Monday, 09 November 2020_Political commentator John Steppling says US President-elect Joe Biden has a history of hawkish foreign policies including supporting coups.
U.S. President Donald Trump is terrible. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is just as bad. In some ways he is worse. You shouldn’t vote for either one.
Trump is erratic and unpredictable, which is dangerous. Even so, Biden is worse than Trump on international relations.
At the center of the president’s worldview is a deep, admirable and prescient skepticism about foreign interventionism. Trump began criticizing the Iraq War soon after it began, when the U.S. invasion was still popular. His critiques continued during the 2016 primaries — have you known of another Republican to campaign against militarism? As president-elect Trump told a roomfull of service members: “We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with.”
Trump signed the first peace agreement with the Taliban; he plans to bring home the last American troops in Afghanistan before Election Day — even sooner than required under the deal. He refuses to be goaded into a new cold war against Russia, has met with the leader of North Korea positions far to the left of hawkish pro-war Democrats like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama and Biden.
Because most Americans are self-centered and unconcerned about brown people in other nations, it’s ridiculous yet necessary to remind you that the Afghans we bomb are real people like you and me, that Iraqis are scarred for life when their children are hobbled by American bullets, that Yemenis cry for their dead blown to bits by American missiles, that our insane decision to turn Libya from the most prosperous country in Africa into a failed state with 21st century slave auctions is an atrocity, that we have murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the last couple of decades for no reason that can be justified under common sense or international law.
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