#Biden and his foreign policy team

[psychotrenny]

Like when are all of Biden's idiot fans gonna realise that he is not the "lesser evil". They love threatening people with how any opposition to Biden is gonna let Trump win and how Trumps gonna do all these awful things to the US as though said awful things aren't already happening under Biden. Increased border militarisation and deportation of migrants, loss of reproductive rights, legal assaults on the existence of gay and transgender people, corporate malpractice, police brutality etc etc. Like they're not just continuing to happen they've actually gotten worse under Biden than they were under the Orange Satan himself. The only substantial difference between them is foreign policy and in that area Biden is actually even bloodthirsty; in particular he's been an especially bad zionist for his entire political career and there's nothing to indicate that Trump would have somehow handled it worse beyond the mindless truism of "Orange Man Bad". Looking at their actual policies, voting for Joe Biden isn't gonna protect anyone within the US and is arguably more dangerous for the rest of the world (i.e. where the majority of the world's population lives). There is no "harm reduction" here.

If you're actually looking to help create a better world and protect vulnerable people, as opposed to feeling good that you helped the blue team win, then you're going to have to do it through avenues beyond voting for Joe. Vote third party, withhold your vote to pressure the democrats into nominating a better candidate, engage in action beyond electoralism; there are plenty of options out there. And they're all more effective than lecturing people on the computer (most of whom don't even live in your country they're just part of your empire and so forced to follow the politics) about how being mean to Biden makes you functionally a fascist or whatever

[simply-ivanka]

Kamala Harris: Mystery Commander in Chief

How would the Vice President keep America safe in a dangerous world? The voters deserve some answers.

The Editorial Board --- Wall Street Journal

Kamala Harris is all but telling Americans they’ll have to elect her to find out what she really believes, as the Vice President ducks interviews and the media give her a free ride. This is bad enough on domestic issues, but on foreign policy it could be perilous. The world is more dangerous than it’s been in decades, and Americans deserve to know how the woman aiming to be Commander in Chief Harris would confront these threats.

Ms. Harris this week tweeted a photo of her sitting next to President Biden in the White House situation room discussing the Middle East. The point is to suggest she’s a co-pilot on Biden foreign policy.

This isn’t the credential the Harris campaign thinks it is, and the voters should hear directly from her what she thinks about the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, the failure to deter Russia in Ukraine, the Iranian nuclear program, China’s island grabs in the South China Sea, and more. The matter is all the more important because Ms. Harris conspicuously declined to choose a running mate who might lend foreign policy experience to the ticket.

Ms. Harris has given a few hints about her own views on the Middle East, and those aren’t encouraging. Her team spent much of Thursday walking back whether she told an anti-Israel group she’d be willing to ponder an arms embargo against Israel. She skipped Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress when our main Middle East ally is under siege. Did she pass over Josh Shapiro as her running mate because he would have enraged the anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party?

To the extent she has revealed a larger instinct on national security, it’s been wrong. She told the Council on Foreign Relations in 2019 that she’d rejoin the Iran nuclear deal as long as “Iran also returned to verifiable compliance.” But Iran didn’t comply and is now on the brink of a nuclear breakout.

Her 2018 Senate vote to “end U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen,” as Ms. Harris put it in a tweet, also hasn’t aged well. The Houthis the Saudis were fighting are now targeting commercial ships in the Red Sea almost daily and putting U.S. naval assets at risk. Does she think this status quo can persist—and what would she do differently?

Ms. Harris will surely argue that she and Mr. Biden reinvigorated the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after Vladimir Putin’s invasion in Ukraine. But absent a change in U.S. political will, the war in Ukraine isn’t on track to end on terms favorable to American interests. Her past enthusiasm for banning fracking—which her campaign is trying to walk back—also suggests she isn’t serious about checking Mr. Putin’s main source of war financing.

Ms. Harris would no doubt also tout the diplomatic progress the Biden Administration has made in Asia with Japan, the Philippines and others. Yet she whiffed on one of the single most important diplomatic questions in Asia: She opposed Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that would have excluded China and boosted America as the region’s premiere trading partner.

Most important, will Ms. Harris build up the hard military assets required to deter China’s Xi Jinping and a consolidating axis of U.S. adversaries? “I unequivocally agree with the goal of reducing the defense budget,” Ms. Harris said as a Senator in 2020 after voting against a Bernie Sanders proposal to slash the Pentagon by 10%. That vote needed no explanation, but Ms. Harris wanted to make sure the left knew she was sympathetic. Does she still want to slash the defense budget?

Donald Trump often shoots from the hip on these subjects, and his favorable comments about dictators are witless. But his first-term record, especially on Iran and the Middle East, is far stronger than the Biden-Harris performance.

Americans shouldn’t have to read tea leaves to figure out if Ms. Harris would keep the country safe in a treacherous world.

[zvaigzdelasas]

President Joe Biden’s approach to the ongoing violence in Israel and Palestine is fueling mounting tensions at the U.S. government agency most involved in foreign policy: the State Department. Officials told HuffPost that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his most senior advisers are overlooking widespread internal frustration. Some department staff said they feel as if Blinken and his team are uninterested in their own experts’ advice as they focus on supporting Israel’s expanding operation in Gaza[...]

“There’s basically a mutiny brewing within State at all levels,” one State Department official said.[...]

The cable would come in the wake of Josh Paul, a veteran State Department official, announcing his resignation on Wednesday. [...]

“In the last 24 hours, I’ve been getting an immense amount of outreach from colleagues... with really encouraging words of support and a lot of people saying they feel the same way and it’s very difficult for them,” said Paul, whose departure was first reported by HuffPost.

19 Oct 23

[mariacallous]

In mid-January, Phil Gordon visited Guatemala to hand deliver a letter from Kamala Harris to a man who very likely owed his presidency to U.S. diplomatic intervention.

Bernardo Arévalo de León had just been inaugurated as Guatemala’s new leader, despite efforts by the country’s outgoing government over months to derail a democratic transition of power. Gordon, the U.S. vice president’s national security advisor, was in Guatemala to attend Arévalo’s inauguration with a delegation of other high-level Biden administration officials.

The letter congratulated him on his victory and invited him to Washington for a meeting with Harris, according to a copy reviewed by Foreign Policy. But its real significance was spelled out between the lines. A senior administration official involved in the discussions said the letter was a “signal that the U.S. gives full-throated support to Arévalo and Guatemala’s democratic transition of power.”

The inauguration itself took place after midnight on Jan. 15, following a dramatic final effort by members of Guatemala’s outgoing government to halt the proceedings. Gordon and other members of the U.S. delegation were instrumental in ensuring the transition of power took place, having imposed sanctions and visa restrictions, and back channeled with other embassies to pressure Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei to accept the election results and step aside.

The democratic transition in Guatemala represents one of the clearest victories of U.S. President Joe Biden’s agenda to promote democracy worldwide, as well as a rare example of Vice President Kamala Harris’s national security team playing a distinct and direct role in shepherding it through, according to interviews with multiple administration insiders and Central America experts. The episode provides possible insights into how Harris’s foreign-policy team would work should she win the presidential election in November.

While it went relatively unnoticed in Washington, where people are largely focused on wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the U.S. maneuver to bolster democracy in Guatemala was a policy win—in stark contrast to some of the administration’s endeavors in other parts of the world. The Biden administration has faced criticism for embracing autocrats in ways that undermined his stated goals of promoting global democracy. Across West Africa, the United States has failed to stem an “epidemic” of coups that dealt a heavy blow to U.S. interests. In Afghanistan, which the United States withdrew from chaotically three years ago, democracy is more distant than ever.

