this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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It's the dunk tank.
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The American plot to drive Ukraine away from Russia goes back at least 10 years. Our plot to stoke fascism there goes back probably 70. Biden was in office when the war popped off, but using Ukraine to antagonize Russia is one of the clearest examples of a bipartisan foreign policy consensus. Had Trump won in 2020 we'd be about where we are now on the war.
Contrast this with Trump much more literally committing an act of war against Iran by assassinating Qasem Soleimani. This is after he tore up the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal for no reason.
I am not disputing that, Trump resumed arming the Azov during his presidency. His hands are far from clean. The war in Ukraine was going to happen one way or another.
However, it is also true that Zelensky’s aggressive rhetoric came after his meeting with the newly elected Biden in early 2021, which set off the alarm for the Russians to begin with - also why you saw Russia scrambling for diplomatic talks all of 2021 that culminated in the failed US-Russia Summit in June 2021.
Zelensky was elected as the peace president to bridge the divide between Russia and Ukraine. We don’t know what Biden said to him, but it is clear that the Biden administration took on a much more aggressive stance re: Ukraine compared to Trump’s.
And I am not disputing that Trump is hawkish. I am saying that Biden is much more willing to escalate against near-peer nuclear-armed powers like Russia and China.
I can see Biden taking a different stance in Ukraine, but I can also see his meeting with Zelensky as being the natural development of the situation. I definitely see Biden's rhetoric towards China as a continuation of Trump's, which was a lot more hostile than Obama's (although that progression I'm guessing was also determined largely by the evolving situation/long-term interests in the area).
That’s my point. Our criticism of Biden is not that he is better or worse than Trump, it is that he had crossed a line and set a precedent that will define the US foreign policy forward.
If before US presidents were still more averse to provoking nuclear armed states and performing economic terrorism on their own allies, now all bets are off. Without punishment, every future presidential candidate is going to be defined by how ghoulish they can get. This process is irreversible.
That’s why Biden’s tech sanction is so much more worse than Trump’s trade wars, because it has no proportional responses. To understand how China views Biden’s tech sanctions, you need to read the Chinese sci fi novel Three Body Problem. This is how many people in China are looking at it.
With Trump’s petty trade wars, reconciliation was still possible. There is no more reconciliation between the two powers after the tech sanction, which only drives the world closer to the brink of a nuclear war. This is what is at stake here.
Provoking nuclear powers was standard operating procedure for the U.S. until detente. After a short break it again became central U.S. policy with our funding of anti-Soviet terrorists in Afghanistan. In the 90s we openly meddled in Soviet/Russian internal politics and poked the Taiwan bear.
This is bad, but hardly new.
Could you elaborate a little? I read the plot summary on Wikipedia and am not really getting the connection, but maybe it’s something you can only understand from actually reading.