Op-Eds

Biden’s Foreign Policy: No Joy in Mudville

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1913 baseball photo. Public domain.
1913 baseball photo. Public domain.

Well, at least he hasn’t started any NEW wars!

For four years, that was the excuse I got from anti-war Donald Trump supporters every time he escalated one of the several wars he inherited from George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

I expect to start hearing it from anti-war Joseph Biden supporters soon.

Trump was Schrodinger’s President. He campaigned as simultaneously opposed to “endless wars” and “the most militaristic” president in history.  He presided as mostly the latter, while continuing to campaign as the former.

Exiting stage right, he left Joe Biden teed up for a foreign policy grand slam, with three easy, peasy, no-brainer foreign policy base hits and two chances at a home run.

Potential base hit #1: Holding up the US end of the Afghanistan peace deal Trump negotiated with the Taliban. America’s second-longest war could be ending, but Biden’s still dithering.

Potential base hit #2: Restoring and building on Obama’s attempt at a relationship change with Cuba, which Trump dismantled. Instead of taking the hit, then stealing second base by unilaterally ending more than 60 years of meddling and embargo, Biden’s just quacking about lifting some of Trump’s reimposed restrictions and pitching “talks” about the rest.

Potential base hit #3: Replacing Trump’s fake “withdrawal” of US forces from Syria with a real one (Trump massively escalated the Syria conflict, then drew troops back down to Obama-era levels and pretended that was “withdrawing”). Instead, in late February, Biden authorized US airstrikes in Syria, supposedly to retaliate for an attack on US contractors and troops in Iraq (where they shouldn’t have even been) but more likely to prove his belligerence to doubters in the military-industrial complex’s amen corner.

The grand slam home run: Bringing the US back into compliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka the “Iran nuclear deal,” which Trump violated (he didn’t “withdraw” from it — it’s a UN Security Council resolution and legally binding on all UN member states).

Biden campaigned on resuscitating the deal, and could have done so on his first day in office by simply bringing the US back into compliance. Instead, he’s hemming and hawing, offering “talks” the Iranians aren’t interested in and trial-ballooning new “conditions” he expects them to agree to before he’ll commit to obeying the law.

That’s four slow, fat pitches right across the plate, and Joe Biden seemingly can’t seem to bring himself to take a swat at them.

On foreign policy, Joe Biden’s presidency is shaping up a lot like Donald Trump’s and Barack Obama’s — lots of promises, with mostly only the bad ones likely to be delivered on.

If you were expecting something different, it looks like you got conned. And the worst is probably yet to come.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

Capitol Riot: Well Past Its Sell By Date

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Tear gas outside the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. Photo by Tyler Merbler. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Tear gas outside the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021. Photo by Tyler Merbler. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel said in November 2008, shortly before becoming White House Chief of Staff in the Obama administration. Left unsaid: Even if you have to make something into a “serious crisis,” molehill-to-mountain style.

There are plenty of real crises. There’s almost always something important that’s going wrong.  But real crises are difficult to exploit. Getting important things done well is hard work, and who deserves credit isn’t always obvious. Political grandstanding is easier, leading to what I call the Dairy Farm strategy of crisis exploitation:

First, have a cow.

Then, milk it.

Democrats have been milking the January 6 Capitol riot for going on two months now. Congress is holding hearings. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) wants to establish a “1/6 Commission,” with a pre-stacked 7-4 Democrat/Republican split, to “review” that day’s events and ensure blame for those events falls squarely on Republicans.

Naturally, Republicans object to the partisan imbalance. Some of them loathe the idea in its entirety, some want its purview reduced to Capitol security failures, others want that purview expanded beyond the “right” to include other riots in other places on other issues (i.e. Black Lives Matter and antifa), versus the “right-wing extremism” Pelosi wants to milk and milk and milk.

I’m not saying members of Congress were unjustified in having a cow after a mob overran police lines and chased them from their chambers. But it was what it was: A one-off riot.

Incited? Yes, in various ways and by various people. Planned? Not much if at all, at least so far as the available evidence indicates. Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, et al. spent two months winding up a mob of unstable non-geniuses, then set that mob loose to do short-term, uncoordinated mayhem.

It wasn’t 9/11. It wasn’t Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t the JFK assassination. It wasn’t an “insurrection.” It wasn’t a “coup.” It was a poorly scripted and typically stupid Donald Trump publicity stunt run amok.

The problem with milking the cow you had is that milk goes sour relatively soon.  Pelosi’s pail has become a petri dish for what she sneeringly dismisses as “conspiracy theories” when regular people spout them.

She wants us to drink a tall, warm glass of that sour milk to wash down government censorship of media (both “mainstream” and “social”) and other “emergency” infringements on civil liberties. We should pour it down the drain instead.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

Cancun Kerfuffle: In Defense of Ted Cruz

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Ted Cruz speaking at Values Voter Summit in Washington D.C. on October 7, 2011. Photo by Gage Skidmore.
Ted Cruz speaking at Values Voter Summit in Washington D.C. on October 7, 2011. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

As Texas went dark last week, with much of the state’s population experiencing blackouts under severe winter weather conditions, US senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and his family jetted off to Cancun for a warm, sunny family vacation. Mockery and outrage ensued.

The mockery was quite fun and often on point given Cruz’s political positions (“heroic father crosses Mexican border and travels 1200 miles to find running water, heat, and electricity for his family”). The outrage, well, not so much.

Cruz doesn’t work as a lineman for any of the several utilities serving Houston.

Nor does he staff a complaint desk handling public calls reporting power outages.

In fact, he doesn’t even work in Houston. He works in Washington, DC.

For some reason, though, he’s taking hits for a  “failure of leadership” because he didn’t stay in Texas to suffer along with his constituents.

Ted Cruz isn’t a “leader.” He’s a US Senator. He casts one of 100 votes in a national legislative body. He is not the energy tsar of Texas. The most his constituents could reasonably expect of him would be to lobby US president Joe Biden for emergency assistance from the federal Emergency Management Agency. That’s something he could more easily do by phone than in person, especially given pandemic-related social distancing norms, and his phone presumably works as well from Cancun as it would from College Station, Corpus Christi, or Caldwell.

Is a sun-soaked vacation during a winter weather event “bad optics?” Only to people who place greater value on and trust in Ted Cruz, his position, and his activities than they should. Making sure you have electricity just isn’t his job — and if it was you could probably expect longer and more frequent blackouts, not shorter and fewer ones.

Whose job is it to make sure Texans have electricity? That would be the mission of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Well, sort of. ERCOT, a “membership-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation,” is overseen and regulated by Texas’s Public Utility Commission and state legislature.

In other words, by a bunch of politicians and government employees.

A case could be made that last week’s storms and freezes were a rare and unforeseeable circumstance and that ERCOT and its political masters aren’t really to blame.

There’s no case to be made that Ted Cruz IS to blame. Or that his family trip to Cancun somehow insults his constituents. Lighten up, folks.

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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