“Probably the most key player for securing this transition for Arévalo was the international community and specifically the United States,” said Marielos Chang, a Guatemalan political consultant and professor at the Universidad del Valle in Guatemala.

When Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential race last month and endorsed Harris, one of the many questions posed about the vice president was: What role had she played on foreign-policy issues? Many current and former U.S. national security officials say it is hard to discern where Harris and her small national security team have made a mark—but Guatemala stands as an exception.

Harris became the administration’s point person on Central America’s Northern Triangle region to tackle the root causes of migration, an assignment that later became a point of controversy on the campaign trail—and a source of criticism from Republicans. Migration encounters at the U.S. southern border hit a record high at the end of 2023, and border security and migration remains a major issue for both parties on the campaign trail, particularly for Republicans.

“President Biden gave Vice President Harris one job—‘border czar’—and she failed miserably,” Texas Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said last month, echoing similar charges across the board from Republicans that the Harris campaign has sought to push back on.

Throughout her time as vice president, Harris and her national security team worked closely with Giammattei’s government to try to tackle the root causes of migration from the source, even before Guatemala’s transition crisis.

Guatemala is Central America’s most populous country and a key hub for the flow of migrants north toward the U.S. southern border.

One key initiative Harris’s team and other National Security Council (NSC) officials worked on with Giammattei was the “safe mobility office” initiative, to try to establish offices in the region where people could apply for asylum in the United States from afar or learn about the convoluted U.S. migration system before ever reaching the U.S. border.

Gordon met with Giammattei for over nine hours in one of his numerous trips to Guatemala as they hashed out these proposals, according to a senior administration official familiar with the matter. This official and others spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak on the record about internal government deliberations.

The National Immigration Forum, a nonprofit organization that tracks migration issues, has said that “much remains unclear about the offices’ operational realities” but that it is aimed at lessening the burden on immigration systems at the border and deterring people from trying to venture there in the first place.

Arévalo won Guatemala’s presidential election in August 2023 by a comfortable margin on a campaign of anti-corruption reforms. In the wake of the election, “we were starting to see signs that Giammattei’s administration was seeking to block the outcome of the free and fair elections and prevent a peaceful transfer of power,” said Katie Tobin, the former top Biden migration advisor at the NSC.

From there, Harris’s team was well placed to launch the pressure campaign on the outgoing government to accept the election results. It was also coordinated by the top U.S. diplomat at the time in Guatemala, Patrick Ventrell, and other State Department and Treasury Department officials, according to the officials familiar with the matter.

In October, the administration announced sanctions on Guatemalan officials linked to corruption. In November, Gordon traveled again to Guatemala to meet with both Giammattei and Arévalo separately to “reinforc[e] the importance of the peaceful democratic transfer of power,” according to a White House readout of the meetings at the time. Days after his visit, the Biden administration sanctioned another former top Guatemalan official for his role in “ongoing efforts to undermine the democratic transfer of power.”

Then, on Dec. 11, the State Department announced visa restrictions on nearly 300 Guatemalans, including over 100 Guatemalan members of Congress and other business elites, for “ongoing anti-democratic actions” that sought to interrupt the transition of power.

“That sent a really strong message to all politicians, that the United States was not going to be just waiting to see what happens,” Chang said. Chang said that Guatemalans paid close attention to the diplomatic campaign by the United States, and in particular the top U.S. diplomat there, Ventrell. Harris’s personal role, Chang said, wasn’t visible in Guatemala in the same way it was back in Washington in internal government deliberations.

The pressure appeared to be working, and Giammattei and his proxies began backing down. But there would be one last dramatic political battle, and members of Harris’s national security team would find themselves at the center of it.

Biden in January announced he was sending a delegation of eight senior U.S. officials to Guatemala for Arévalo’s inauguration, led by U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) chief Samantha Power. The delegation also included Gordon and Tobin, as well as Brian Nichols, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs.

Lawmakers who opposed Arévalo threw up more roadblocks, delaying the special session of Congress to finish the inauguration and sparking fears of a last-minute coup. Arévalo’s supporters rallying to celebrate his inauguration grew increasingly restive and impatient as the hours dragged on, eventually clashing with riot police and gathering outside the congressional building.

The showdown also intersected with the U.S. election campaign, as one of former President Donald Trump’s top confidants, Ric Grenell, traveled to Guatemala in the days leading up to the inauguration and threw his support behind the efforts to derail Arévalo’s ascent to the presidency, as the Washington Post reported. Grenell reportedly backed hard-line conservatives who sought to block the transition and alleged that the U.S. foreign-policy establishment was trying to “intimidate conservatives” in the country. Grenell, Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence and ambassador to Germany, has emerged as one of the most influential voices in the MAGA movement advising Trump on his 2024 run.

On the day of the planned inauguration, Biden’s delegation went into crisis mode. “We were at the [U.S.] ambassador’s residence during this, for nine hours,” Tobin recalled. “The [USAID] administrator, Phil [Gordon], our charges d’affaires [Ventrell] were all making tons of calls to the outgoing government and incoming administration” and “coordinating with foreign delegations” in response to the eleventh-hour crisis, she said.

“We worked out a unified message as the international community there that we were expecting the Guatemalan government to do the right thing and uphold democratic values,” she added. They weren’t alone. Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s president, who was also in Guatemala for the inauguration and has outsized political influence in the region, vowed not to leave until Arévalo was inaugurated.

In the end, the pressure from Guatemalan protesters and the international community worked. Arévalo was sworn in shortly after midnight on Jan. 15. “That transition almost didn’t happen, until it finally did,” Tobin said.

Shortly after the inauguration, Harris issued a statement “commend[ing] the people of Guatemala for making their voices heard and this important transition.” Her team has maintained close contact with Arévalo in the months since; Gordon met him along the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Germany in February and Arévalo took Harris up on her offer for a White House meeting, visiting Washington in March. Giammattei, meanwhile, has been barred from entering the United States over U.S. allegations of “his involvement in significant corruption,” according to the State Department.

“A lot of people have critical views of the United States as not always a good player regarding their actions in Latin America,” Chang said, citing Guatemala among other cases. “With this specific example, however, you can see how the United States can actually help in countries that are struggling with democratic transitions.”

[quasi-normalcy]

The paradox of the Biden presidency is that he and his foreign policy team (notably Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and White House aide Brett McGurk) are the last Scoop Jackson Democrats, a crew of neoconservatives and liberal hawks who are pursuing a wildly anachronistic policy. This was evident long before October 7, when the Hamas massacre and Biden’s ensuing support for Israel’s devastation of Gaza brought the problem into stark relief. The killing fields of Gaza are only making visible the horrific and ongoing human costs of Biden’s long-standing commitment to an obsolete Cold War liberalism that is completely inadequate to the challenges of the 21st century.

[misfitwashere]

Ukraine and Harris

And Ukrainian-Americans and the Ukrainian Future

Timothy Snyder

Jul 27, 2024

Ukrainians have been asking me what it means for their country that President Joe Biden has decided to withdraw his candidacy and that Vice-President Kamala Harris is now the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. 

I think that it only means good things. 

The Biden administration now has more time for Ukraine.  Until last Sunday, Joe Biden had two jobs: president and candidate for president.  Now he has only one job: to be president.  This means more time for policy, including foreign policy.  The people on his team who work on Ukraine will find it easier to get his attention.  Aside from that: President Biden will now be thinking about his legacy.  He knows that whatever policies he wants attached to his name must be formulated and implemented in the next six months.

