I also did today’s Iran War Update for Naked Capitalism.
I’m back again to bury the Biden legacy.
Once again, I have to remind readers why I’m bothering with this when the Corrupt Dotard Donald Trump is in full-on florid psychosis and threatening to annihilate Iran while breaking all records for Presidential corruption.
Since Trump sucks so bad (and yes, I’d say he’s even worse than Biden, and there IS a difference between the kinds of administrations we get with the different parties), why bother with ol’ Plagiarism Joe?
The reason is simple.
Until Americans, particularly Democrats, reckon with just how disastrous the last three Democratic presidential administrations have been (yes, America’s neocon foreign policy starts with Bill Clinton blowing up Yugoslavia and turning NATO into an offensive alliance and has continued to warmonger ever since, regardless of which party was in power), we’ll keep getting stuck with more of the same “not quite as bad as the Republicans” bullshit; we will only continue hurtling toward the undeniable end of the American Republic.
There is currently a well-funded counter-revolution occurring in the Democratic Party in which centrist Dems and the MSM are aligning to destroy anti-genocide, anti-war candidates like Graham Platner in Maine (got him) and replacing them with consultant-pliable candidates who are willing to disappear their progressive bona fides, take pro-genocide money, stop talking like a local, and do embarrassing crap on social media.
If Dem voters don’t belatedly realize that their party establishment leadership is as corrupt as the GOP and actively push to purge them, we will not be able to vote our way out.
Never forget the Iron Law of Oligarchy.
So let’s get back to the Delaware groper’s (and credibly accused rapist) abysmal record as US President.
In part 1 of this mini-series within a series (the prequel covered COVID, we’ll wrap with Gaza), I covered the post-Cold War years when Joe Biden ran point in the US Senate under the Clinton and Bush 2 administrations.
In part 2, I covered Joe’s misleadership role as Vice President up to the success of the Maidan Coup in 2014.
Part 3 finished out Biden’s term as VP, during which his portfolio included a nearly free hand in Ukraine because Obama was busy hanging out with Jay Z or some shit.
This is the penultimate post in the series and will cover Biden’s relentless efforts to provoke Putin’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine throughout 2021.
I’ll come back to Trump’s term because the Donald laid the groundwork for Biden to entrap Putin into a costly and very bloody war in Ukraine, but I’m going to go ahead and rant about what Biden did in 2020 and 2021 that has cost so many Ukrainian and Russian lives.
Tough-Talking Senior Citizen Made No Secret of His Plans
I’d written off Biden’s chances of winning the presidency throughout the early 2020 campaign season right up until Barack Obama and the utterly compromised and corrupt South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn conspired to rig the primaries (with the help of all the “moderate” candidates who dropped out en masse to help and Elizabeth Warren who stayed in despite having no chance of winning to hurt Bernie Sanders), only to be enraged and horrified by the 2020 campaign and the dreadful choice between more Trump and obviously senile and incredibly bellicose Joe Biden.
Biden made talking mad shit about Russia a centerpiece of his 2020 Presidential campaign (such as it was) from his January 2020 Foreign Affairs piece:
We must impose real costs on Russia for its violations of international norms…To counter Russian aggression, we must keep the alliance’s military capabilities sharp.
To his Sept 2020 Town Hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania:
I believe Russia is an opponent. I really do. But I assure you, they will pay a price.
To his Oct 2020 60 Minutes interview:
…the biggest threat to America right now in terms of breaking up our– our security and our alliances is Russia.
President Joe Was All Brinksmanship All the Time
Joe Biden entered office dead set on fanning the flames of war in Ukraine. Like all neo-cons, Biden’s contempt for Russia knows no bounds, and there’s no evidence he’s ever lost sleep at the thought of the devastation his actions have wrought on Ukraine.
President Joe wasted no time in turning up the heat on Putin, from his February 4 speech to Victoria Nuland’s State Department:
…the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions… are over. We will not hesitate to raise the cost on Russia.
