The Biden Administration’s foreign policy has mostly been one disastrous decision after the other, culminating in the new sanctions regime against Russia that has spectacularly backfired against the US Empire. Let us count some of the ways.
Biden said the ruble would be reduced to rubble. Instead, the ruble is doing better than it has in years.
Biden said the Russian economy would be strangled by sanctions and they would have no one to whom to sell their oil and gas. Now, China and India are buying huge amounts of Russian oil, and Indian middlemen are selling it at a premium so that Americans will potentially be buying it at higher prices at the pump while some Indian oligarchs get rich.
Russia is now making more money off of oil and gas sales than it was before it invaded Ukraine.
The sanctions accelerated inflation in the United States, sometimes up to around 30% in things like food, fuel, and shelter, and Biden’s only response is to say that this is the price for opposing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which the US Empire had done everything it could to provoke in the hopes of weakening Russia. American working class families are reeling under the hits that keep on coming.
Meanwhile, the US Empire’s client governments in Western Europe mostly went along with sanctions that hurt their own interests and people far more than they did Russia’s and Russians. Of those countries, Germany is perhaps the most spectacular FUBARed state.
A few years ago, under pressure from German environmentalists like the Greens, Germany shut down all of its nuclear power plants. This increased its reliance on natural gas for energy to keep its civilization going, and most of that gas was imported from Russia. The German government boycotted Russian gas, Biden’s American gas industry donors cannot ship enough to meet German needs, so now Germany is reopening coal plants!
Kee-reist. If the German Greens go along with this, they will prove beyond a doubt that they are the worthless bourgeois imperialist party the Trotskyists at the WSWS say they are, or that they are “bullshit,” as conservative commentator Saagar Enjeti recently said.
The German government is reopening coal plants when we are in the middle of climate change caused in part by coal plants, just to go along with an incompetent American empire’s wishes. How long the German people will put up with this I don’t know, but it really should be pissing them off right about now.
Biden’s arrogant and stupid Ivy League handlers thought that the Saudis would increase oil production to help them screw over Russia, but they refused, and are now in negotiations with other countries to sell oil in currencies other than the petrodollar. Russia, China, Brazil, India, South Africa, and other countries are trying to figure out how to set up another global trading currency to compete with the dollar.
They will succeed; it’s only a matter of time. Biden stupidly used the American dollar and financial system as a weapon of Empire, and they will never forget. The American dollar will lose value, making imports more expensive in a country where nearly all manufacturing of anything besides weapons has been outsourced. What could possibly go wrong?
Declining empires often tax their own populations to the point they just can’t pay anymore, and the whole financial system can come crashing down. The US Empire is doing the same thing to its people, except through the indirect tax of inflation for the benefit of kleptocratic vampires that really rule the US rather than for the imperial government itself.
Meanwhile, back in Ukraine, the Russians are unstoppable. All of the weapons and treasure thrown at a corrupt, nationalistic and sometimes Nazistic regime have failed to prevent the Russians from conquering over a fifth of Ukrainian territory, and the Ukrainians are clearly incapable of mounting any offensives that could ever take it back.
Up to a fourth of Ukraine’s prewar population has fled the country, its industrial heartland is lost and its loss of access to seaports cannot be prevented. The Kiev regime says that at least 500 Ukrainian soldiers are being killed every day. Clearly, this is not a sustainable situation, but Biden refuses to speak of peace while his donors speak to him of their profits.
No one is winning from Biden’s foreign policy, except for usual capitalist suspects. I can’t help but feel the wheels of Empire just about have to start coming off sometime soon now. The situation is unsustainable. All I can say for sure is that Joe Biden and the corrupt Democratic Party he leads are destined to go down in history has cautionary tales of spectacular failure.
I know what you mean, of course, but I wonder if all this idiocy is really "Biden's Foreign Policy"? It actually seems more like a cluster of militaristic zombie policies that just lurch from one pointless military adventure to another, based entirely on the whims of a corporate-military sector run completely amok, regardless of which sad clown happens to be in the Oval Office.
The current empire's crisis is a result of misadministration going back to at least the Madelaine 'we stand taller' Albright State Department when after the USSR collapse, NATO began overtly being used offensively. Now accelerating exponentially - as Ray McGoverrn has recently observed the neo-cons are now in charge of the US Government. The global south non-West with few exceptions are not just forging new economic structures but are crafting a multi-polar world order and - importantly - saying NO to US hegemony and Western colonialism aka 'the rules based order'.