Though it is impossible to be sure, I would guess that Ukraine will likely as central to a Harris presidency than it was to the Biden presidency.  On a number of foreign policy issues, including Ukraine, the Biden administration began from traditional assumptions that were outdated, and then worked quickly to catch up.  I do not think that this will be the case for Harris, in part because the Biden administration has caught up.  The vice-president’s foreign policy team might well be more decisive on Ukraine than the Biden team.  Vice-President Harris made a point of traveling to Geneva for Ukraine’s peace summit when it became clear that President Biden would not attend. In fairness, we should remember that President Biden visited Kyiv itself!

All of that, though, is far less important than the main issue, which is beating Donald Trump.

Harris has a better chance of doing so than did Joe Biden.  If you are on Ukrainian social media, you are dealing with Russian bots and trolls saying that Harris is unpopular in America and can’t win.  In the United States, the Russian bots and trolls are spreading racism and misogyny.  The Russian demobilization serves the same goal: to stifle any hope for something good in both countries. 

Here are the basic facts.  Just a few days into her campaign, Harris polls even with Trump, whereas Biden was behind by several points.  Her campaign has been energetic and effective.  She has mobilized several constituencies who might otherwise have been indifferent.  Trump is obviously afraid of her (as are the Russian propagandists who support Trump).

Now, I understand that there are Republicans who maintain that Trump would have a good Ukraine policy, including people whose views on foreign policy I admire.  Respectfully, I believe this this is wishful thinking.  In some cases, Ukrainians also think wishfully, confusing a thoughtful proposal by a Republican with Trump’s own views or likely future actions.  So let me take a moment to explain why I believe that a second Trump administration would be disastrous for both countries. 

In Ukrainian terms, Trump is a Yanukovych figure, a wannabe oligarch backed by actual oligarchs and the Kremlin.  Unlike Yanukovych, he is personally charismatic and politically talented.  The essence of Trump’s agenda is the transformation of the American political order.  Whether or not this succeeds, the attempt at regime change will remove the United States from the international scene for an indefinite period.  Insofar as we have a foreign policy at all under a Trump administration, it will amount to allowing Russia and China to do what they want.

When thinking of how the United States matters to Ukraine, it is also worthwhile considering how Ukrainians (Ukrainian-Americans) will matter in this election. 

Given the strange American electoral system, certain states matter more than others.  Ukrainian-Americans are 1% of the population of Pennsylvania, and 0.5% of the population of Michigan.  If Trump wins those two states, he will win the general election.  If Harris wins those two states, then she will win the general election. 

In Michigan, the number of Ukrainian-Americans is greater than Trump’s margin of victory in the state in 2016.  In Pennsylvania, the number of Ukrainian-Americans is greater than Trump’s margin of victory in that state in 2016, and also greater than that of Biden’s margin of victory in 2020.   

In other words, the votes of Ukrainian-Americans might decide whether Ukraine continues to exist. 

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Is Lula Anti-American? It's complicated.

It’s the question in Washington that won’t go away: “Is Lula anti-American?” Since returning to Brazil’s presidency on January 1, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has repeatedly caused alarm in the U.S. capital and elsewhere with his comments on Ukraine, Venezuela, the dollar and other key issues. An unconfirmed GloboNews report in June said President Joe Biden may have abandoned any intentions of visiting Brasilia before the end of the year because of frustration with Lula’s positions.    

The question causes many to roll their eyes, and with good reason. Three decades after the end of the Cold War, some in the United States continue to see Latin America in “You’re either with us or against us” terms. Washington has a long record of getting upset with Brazil’s independent stances on everything from generic AIDS drugs in the 1990s to trade negotiations in the 2000s and the Edward Snowden affair in the 2010s. A large Latin American country confidently operating in its own national interest, neither allied with nor totally against the United States, simply does not compute for some in Washington, and maybe it never will.   

That said, there is a long list of reasonable people in places like the White House and State Department, in think tanks and in the business world who are perfectly capable of understanding nuance — and have still perceived a threat from Lula’s foreign policy in this, his third term. The list of perceived transgressions is long and growing: Lula has repeatedly echoed Russian positions on Ukraine, saying both countries share equal responsibility for the war. In April, Lula said blame for continued hostilities laid “above all” with countries who are providing arms—a slap at the United States and Europe, delivered while on a trip to China, no less. Lula has worked to revive the defunct UNASUR bloc, whose explicit purpose was to counter U.S. influence in South America. He has repeatedly urged countries to shun the U.S. dollar as a mechanism for trade when possible, voicing support for new alternatives including a common currency with Argentina or its other neighbors. Lula has been bitterly critical of U.S. sanctions against Venezuela–”worse than a war,” he has said—while downplaying the repression, torture and other human rights abuses committed by the dictatorship itself.    

For some observers, the inescapable conclusion is that Lula’s foreign policy is not neutral or “non-aligned,” but overtly friendly to Russia and China and hostile to the United States. This has been a particular letdown for many in the Democratic Party who briefly saw Lula as a hero of democracy and natural ally after he, too, defeated an authoritarian, election-denying menace on the far right. And for the record, it’s not just Americans who feel this way: the left-leaning French newspaper Liberation, in a front-page editorial prior to Lula’s visit to Paris in June, called him a “faux friend” of the West.  

To paraphrase the old saying, it’s impossible to know what truly lurks in the hearts of men. But as someone who has tried to understand Lula for the past 20 years, with admittedly mixed results, let me give my best evaluation of what’s really happening: Lula may not be anti-U.S. in the traditional sense, but he is definitely anti-U.S. hegemony, and he is more willing than before to do something about it.  

That is, Lula and his foreign policy team do not wish ill on Washington in the way that Nicolás Maduro or Vladimir Putin do, and in fact they see the United States as a critical partner on issues like climate change, energy and infrastructure investment. But they also believe the U.S.-led global order of the last 30 years has on balance not been good for Brazil or, indeed, the planet as a whole. They are convinced the world is headed toward a new, more equitable “multipolar” era in which, instead of one country at the head of the table, there will be, say, eight countries seated at a round table—and Brazil will be one of them, along with China, India and others from the ascendant Global South. Meanwhile, Lula has lost some of the inhibitions and brakes that held him back a bit during his 2003-10 presidency, and he is actively out there trying to usher the world along to this promising new phase—with an evident enthusiasm and militancy that bothers many in the West, and understandably so. 

Continue reading.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Timothy Snyder at Thinking About...:

Ukrainians have been asking me what it means for their country that President Joe Biden has decided to withdraw his candidacy and that Vice-President Kamala Harris is now the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party.  I think that it only means good things.  The Biden administration now has more time for Ukraine.  Until last Sunday, Joe Biden had two jobs: president and candidate for president.  Now he has only one job: to be president.  This means more time for policy, including foreign policy.  The people on his team who work on Ukraine will find it easier to get his attention.  Aside from that: President Biden will now be thinking about his legacy.  He knows that whatever policies he wants attached to his name must be formulated and implemented in the next six months.

Though it is impossible to be sure, I would guess that Ukraine will likely as central to a Harris presidency than it was to the Biden presidency.  On a number of foreign policy issues, including Ukraine, the Biden administration began from traditional assumptions that were outdated, and then worked quickly to catch up.  I do not think that this will be the case for Harris, in part because the Biden administration has caught up.  The vice-president’s foreign policy team might well be more decisive on Ukraine than the Biden team.  Vice-President Harris made a point of traveling to Geneva for Ukraine’s peace summit when it became clear that President Biden would not attend. In fairness, we should remember that President Biden visited Kyiv itself! All of that, though, is far less important than the main issue, which is beating Donald Trump.