To his March 2021 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:
You think he’s a killer? Uh-huh. I do. He will pay a price.
Putin’s reply was typically savage, for a playground:
…whatever you call me is what you are called yourself. I wish him good health.
Biden happily reiterated his support for George W. Bush’s aggressive policy of expanding NATO to include Ukraine at the June, 2021 NATO Brussels Summit.
And in July 2021, Biden revealed he completely underestimated Russia and had no concept of what an industrial autarky can do in wartime, saying, “(Putin’s) sitting on top of an economy that has nuclear weapons and oil wells and nothing else.”
Don’t forget this policy was considered so aggressive at the time that it caused Bush’s Ambassador to Russia (and Biden’s CIA chief) Bill Burns to fire off the infamous Nyet Means Nyet Memo, and inspired Angela Merkel to write in her 2024 memoir that it was a “battle cry” aimed at Putin.
But that meant nothing to our big talking Joe, who told the DC press corps on December 3, 2021 that “I won’t accept anybody’s red line.”
I spent the whole year of 2021 freaking out about the potential of war in Europe even though no one I knew in real life or online seemed to care.
Gaslit to the Point of Panic
I’d been terrified about NATO expansion since I realized we’d admitted Albania and the Baltic States into the alliance at some point late in the Bush administration.
I was alarmed but not surprised when war immediately broke out between Russia and Georgia, but I was relieved when the American electorate reacted with utter bafflement to John McCain’s claim that “Today, we’re all Georgians” and threatened war with Russia on the campaign trail.
Little did I know that the insane warmonger John “Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran” McCain would become a lodestone and role model to mainstream Democrats by the end of the 2010s.
It was reassuring when Obama laughed off Mitt Romney’s claim that Russia was “without question our #1 geopolitical foe” in 2012 by saying “the 80’s called and they want their foreign policy back.”
But after the Clinton campaign blamed Russia for losing the 2016 election to Trump and the liberal corporate media went into a frenzy over RussiaGate, there were no more reassuring laughs to be had.
Friends, family, work colleagues all turned into blood-thirsty warmongers who saw Putin as the villain of villains, solely responsible for the Trump presidency, and were not shy in calling me a “Trump enabler” and worse for being profoundly opposed to any kind of military conflict with nuclear-armed Russia and the deadly serious and quite competent Vladimir Putin.
Only the excellent Congressional Dish podcast by the brilliant and incredibly thorough Jennifer Briney provided some well-sourced reinforcement of my sanity with its December 2021 episode “Keeping Ukraine.”
So I spent all of 2021 in isolated terror at what I saw as Biden’s relentless efforts to provoke Putin and Russia, using Ukraine as his bludgeon.
As worried as I was, I could never have imagined the full-bore information war that would overwhelm the West in 2022.
We’ll get to that next time, but before I wrap, I need to go back to Trump, for completeness’ sake.
Trump Arms Ukraine
Despite Obama giving Biden, McCain, Nuland, and company a free hand to stir shit in Ukraine in his term, he refused to provide aid to the Ukrainian military, recognizing that Russia would always have “escalatory dominance” in the region.
Trump, perhaps stung by the Clinton campaign’s trumped-up (no pun intended, I lie) RussiaGate bullshit, handed his Ukraine policy over to neo-cons Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and had a much more aggressive policy posture than Obama had allowed.
Trump Arms Ukraine
Dec 2017: First lethal aid: Javelins approved
21 Apr 2019: BBC: Comedian Zelensky wins presidency by landslide
Jul–Sep 2019: Trump holds $214m in Pentagon aid, then releases it
Trump Gets Himself Impeached
The Democratic Congressional Majority had a principled opposition to charging Trump with violating the Emoluments Clause, despite the many open bribes he’d taken from foreign countries, but his clumsy 2019 efforts to get Zelensky to incriminate the crooked Biden family with naughty doings in time to impact the 2020 election brought the hammer down.
Events in Ukraine 2014-2021
I need to give some basic historical summaries because “History? What’s that?” and the massive amounts of propaganda and lies told in the MSM about Ukraine to this day.
