When Joe Biden took office as the 46th President of the United States, those of us who desired a more peaceful foreign policy had reasons for both hope and doubt.

The  biggest issue for both was the 20-year US war in Afghanistan, for which Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, had negotiated a long-overdue US surrender.

Would Biden fulfill the US end of the Afghanistan peace agreement by completing the withdrawal of US troops? We hoped, but doubted, as he hemmed, hawed, and violated the agreed deadline despite ample time to meet it.

Credit where credit is due: Biden did finally bring the troops home from Afghanistan. He showed incredible backbone,  refusing to extend deadlines and surge new forces into the conflict despite loud calls from the foreign policy establishment to remain knee deep in that Big Muddy forever.

If foreign policy was a game of golf, the Afghanistan withdrawal would sound like the driver making solid contact with the ball for a likely long drive off the tee.

But in foreign policy, as in golf, the initial swing is likely to go bad if the golfer doesn’t “follow through.” Unfortunately, Biden isn’t.

There was room for hope that he’d bring the US back into compliance with United Nations Security Council 2231, the “Iran nuclear deal,” which Trump had violated (he didn’t “withdraw from” it; UN Security Council resolutions are binding on all UN member states).

Instead,  Biden gave in to the temptation (or perhaps the pressure) to  insist on adding conditions he has no standing to add rather than taking “yes” for an answer (the Iranians were willing to reboot the deal as negotiated and agreed, but not to accept new terms).

Similarly, Biden is continuing Trump’s trade and technology war with China, even upping the tempo and timbre of US saber-rattling over Taiwan.

He’s continuing the Obama- and Trump-era policy of constant brinksmanship with Russia over Crimea and the Donbass region republics that used to be part of Ukraine until they seceded in the wake of a US-sponsored coup in 2014. The intent seems to be to creep NATO right up to Russia’s borders. What could possibly go wrong?

If Biden had followed through on the impulse that ended the war in Afghanistan, we could have had a “peace dividend.” Instead, on December 27, he signed a $768 billion  National “Defense” Authorization Act. He ended a war — then ADDED $30 billion to military spending.

In the game of foreign policy golf, the hole is Thomas Jefferson’s “Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.”

Instead of following through for a solid drive onto the green and an easy putt, Biden let his ambitious swing become a slice into the rough.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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In 2020, the world’s political and economic elites gathered in Switzerland to discuss ways of restructuring society after the COVID-19 pandemic. The occasion: The 50th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, themed “The Great Reset.”

That meeting and its theme give rise to a number of novel theories — we’re all going to be micro-chipped for constant tracking in  a “social credit system” operated by a single world government, etc. — and in our 21st century authoritarian age, it’s hard to blame anyone for fearing moves in that direction.

In my view, the World Economic Forum isn’t just thinking in the wrong direction, it isn’t thinking big enough. It’s far too constrained in its goals, which revolve around bringing the world’s regimes into closer conformity with each other and with the United Nations on issues like taxes, regulations, and the bugbear du jour, climate change.

To put it a different way, The Great Reset is about finding ways to make it easier for the same people who’ve been running things for the last 400 years — since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, when the modern “nation-state” model we live under came into existence — to remain in charge, doing the same things they’ve been doing, with even less inconvenient dissent from uppity serfs, forever and ever, amen.

In my opinion, we need a far Greater Reset than that. It’s time to tear the whole Westphalian Model down to its component parts — from its shearing of the public as sheep with taxation, to its periodic large-scale military and political holocausts, to its technocratic mismanagement and “sovereignty” disputes — and demand that those parts justify themselves or be discarded.

As a panarchist, one of the most amusing demands I run into is that I prove how, without monopoly government in the form it exists now, we wouldn’t run into the problem of  … well, insert any major problem we already have.

They’ve had 400 years to solve Problem X, and haven’t. Where Problem X is concerned, the burden of proof should be on them to prove how their solution is going to suddenly, magically start working when it never has before, not on me to prove that an untried alternative will solve what they haven’t.

I don’t expect to see a free society in my lifetime, but four centuries seems like a more than generous trial period for the Davos Crowd’s alternative. It’s time to get moving toward A Greater Reset.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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On December 17, the US House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released a series of emails between outgoing National Institute of Health Director Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

In the emails, Collins refers to the authors of something called “The Great Barrington Declaration” as “fringe epidemiologists” and states his desire for “a quick and devastating published takedown” of its premises.

Collins defended his characterization and call for action on Fox News Sunday, telling host Bret Baier that “hundreds of thousands of people would have died” if the Declaration’s recommendations (strong measures for the protection of the elderly and otherwise vulnerable, leaving the rest of us to achieve herd immunity through widespread infection) had been followed.

I’m reminded of something William F. Buckley, Jr. said about the 1964 presidential election, which US Senator Barry Goldwater lost to President Lyndon Baines Johnson: “They told me if I voted for Goldwater we’d be at war in Vietnam in six months and I did and we were.”

I supported the Great Barrington Declaration — and hundreds of thousands died.  Not because US policymakers implemented the Declaration’s recommendations,  but either because of, or in spite of,  US policymakers following the recommendations of Collins, Fauci, and others.

The question isn’t which set of recommendations would have produced better outcomes. It’s whether science should be reduced to the status of  handmaid to bureaucratic diktat, with scientists whose findings don’t support that diktat marginalized through the influence of those same bureaucrats.

How “fringe” are the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration?

Sunetra Gupta is a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the University of Oxford. She earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Princeton and a PhD from Imperial College London (her doctoral thesis title: “Heterogeneity and the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases”).

Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University, where he’s earned four degrees, including an MD.

Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, with a bachelor of science from Sweden’s Umea University in mathematical statistics and  a PhD from Cornell in operations research. He sits on scientific advisory committees for the US Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control.

Agree with their recommendations or not, neither their credentials nor their policy positions qualify as “fringe” by any reasonable definition. Their only real offense was disagreeing, on what they considered relevant scientific grounds, with policies advocated by Francis Collins.

“Francis Collins has spoken” was neither good science nor a good up-or-down test for determining the quality of public policy recommendations. Freedom of scientific inquiry and unconstrained public discussion of the alternatives are too important to sacrifice on the altar of technocracy.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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