[...] In Ukrainian terms, Trump is a Yanukovych figure, a wannabe oligarch backed by actual oligarchs and the Kremlin.  Unlike Yanukovych, he is personally charismatic and politically talented.  The essence of Trump’s agenda is the transformation of the American political order.  Whether or not this succeeds, the attempt at regime change will remove the United States from the international scene for an indefinite period.  Insofar as we have a foreign policy at all under a Trump administration, it will amount to allowing Russia and China to do what they want. When thinking of how the United States matters to Ukraine, it is also worthwhile considering how Ukrainians (Ukrainian-Americans) will matter in this election.  Given the strange American electoral system, certain states matter more than others.  Ukrainian-Americans are 1% of the population of Pennsylvania, and 0.5% of the population of Michigan.  If Trump wins those two states, he will win the general election.  If Harris wins those two states, then she will win the general election. 

Timothy Snyder wrote an excellent piece on how electing Kamala Harris is essential to Ukraine existing as an independent nation.

[kineticpenguin]

There's this weird centrist notion that the Democrats, especially Biden, are never rewarded and are indeed punished for making concessions to the left, which I find a bit odd.

For one thing, this is talking about specific subsets of people who may or may not be even on the left: global warming is a concern for liberals too, and by 2020 only neocon boomers weren't calling Afghanistan a "pointless forever war." Hell, there's a reason Trump set the date!

For another, it's hardly as if leaving Afghanistan was a shining moment for Biden's foreign policy. His administration seemed, as with Roe vs Wade being overturned, to have had months to prepare. They did not seem to prepare, and looked like they were caught flat-footed by the events. So I suppose there is a grain of truth, there: ISAF giving Afghanistan the Irish Goodbye and the US keeping the Taliban's assets frozen purely as a departing middle finger wasn't great, especially as Afghanistan would be subsequently hit with huge national disasters. But on the whole, I think the most brutal criticism of the withdrawal tended to come from liberals and conservatives whose national pride was wounded by the videos of departing C-17s. The antiwar left's response seemed to be "fine, I guess, at least it's over." Did it really deserve a round of enthusiastic Attaboys?

I also feel like this is misremembering how, in the process of getting the Inflation Reduction Act passed, Joe was at his most "I'm so helpless, I'm so weak" in public, full-throttle backpedaling on campaign promises and using Manchin and Sinema as an excuse at every turn. It was also when it became clear that the Biden administration is extremely poor at communicating its successes. For example, how many people have heard of Biden "breaking the rail strike"? Now compare that with how many people are aware that his administration negotiated a deal between the rail companies and several of the largest unions, with the IBEW thanking him directly for "playing the long game"?

I just think the real problem is that the man just isn't very good at his job, and at the very least, his media team fucking sucks. This all feels like the centrists have resigned themselves to losing the election and they're warming up their usual excuses (it's those damn Bernie Bros again!).

[theculturedmarxist]

George Orwell wrote in 1984 that "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Governments work relentlessly to distort public perceptions of the past. Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion. A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism. In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would likely have been effective.

The Biden team uses the word “unprovoked” incessantly, most recently in Biden’s major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a recent NATO statement, and in the most recent G7 statement. Mainstream media friendly to Biden simply parrot the White House. The New York Times is the lead culprit, describing the invasion as “unprovoked” no fewer than 26 times, in five editorials, 14 opinion columns by NYT writers, and seven guest op-eds!

There were in fact two main U.S. provocations. The first was the U.S. intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise order). The second was the U.S. role in installing a Russophobic regime in Ukraine by the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The shooting war in Ukraine began with Yanukovych’s overthrow nine years ago, not in February 2022 as the U.S. government, NATO, and the G7 leaders would have us believe.

Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss these roots of the war. To recognize them would undermine the administration in three ways. First, it would expose the fact that the war could have been avoided, or stopped early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation and the U.S. more than $100 billion in outlays to date. Second, it would expose President Biden’s personal role in the war as a participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and before that as a staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early advocate of NATO enlargement. Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the administration’s continued push for NATO expansion.

The archives show irrefutably that the U.S. and German governments repeatedly promised to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” when the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance. Nonetheless, U.S. planning for NATO expansion began early in the 1990s, well before Vladimir Putin was Russia’s president. In 1997, national security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled out the NATO expansion timeline with remarkable precision.

U.S. diplomats and Ukraine’s own leaders knew well that NATO enlargement could lead to war. The great US scholar-statesman George Kennan called NATO enlargement a “fateful error,” writing in the New York Times that, “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry considered resigning in protest against NATO enlargement. In reminiscing about this crucial moment in the mid-1990s, Perry said the following in 2016: “Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. At that time, we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy ... but they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.”

In 2008, then U.S. Ambassador to Russia, and now CIA Director, William Burns, sent a cable to Washington warning at length of grave risks of NATO enlargement: “Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

Ukraine’s leaders knew clearly that pressing for NATO enlargement to Ukraine would mean war. Former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovych declared in a 2019 interview “that our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.”

During 2010-2013, Yanukovych pushed neutrality, in line with Ukrainian public opinion. The U.S. worked covertly to overthrow Yanukovych, as captured vividly in the tape of then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt planning the post-Yanukovych government weeks before the violent overthrow of Yanukovych. Nuland makes clear on the call that she was coordinating closely with then Vice President Biden and his national security advisor Jake Sullivan, the same Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team now at the center of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Ukraine.

After Yanukovych’s overthrow, the war broke out in the Donbas, while Russia claimed Crimea. The new Ukrainian government appealed for NATO membership, and the U.S. armed and helped restructure the Ukrainian army to make it interoperable with NATO. In 2021, NATO and the Biden Administration strongly recommitted to Ukraine’s future in NATO.

In the immediate lead-up to Russia’s invasion, NATO enlargement was center stage. Putin’s draft US-Russia Treaty (December 17, 2021) called for a halt to NATO enlargement. Russia’s leaders put NATO enlargement as the cause of war in Russia’s National Security Council meeting on February 21, 2022. In his address to the nation that day, Putin declared NATO enlargement to be a central reason for the invasion.

Historian Geoffrey Roberts recently wrote: “Could war have been prevented by a Russian-Western deal that halted NATO expansion and neutralised Ukraine in return for solid guarantees of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty? Quite possibly.” In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine reported progress towards a quick negotiated end to the war based on Ukraine’s neutrality. According to Naftali Bennett, former Prime Minister of Israel, who was a mediator, an agreement was close to being reached before the U.S., U.K., and France blocked it.

While the Biden administration declares Russia’s invasion to be unprovoked, Russia pursued diplomatic options in 2021 to avoid war, while Biden rejected diplomacy, insisting that Russia had no say whatsoever on the question of NATO enlargement. And Russia pushed diplomacy in March 2022, while the Biden team again blocked a diplomatic end to the war.

By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Russia will escalate as necessary to prevent NATO enlargement to Ukraine. The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement. The Biden administration’s insistence on NATO enlargement to Ukraine has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable U.S. military aspirations. It’s time for the provocations to stop, and for negotiations to restore peace to Ukraine.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the date of William Burns' 2008 cable warning about NATO enlargment. That error has been fixed.

[dragoneyes618]

Let’s not get caught up in the details of the controversy that made headlines this past weekend about the fact that 12 employees of UNRWA—the U.N. refugee agency dedicated to assisting the Palestinians—took part in the Hamas pogroms in southern Israel on Oct. 7. The New York Times broke the story, and many of the governments that are the principal funders of UNRWA, including the United States, which is the largest donor giving $422 million to it in 2023, have since expressed various levels of concern or outrage.

