples who get no vote on what they are to suffer, even as liberals justify their wars by deploring the injustice of regimes that inflict arbitrary violence and deny their subjects the right to vote.
Non-interventionist liberalism, in either its progressive or libertarian varieties, is hardly in a position to exercise an internal restraint upon the humanitarian ambitions of a Biden-Harris administration.
Those elite progressives who do think of themselves as antiwar tend to put equal or greater emphasis on an internationalist campaign they are eager to fight — a war on the weather, or ‘climate change’.
To this end, they want American sovereignty to be subordinate to international climate agreements, and they are willing to use whatever leverage they can wield within a Democratic administration to press for this priority.
But you cannot have two first priorities. If backing a Democratic president who does launch a military campaign against some benighted country — as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did — is the price to pay for getting a Democratic president who also pursues climate-change compacts, what progressive is going to balk?
What progressive can even think of placing mere peace above a cause that progressives believe is literally saving the planet? If World War Two or the Civil War was a necessary war, then any war that’s a collateral consequence of doing what’s necessary to save the earth itself has to seem acceptable. Apocalyptic ideas have consequences.
https://spectator.us/joe-biden-endle...nistan-serbia/
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