2014
22 Feb: Yanukovych flees; the Rada votes him out. Maidan commander Parasyuk to Ukrainska Pravda, 24 Feb: his men held deputies in the building. Yanukovych in Rostov: “nobody has ousted me” (RFE/RL).
23 Feb: The Rada votes to repeal the 2012 language law that let Russian be an official regional language. The 2012 law allowed a regional language where at least 10% spoke it. Acting President Oleksandr Turchynov refused to sign the repeal, so the 2012 law stayed in force until the Constitutional Court struck it down on 28 Feb 2018 (Ukrinform).
16–18 Mar: Crimea referendum, then annexation. Putin’s Crimea address.
14 Apr: Fighting in Donbas begins. OHCHR counts the war from this date. The 2001 Ukrainian census showed that the breakaway regions of Donetsk (74%) and Luhansk (68%) were majority Russian-speaking, as was Crimea (with 77%).
2 May: Odesa, House of Trade Unions: 48 dead, 42 of them in the fire. OHCHR.
17 Jul: MH17 shot down over Donbas: 298 killed. OHCHR counts them in the 2014 civilian toll.
5 Sep: Minsk I: the 12-point protocol. Trilateral Contact Group (Ukraine, Russia, OSCE) plus the separatist leaders. Ceasefire, OSCE monitoring, decentralisation, amnesty, prisoner exchange. The ceasefire failed.
2014 total: 2,084 civilians killed, the deadliest year. Includes MH17.
2015–2018
12 Feb 2015: Minsk II: the “Package of Measures”. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande as mediators (UN Peacemaker PDF). Ceasefire from 15 Feb and heavy-weapons withdrawal; local elections in the separatist areas under Ukrainian law, and amnesty; constitutional reform by end-2015 giving “certain areas” of Donetsk and Luhansk special status; Ukraine regains the border only after the elections and the reform. See below for Merkel and Hollande’s comments on the true purpose of the agreement.
2015–2018: The political clauses were never carried out. Civilian deaths fell from 955 in 2015 to 58 in 2018.
Dec 2017: Trump approves Javelins, the first US lethal aid. CNBC/AP.
Nov 2018: Kerch Strait: Russia seizes three Ukrainian navy ships. State Dept.
2019–2021
21 Apr 2019: Zelensky wins with 73% on a peace platform. BBC. Note that he changes his position dramatically after taking office.
25 Apr 2019: The Rada passes the state-language law: Ukrainian “the only official state language”. 278 votes; Poroshenko signed it on 15 May, days before leaving office (UNIAN). In force 16 Jul 2019. Language quotas for state and private TV; at least half of printed media text in Ukrainian; “public humiliation” of Ukrainian made an offence (RFE/RL). Private communication and religious ceremonies are exempt (UNIAN).
20 May 2019: Inaugural: “Our primary task is ceasefire in Donbas”
25 Jul 2019: The Trump call (memo PDF)
1 Oct 2019: Zelensky signs the Steinmeier Formula. Ties Minsk to elections in Donbas. “No to Capitulation” protests follow and he backs off. Foreign Policy.
How the EU and Ukrainian Leadership Saw the Minsk Accords
7 Dec 2022: Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Die Zeit. The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time, which it used to get stronger.
28 Dec 2022: Former French President François Hollande to the Kyiv Independent
15 Jun 2022: Poroshenko: Minsk bought “eight years” to build the armed forces. Espreso / Radio Svoboda (Portnikov).
Dec 2017: First lethal aid: Javelins approved
2 Feb 2019: US announces intent to withdraw from the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty; withdrawal is completed in August.
21 Apr 2019: BBC: Comedian Zelensky wins presidency by landslide
Jul–Sep 2019: Trump holds $214m in Pentagon aid, then releases it
Under Trump, US military aid (and CIA activity) to Ukraine compared pretty favorably to the kind of money poured into the black hole before Russia invaded in February 2022.