No one who knows anything about UNRWA can pretend to be surprised by what happened. The notion put forward by some of its apologists that the people who took part in the terror attacks are just a tiny minority of its 13,000 employees is not to be taken seriously. As The Wall Street Journal subsequently reported, it is estimated that approximately 10% of UNRWA employees are either active members or have ties to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

For years, it has been well known that UNRWA facilities, including schools and other places that are supposed to be devoted to charitable purposes, have been used by Hamas to store weapons or otherwise assist terrorists. Its education programs are as bad as those run by Hamas or the Palestinian Authority when it comes to indoctrinating young Palestinians in hatred for Israel and the Jews. UNRWA’s creation in 1949, coupled with its actions and the infrastructure it has built up since then, is dedicated to perpetuating the conflict with Israel. Forget philanthropy or—as every other refugee agency in the world focuses on—resettling those displaced by war in some safe place where they can make a new start in life.

That said, the notion that anything is shocking about the fact that a few of the UNRWA staff were caught taking part in the Oct. 7 attacks, including direct participation in kidnapping and mass murder, is a joke.

Sadly, so is most of the discussion about holding UNRWA accountable.

An unaccountable U.N. agency

Much to the dismay of Israel-haters like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the Biden administration announced that it was suspending funding of UNRWA. But when the details are drilled down, it turns out that the United States is continuing to pay the money it already pledged but will only put a pause on sending cash for new projects. The same is true for Germany and Canada, as well as some other donor nations. The government of the Netherlands has suspended all funding but other countries, like Ireland, Spain and Turkey, are refusing to take any actions to hold UNRWA accountable.

If the past is any indication of the future, even those who have spoken out about this, like the United States, will eventually, even if quietly, resume full funding of UNRWA. As part of his policies that attempted to hold Palestinians and their enablers accountable for their support for terrorism and rejection of peace, former President Donald Trump cut all ties with and funding for UNRWA in 2018. Unfortunately, among the first actions when Joe Biden took office in 2021, he reversed that move and restored funding. Biden and his foreign-policy team are steadfast supporters of the United Nations and everything it does, regardless of the fact that it has long been a cesspool of antisemitism.

Even those administration officials who have been the most outspoken in reaffirming Israel’s right to self-defense—like John Kirby, the communications director for the National Security Council, who has also denounced Hamas and supported the goal of its elimination—also defended UNRWA. According to Kirby, UNRWA does “amazing work” saving lives. Incredibly, he even gave it credit for wanting to investigate the problem.

The reason for this is that UNRWA has made itself indispensable to the business of caring for Palestinians in Gaza. It is, as it has been for the last 75 years, the primary conduit of assistance to a population that has been made dependent on the international community for all services, including employment. As such, it can and does present itself to the world as the embodiment of philanthropy, providing sustenance to an enormous number of people in need.

That is why any effort to investigate its activities and penalize it for its close ties to terrorists is always derailed by invoking its good works and the notion that if it were shut down, millions would starve.

So, even when UNRWA is caught red-handed storing rockets to be fired at Israel or even having its staff actively taking part in the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the odds that its parent organization or the various nations that have spent billions of their citizens’ taxpayer dollars on funding it will do anything other than slap it on the wrist are negligible.

As with the rest of his policies that ignored the advice of the foreign-policy establishment and the “experts,” Trump had it right on UNRWA. The only theoretical hope for there to be peace between Israel and the Palestinians must start with the abolition of institutions that not only provide assistance and employment to terrorists but have as their purpose the perpetuation of a futile quest to destroy the one Jewish state on the planet. UNRWA must not merely be defunded. It must be abolished.

A world full of refugees

The very fact of its existence is a function of the way the international community has acted to prevent a resolution of the conflict.

When UNRWA was created by the United Nations in 1949, the plight of refugees was among the world’s most pressing problems. Up to 60 million people were displaced in Europe during and immediately after the Second World War.

That included those Jews who had survived the Holocaust seeking to go to Israel or the West, as well as millions of others who had been uprooted for one reason or another. Among them were ethnic Germans who were thrown out of their homes throughout Eastern Europe, including traditionally German regions like East Prussia. As Europe adjusted to new borders largely imposed by the demands of the Soviet Union, many people were forcibly evicted and told to move to places where their ethnicity would be welcomed. Any who resisted were not supported by the international community. They were violently repressed, imprisoned and forgotten.

Nor was Europe the only region where there was a refugee crisis. When Britain abandoned its rule of India, the subcontinent was partitioned into two separate nations—largely, Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. The drawing of those lines on the map created 14 million people who found themselves on the wrong side of the new borders and became refugees. More than 1 million people died in the ethnic and religious violence there as massive populations scrambled to find new homes.

Arab and Jewish refugees

Coming around the same time as the catastrophe caused by the partition of India was the refugee problem caused by Britain’s leaving another of its former possessions: the Mandate for Palestine. The United Nations voted to partition Palestine into two states: one for the Jews and one for the Arabs with Jerusalem being an international enclave. While the Jews accepted the partition scheme, the Arabs did not. The leaders of the Palestinian Arabs—like the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini—declared war on the Jews. Neighboring Arab nations supported them and invaded the newborn State of Israel on its first day of existence in May 1948.

The Arab war to destroy Israel not only failed; the fighting led hundreds of thousands of Arabs in the former Mandate to flee. A small minority were forced out by Israelis during bitter fighting in some areas. But most of them left out of fear of what would happen to them if they fell under the rule of Jews (and with the expectation that they would take over all the land once the Jews were “thrown into the sea”). That was mostly the product of projection since in many instances Jews captured by their foes were massacred. But it was also the result of propaganda from the Arab side in the fighting in which they sought to demonize their enemies and strengthen the will of the Palestinian Arabs to fight.

During the same period as approximately 700,000 Arabs became refugees, some 800,000 Jews either fled or were forced to flee their homes in the Arab and Muslim world where they had lived for centuries. The very different disposition of those two populations says all anyone needs to know about the next 75 years of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Jewish refugees were resettled in a massive philanthropic project funded by Jews around the world. Most of those refugees went to Israel, where they faced hardships in what was then a very poor and embattled country. Today, their descendants make up about half the Jewish population and have contributed enormously to its defense and flourishing as a modern state. Others found new homes in the United States and other parts of the world.

Unlike every other refugee population, the Palestinian Arabs were not resettled. They were kept in camps throughout the Middle East with the largest concentration in Gaza, which was controlled by Egypt from 1949 to 1967. They were prevented from finding new homes in Arab and Muslim countries, where they spoke the language and shared a common culture. Nor were they enabled to go elsewhere to make new lives.

Instead, they were kept in place to wait for the day when they could “go home” to their former villages in what was now Israel. Their leaders and the rest of the Arab world opposed their resettlement, doing all they could to prevent it.

And the agency that enabled this policy to continue for generations was none other than UNRWA.

It’s important to understand that at the time when all these refugee problems arose, the United Nations created two refugee agencies. One, UNRWA, deals only with the Palestinians. The other, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (or UNHCR) has the responsibility for all of the other refugees in the world.

The UNHCR has its flaws, but its job is to help the refugees by giving them not just immediate aid in surviving being displaced by wars and other disasters but also assistance in resettling in places where it will be safe for them. Their goal is to ensure that their problems are resolved and that their children will make new lives rather than continue to live in camps.

By contrast, the UNRWA exists solely to ensure that Palestinian refugees are never resettled. That’s why almost all of the people who are called Palestinian refugees are the descendants of the people who fled the war the Arab world started in 1948. Several generations have been born in the camps but, contrary to the way other populations are treated, all are given the same status as those who were the original 1948 refugees.

Of all the tens of millions of refugees of the 1940s, the only ones whose descendants have not been resettled are the Palestinians. A humane and rational policy would have led to their being absorbed into other populations. But that’s not UNRWA’s job. It operates the ultimate welfare state in which generations are kept dependent on charity. Worse than that, its programs and policies all encourage the Palestinians to go on believing that someday Israel will cease to exist, and then they can return to where their grandparents and great-grandparents lived three-quarters of a century ago. Though it pretends to be a humanitarian force, it encourages its charges to look forward to the day when Hamas’s genocidal objective—the mass murder of Israel’s 7 million Jews—will be achieved.

Therefore, it’s little surprise that UNRWA is riddled with supporters of Hamas and that among its staff are people who take part in terrorist atrocities. And that much of the aid it receives from the world goes to help Hamas continue to function. UNRWA allows the very people its donors think they are helping to be used as human shields in a cynical hopeless war.

So, let’s not waste much time arguing about the details of UNRWA’s complicity in Oct. 7 or other acts of terror. The only discussion that needs to be held is one about its abolition and replacement by a genuine refugee agency. The world needs one that can give Palestinians new homes rather than keep them in misery awaiting another Holocaust for the Jews that they’ve been led to believe will magically solve their problems.

[darkmaga-retard]

They have engineered a situation where the system can no longer be trusted at any level...

Roger Stone

Aug 14, 2024

President Joe Biden, Rep. Jamie Raskin, and Vice President Kamala Harris

A recent op/ed in The Hill written by Myra Adams, a nobody who was supposedly on the creative team of two GOP presidential campaigns in 2004 and 2008, repeated the familiar trope that President Trump is a threat to democracy and jeopardized the long-standing American tradition of the “peaceful transfer of power.”

Adams lamented about a Wall Street Journal poll of first-time voters aged 18-21 showing that none of them cared about Jan. 6 or threats to democracy. Adams believes that the youth of America should be enraptured about media-driven hysteria rather than concerned about their tenuous future in Kamala’s America.

Young Americans look at a country where their freedom and opportunity are vanishing. They look at the prospects of buying a home, gaining a quality job, and creating a family as a pipe dream. World War 3, a conflict that may cause young people to be placed on the frontlines, is unfolding because of military conflicts agitated by U.S. foreign policy.

Young people do not have the luxury to be gilded from the America’s grim realities. 

Adams is dismayed that young people aren’t aware of just how evil Trump truly is, how his words cut at the heart of democracy, and sow seeds of discord within the political system.

Whereas politicians like Joe Biden, John McCain, George W. Bush and Obama would pay lip service to each other, not overstepping certain bounds because they ultimately serve the same masters. Trump generally refuses to give his political opposition anything but scorn and revulsion.

“It is immoral and un-American to assume without evidence that the opposing team will cheat and rob your guy of the presidency,” Adams wrote, adding she was appalled because “Trump has managed to turn himself and the Jan. 6 attackers into victims while Republicans applaud.” 

[simply-ivanka]

What Did the Biden Family’s Foreign Clients Get for their Money?

Hunter Biden pleads guilty to federal tax charges.

Wall Street Journal

By James Freeman

Hunter Biden has been convicted of federal crimes for not paying all the taxes he owed on his foreign income. But the most important question for Americans remains unanswered: What exactly did his overseas clients get in return for their money? His Thursday guilty plea on tax charges prevented testimony that may have gone some way toward providing an answer. This potential testimony may also explain why Hunter Biden waited until now to acknowledge his guilt.

The Journal’s Sara Randazzo, Ryan Barber and Annie Linskey report from Los Angeles:

Federal prosecutors signaled an aggressive strategy as the trial drew near, previewing an approach that would show how foreign interests paid the younger Biden to influence the U.S. government while his father was vice president during the Obama administration. Prosecutors said they planned to cast a light on a lucrative arrangement with a Romanian real-estate magnate who was facing a corruption investigation in his home country, along with his ties to the oil company CEFC China Energy and his tenure on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. 

In court Thursday, [prosecutor Leo Wise] insisted on reading the entirety of the 56-page indictment into the record—over the objection of Biden’s lawyer—to establish the facts underlying the guilty plea. 

Alanna Durkin Richer reported last month for the Associated Press:

Hunter Biden’s lawyers say prosecutors are inappropriately trying to insert “politically-charged” allegations about his foreign business dealings into the upcoming federal tax trial against the president’s son.

Special counsel David Weiss’ team told the judge last week that they plan to call to the witness stand a business associate of Hunter Biden’s to testify about an arrangement with a Romanian businessman who was trying to “influence U.S. government policy” during Joe Biden’s term as vice president…

The Romanian businessman, Gabriel Popoviciu, wanted U.S. government agencies to probe a bribery investigation he was facing in his home country in the hopes that would end his legal trouble, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors say Hunter Biden agreed with his business associate to help Popoviciu fight the criminal charges against him. But prosecutors say they were concerned that “lobbying work might cause political ramifications” for Joe Biden, so the arrangement was structured in a way that “concealed the true nature of the work” for Popoviciu, prosecutors alleged…

In fact, Popoviciu and Hunter’s business associate agreed that they would be paid for their work to “attempt to influence U.S. government agencies to investigate the Romanian investigation,” prosecutors said. Hunter Biden’s business associate was paid more than $3 million, which was split with Hunter and another business partner, prosecutors say.

Ms. Richer also noted that Hunter Biden’s defense lawyers “slammed prosecutors for showcasing ‘these matters on the eve of Mr. Biden’s trial—when there is no mention of political influence in the 56-page Indictment.’ ” The A.P. story continued:

“The Special Counsel’s unnecessary change of tactic merely echoes the baseless and false allegations of foreign wrongdoing which have been touted by House Republicans to use Mr. Biden’s proper business activities in Romania and elsewhere to attack him and his father,” the defense wrote.

But the defense has now opted not to defend.

Of course Romania is not the only foreign jurisdiction that proved fruitful for the Biden family business. The majority staff of several House committees recently reported:

From 2014 to the present… Biden family members and their associates received over $27 million from foreign individuals or entities…

Witnesses acknowledged that Hunter Biden involved Vice President Biden in many of his business dealings with Russian, Romanian, Chinese, Kazakhstani, and Ukrainian individuals and companies.Then-Vice President Biden met or spoke with nearly every one of the Biden family’s foreign business associates, including those from Ukraine, China, Russia, and Kazakhstan.

And of course let’s not forget Hunter Biden’s own deposition on Capitol Hill. This column noted in March that mere minutes after making yet another broad claim of not involving his father in the business, Hunter Biden confirmed the story of travelling with then-Vice President Joe Biden on Air Force Two to China and introducing his father to Jonathan Li in the lobby of the Bidens’ hotel. The following excerpt from the deposition suggests that the timing could not have been better:

[Committee member or staff]: At the time that you did introduce your father to Jonathan Li, did you or any of your business associates have any potential business with Jonathan Li?

[Hunter Biden]: I was working with Jonathan on a potential that he had an idea for creating a private equity fund based in China to do cross-border investments.

Nice. But good luck explaining what value Hunter Biden might be able to add to such an enterprise. Years later, his Chinese associates still hadn’t come up with a story. In 2019 Cissy Zhou and Jun Mai reported in the South China Morning Post:

BHR (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Company has grabbed global media attention for its links with Hunter Biden, the son of former United States vice-president Joe Biden, after US President Donald Trump fired a barrage of corruption allegations at him and requested China investigate the Bidens’ financial activities in the country.

The company has repeatedly declined to elaborate on the younger Biden’s role at the firm when contacted by the South China Morning Post via phone, mail and visits to the office. But Jonathan Li Xiangsheng, the firm’s chief executive and Hunter Biden’s partner, has said the company was working on an explanation about the American’s role.

Li refused to comment on the younger Biden when reached by the Post on Monday.

A recent visit to the firm’s registered address in Beijing found a small, plainly decorated office, where a receptionist said she had never seen Hunter Biden.

Is there anything Joe Biden said about the family business in 2020 that has turned out to be true?

Meanwhile as Vice President Kamala Harris seeks a promotion, perhaps she ought to disclose if she ever questioned anyone or learned anything about the Biden family business and its implications for American foreign policy. One would guess she was at least curious. Did she ever talk to anyone about the ethical standards for Hunter Biden’s art sales, which turned out to be a sham while she was serving alongside Joe Biden?

Vice President Harris is not just a lawyer but a former prosecutor and a former state attorney general, for goodness sake. Wasn’t she the least bit concerned?

***

Spokespeople for both the president and the vice president say that they won’t be pardoning Hunter Biden. But then why is Hunter Biden’s lawyer still making what seems like a political argument rather than a legal one?

Jack Morphet and Priscilla DeGregory report for the New York Post on comments from defense lawyer Abbe Lowell:

“Hunter decided to enter his plea to protect those he loves from unnecessary hurt and cruel humiliation,” Lowell said.

“This plea prevents that kind of show trial that would not have provided all the facts or served any real point in justice. He will now move on to the sentencing phase, while keeping open the options to raise the many clear issues with this case on appeal.”

He’s going to appeal a case in which he just pleaded guilty to all the charges? Sounds like an argument built for the White House briefing room, not a courtroom.

***

James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival” and also the co-author of “Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts and Bailouts at Citi.”

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

President Joe Biden announced Friday that Israel has proposed a three-part plan that would ultimately lead to a permanent cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, as well as the release of all hostages who have been held there for the last eight months.

Speaking from the White House, Biden said that the proposal comes after intensive diplomacy carried out by his team. The plan has been relayed to Hamas via Qatar, one of the main mediators in negotiations.

Biden’s announcement is notable as he and his administration have battled opposition from the far-left wing of the Democratic Party, especially as the general election is in full swing.

People have demonstrated across the country, including students who set up encampments on college campuses last month. And members of the Biden administration have also quit their jobs in protest over U.S. policy toward Israel.

The plan's first phase would start with six weeks of a full and complete cease-fire, including the withdrawal of Israeli forces from populated areas of Gaza, and the release of women and children being held hostage, Biden said during the surprise announcement. This initial stage would also include a surge of humanitarian assistance, with 600 trucks carrying aid into Gaza every day.

Biden said that, in that first phase, Israel and Hamas would negotiate a permanent cease-fire and admitted that there could be major hurdles.

"I’ll be honest with you, there are a number of things to be negotiated to move from phase one to phase two," he said.

The president said that phase two wouldn't begin until all agreements are reached. That second stage would involve the release of all living hostages in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned in Israel.

The final phase would be the start of a major reconstruction plan in Gaza and the return of the remains of deceased hostages to their families.

“I’ve urged the leadership in Israel to stand behind this deal, regardless of whatever [political] pressure comes," Biden said.

While Israeli officials did not comment on the specific terms outlined by Biden, a statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said he had authorized the government's negotiating team to "present an outline" that included "the return of all our abductees and the elimination of Hamas’ military and governmental capabilities."

Netanyahu, who has repeatedly promised to not end the war until Hamas is destroyed, has come under intense pressure from the families of hostages, many of whom say he and the government are not working hard enough to gain the return of their loved ones.

Hamas released a statement saying that the group "views positively what was included in US President Joe Biden’s speech today." Hamas also said that it would only deal with proposals if they were based on a permanent cease-fire and complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, among other stipulations.

Friday's statement echoed a statement from a day earlier in which the group asserted that if Israel stops its war in Gaza, it would be prepared "to reach a complete agreement that includes a comprehensive exchange deal."

The Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a statement stressed "the importance of creating real political conditions for the establishment of an independent and fully sovereign Palestinian state." Qatar has been heavily involved in mediating between parties during negotiations.

In a statement released after Biden's announcement, former President Barack Obama praised the outlined plan writing that a ceasefire would "save lives" and "lay the foundation for what will be a long and difficult road to a future in which Israel is secure and at peace with its neighbors, and Palestinians finally have the security, freedom and self-determination that they have sought for so long."

Biden's announcement comes after Israeli forces moved farther into the southern Gaza city of Rafah on Tuesday, days after an airstrike sparked a major fire that killed dozens of Palestinians.

Biden has grown increasingly frustrated with Netanyahu in recent months, though the U.S. successfully defended its ally in April against Iran's drone and missile attack on Israel.

In March, Biden warned Netanyahu against Israel launching a military assault in Rafah, with national security adviser Jake Sullivan saying after the two leaders spoke that it "would be a mistake." And in early May, the U.S. stopped a large shipment of offensive weapons to Israel. Despite what seemed to be Biden's red line, the White House said earlier this week that Israel had not crossed it.

The war in Gaza, triggered by Hamas' surprise assault on Israel on Oct. 7 which left some 1,200 dead and resulted in the kidnapping of 240, has killed around 36,000 Palestinians, according to officials in Gaza.

Israel has been sharply criticized and become increasingly isolated during the war.

In recent weeks, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians fled after being forced from their homes.

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor applied for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and others over alleged war crimes.

In the last week, Spain, Norway and Ireland formally recognized a Palestinian state, a step Israel vehemently opposes.

[mariacallous]

The fundamental problem for American presidents who have attempted to work with Benjamin Netanyahu is that Benjamin Netanyahu does not care what American presidents think. An exceptional English orator who was raised in Philadelphia, Netanyahu believes that he can outmaneuver and outlast American politicians on their own turf. “I know America,” he said in a private 2001 conversation that later leaked. “America is something that can easily be moved.” This attitude constituted a sharp break; in the past, even hard-line politicians like the maverick general turned premier Ariel Sharon responded to pressure from American presidents.

But during Bill Clinton’s presidency and again during Barack Obama’s, Netanyahu changed the equation. He repeatedly blew off American entreaties on issues including the peace process and Iran, and turned his willingness to stand up to U.S. presidents into an electoral selling point with his base. Faced with this unprecedented recalcitrance, different Democratic administrations tried different tactics for wrangling Bibi. Some attempted to compel his compliance with hard public pressure, only to have Netanyahu wait out a U.S.-imposed settlement freeze, then agitate against the Iran nuclear deal in Congress and the American media. Others attempted to settle disputes privately with Netanyahu, on the assumption that the Israeli leader would respond better if not openly antagonized.

None of this worked and none of it arrested Netanyahu’s drift further to the right. As both vice president and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden had a front-row seat to these failures. So did his close-knit foreign-policy team, including longtime staffers such as Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Recognizing the errors of the past, they have charted a different course aimed at outmaneuvering Netanyahu, seeking to succeed where their predecessors did not. This approach predates the current Gaza conflict, but has reached full expression in the past months. It explains why Biden has full-throatedly supported Israel against Hamas while simultaneously assailing the country’s hard-right governing coalition. And it offers a glimpse at the administration’s intended endgame for the war—and for Netanyahu himself.

In 2015, I visited another country with an ascendant right-wing populist leader: Hungary. Today, the country is essentially aligned with Russia against America and its allies. At the time, its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, was escalating his rhetoric against the European Union and the West. As part of the trip, my group met with officials at the American embassy, who explained their impossible predicament: Whenever Western countries would publicly pressure Orbán on his policies, he would refashion that pressure into electoral support, leaving his critics with no good options. Stay silent and he would win; speak up and he would also win.

Right-wing populists such as Orbán and Netanyahu thrive on posturing against outside antagonists, using external criticism to bolster their bona fides as strongmen who can stand up to the international community. This insight has shaped Biden’s approach to Netanyahu—not by preventing the president from publicly fighting with the prime minister, but by influencing which fights he picks. Simply put, Biden has opted to challenge Netanyahu on issues that splinter his support rather than consolidate it. In practice, this means strategically targeting policies where Netanyahu is on the wrong side of Israeli public opinion and forcing him to choose between his hard-right partners and the rest of the country.

Netanyahu’s disastrous attempt to overhaul the Israeli judiciary offers a case in point. The proposed legislation was drafted by right-wing hard-liners with no opposition input and would have subordinated Israel’s courts to its parliament. The attempted power grab provoked the largest sustained protest movement in Israeli history. Polls repeatedly showed that most Israelis opposed the overhaul and wanted lawmakers to come up with new compromise reforms conceived by consensus. And so that’s precisely what the Biden administration began calling for.

“Hopefully, the prime minister will act in a way that he is going to try to work out some genuine compromise,” Biden told reporters in March. “But that remains to be seen.” In July, he repeated the same point to Netanyahu, then reiterated it to the press: “The focus should be on pulling people together and finding consensus.” As the State Department emphasized at the time, “We believe that fundamental changes should be pursued with the broadest possible base of support.” By placing himself firmly on the side of the Israeli majority, Biden was able to prevent Netanyahu from turning his criticism into an electoral asset. After all, it’s hard to paint someone as anti-Israel, as Netanyahu once did with Obama, when they are expressing the opinion of most Israelis.

Biden understands that Netanyahu’s position is a precarious one. His governing coalition received just 48.4 percent of the vote, and took power only because of a quirk of the Israeli electoral system. The coalition relies on an alliance of unpopular far-right parties to stay afloat, whom Netanyahu must appease to remain in office. Biden has exploited this weakness and repeatedly poked at it. Rather than directly confronting Netanyahu, he has called out his extremist partners and in this way heightened the contradictions within Netanyahu’s coalition, undermining its stability and gradually eroding its support in the polls.

In July, Biden told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that Netanyahu’s government has “the most extremist members of cabinets that I’ve seen” in Israel, noting that “I go all the way back to Golda Meir.” This past week, at a campaign event hosted by a former chair of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, Biden went even further, singling out a far-right minister by name. “This is the most conservative government in Israel’s history,” the president said. Itamar “Ben-Gvir and company and the new folks, they don’t want anything remotely approaching a two-state solution.” This was Biden’s approach in action: criticizing Israel during wartime in front of a pro-Israel crowd, and doing so in a way that nonetheless denied Netanyahu any opening. As long as it’s Biden versus Ben-Gvir, rather than Biden versus Bibi, the president holds the upper hand.

Biden has brought the same strategy to bear on the issue of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, which has accelerated under the cover of Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Netanyahu’s coalition is unable to clamp down on these extremists and their terrorism because it is beholden to these extremists. But most Israelis have no desire to mortgage the security of Israel and its indispensable relationship to the United States in favor of some far-flung hilltop settlers in West Bank regions that few Israelis could locate on a map.

Knowing this, Biden has begun unrolling a series of unilateral measures intended to raise the price of settler violence and pit Netanyahu and his allies against the Israeli public. Earlier this month, the administration announced visa bans on those implicated in settler violence, spurring similar actions by the EU, Britain, and France. “We have underscored to the Israeli government the need to do more to hold accountable extremist settlers who have committed violent attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank,” Blinken said. “As President Biden has repeatedly said, those attacks are unacceptable.” This past week, the U.S. froze the sale of more than 20,000 M16 rifles to Israel over concerns that they might find their way into the hands of violent settlers.

Hamas’s October 7 slaughter has put Biden’s approach to the ultimate test. Like most Israelis, he wants to see Hamas vanquished. And like most Israelis, he does not trust Netanyahu and his far-right allies to do it. This has left the president with few appealing options. Publicly denying Israel support during what it sees as an existential war wouldn’t just go against Biden’s personal values. It would collapse all the credibility he has accrued with the Israeli public through his careful diplomacy during his presidency. And it would give Netanyahu the American antagonist he desperately craves, providing the floundering premier with a lifeline he would use to reunite the right behind him.

To avoid this outcome, Biden has backed Israel’s military campaign, but worked nonstop to shape its contours and limit its fallout on civilians and the rest of the region, tapping into the reservoir of goodwill he has built with the Israeli public. The president has also upped the pressure on Netanyahu by assailing his coalition partners and explicitly calling for a new, more moderate Israeli government. U.S. officials have leaked that they think Netanyahu will not last, and Biden has told the Israeli leader to think about what lessons he’d impart to his successor.

In other words, Biden has once again placed himself on the side of the Israeli majority, in order to undermine Netanyahu and shape the political future of the entire country. It’s one of the biggest bets of his presidency, and when the guns finally fall silent, it could determine the fate of the broader Middle East.

[dir7eater]

imagine this: youre a regular old republican and you don’t like biden so you plan on voting for trump, you like him because hes doing the hard work for this country and is gonna fix biden's inflation which has been hitting you kinda hard. you dont like migrants or trans people because they scare you, and you dont really understand the foreign policy stuff but you trust his word that he will fix ukraine and israel because hes charismatic and can do that because he has a lot of inflence. your facebook feed gives you stuff about qanon and other conspiracy theories, but you kinda brush most of it to the side. they have some good points but you’re not a full blown believer.

you just watched trump get shot grazed by a bullet. as he’s getting dragged into a car by secret service you see him pump his fist and yell “fight fight fight”.

(this part is speculative) you hear that the shooter was a leftist who hated trump. you hear that the shooter is trans or a migrant or a woman or a black person or mentally ill or other identity that you don’t know or understand. you hear that the shooter was hired by biden. you hear all this from anywhere, trumps PR, facebook, it doesn’t matter.

you feel worried, but you don’t know how to express that. you hear a ton of stuff from everyone around you. you make some of your own assumptions, that trump is stronger because he’s survived, and the left is weak because they had to resort to violence. you hear assumptions from others, that trump got too close to power and the left had to put him down before he did, that it’s all a big conspiracy done by the jews. but whatever you hear, it’s solidified in your mind that he is the leader of this silent majority that you’re always hearing about, that he’s the only one who’s good for this country.

this is not the only sort of person who could be radicalized by this.

imagine you’re a self proclaimed centrist. you don’t like choosing sides and aren’t that concerned with politics. you like to say that you see merit to both sides of the aisle! and you want more cooperation! you don’t watch the news that much, but you get some stuff on your tik tok and instagram and twitter. you see a ton of stuff about this shooting and get really worried. you feel sad for trump and you agree with all those statements everyone is putting out. that it’s terrible tragedy and it really shows the true colors of some of the left and extremism. you hear all the speculation about the shooter and about how he’s a leftist and you think to yourself, "wow, you know I was considering biden and the left side canidates but if someone from their side could resort to violence over this, i cant vote for that lack or morals"

and what’s even scarier is the things i’m actually seeing right now.

“oh that looks so staged” “trump’s team planned this” these are conspiracy theory guys. please don’t start saying this without hard truth to back this up. please please please. this is coming from someone who is against trump and his ideals, we can do better than this guys.

what i’m trying to say is this shooting is coming at a terrible time of polarization. that conspiracy stuff like this is going to spread because of the echo chambers and social media and everything right now. there is so much potential that could make everything a lot worse in the US. just be aware.