MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica: fevereiro 2021

US President Joe Biden bellicosely proclaimed, “America is back,” in his major foreign policy priorities speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 19. Repeated twice for effect, Biden signaled the end of the Trump interregnum.

No more assuring words could have been uttered for George W. Bush’s former Defense Secretary Colin Powell and the 70 odd Republican national security officials, who wrote an open letter endorsing Biden out of fear that Trump would upset the bipartisan foreign policy consensus of regime change, forever wars, and the NATO alliance. Republican neo-cons now shelter in the Democrat’s big tent, today’s party of war.

The major difference from his predecessor is that the new US president promises a greater reliance on multilateral diplomacy and international cooperative agreements to achieve US imperial goals. Biden pledged to remain in the World Health Organization and to return to the Paris Climate Agreement, although compliance with the latter is voluntary and Biden defends fracking. After Trump withdrew the US from the UN Human Rights Council three years ago, the US will reengage as an observer. And Trump’s “Muslim ban” was reversed in Biden’s first day in office.

Regardless of the changing of the guard in Washington, the imperial goal of the “full spectrum dominance” endures from one administration to the next. The global network of 800-1000 foreign military bases will not be shuttered.

The fact that the US can with impunity punish a third of humanity (39 nations) with illegal sanctions – what the UN calls unilateral coercive measures – is a measure of its hegemonic standing. These sanctions are a form of “hybrid warfare,” which can be just as deadly as outright war. Although Biden is reviewing the sanctions policy, considering the COVID-19 pandemic, he is expected to “keep using [the] US sanctions weapon but with sharper aim,” as reported by Reuters.

The new Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted that his policies would follow his predecessor, but will “more effectively target” official enemies such as Venezuela and will double down on Russia. Following Trump, Biden is appealing to the UK High Court to extradite Julian Assange.

Biden warned, in his foreign policy priorities speech, about “competition among countries that threaten to divide the world” caused by “shifting global dynamics.” The threat to “divide the world” that concerns the US president is precisely any deviation from US domination. Biden was referring to the emergence of potential rival powers. His warning affirms and extends Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy doctrine of “great-power competition” and swings away from Obama’s earlier and subsequently abandoned conception of “international interdependence.”

Biden’s “shifting global dynamics” are what Obama’s Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel referred to as “challenging the world order that American leadership helped build after World War II.” In other words, the world’s sole superpower is averse to an emerging multipolar world.

Biden’s speech concluded, “We’re at an inflection point” caused by “new crises.” While not identified by Biden, this is implicit recognition of the impending crisis of legitimacy of the neoliberal world order. The US is the main beneficiary, proponent, and enforcer of a global political economy that increasingly is seen as failing to meet people’s needs. Class disparities during an economic recession are ever more evident in the US and internationally. Here in the US, billionaires added $4 trillion to their net worth since the onset of the pandemic.

While still president, Trump spoke against the US as the world’s gendarme: “The plan is to get out of endless wars to bring our soldiers back home, not be policing agents all over the world.” For a variety of reasons, Trump’s iconoclastic words never found their way into policy. And, certainly, Biden’s speech writers will never give him similar words to read.

Rather, Biden said in his foreign policy speech that the US is “fully committed to our NATO Alliance” and “welcome[s] Europe’s growing investment in the military capabilities.” The US mission in Iraq will be expanded and more US troops will be sent to Germany.

Biden justifies the NATO military encirclement of Russia, with intimations that Ukraine and Georgia may eventually join, by “the threat from Russia.” However, Russian reactions to staging hostile war games and nuclear capable facilities on its border are plausibly defensive. Meanwhile the US-led military alliance has long since broken loose from its Atlantic-centric borders with NATO Partners Across the Globe extending to Afghanistan, Australia, Colombia, Iraq, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mongolia, New Zealand, and Pakistan.

The new administration will expand US military presence in Africa through its Africa Command (AFRICOM), which in 2019 deployed Special Forces in 22 countries and was in active combat in at least thirteen of them. The largest ever US military exercise in Africa, African Lions 21, is scheduled for this June with “partner nations.”

Biden’s State Department approved a $200 million arms sale to Egypt, a country headed by the man Trump called his “favorite dictator.” The US is and continues to be the world’s largest purveyor of military equipment, eclipsing the combined sales of the next four highest war profiteers.

Oil and gas are strategic resources, and their international flows are key factors for imperial control. Absent oil and gas sales, 60% of its GDP, Russia would be a minor economy.

Now that the US is a net oil exporter, the oil-rich Gulf monarchies are both allies and potential competitors.

Trump extended the US’s “special relationship” in the Middle East with Israel and Saudi Arabia; Biden continues this trajectory. Trump’s provocative move of the US embassy to Jerusalem will not be reversed by Biden, nor will Palestinian rights be recognized.

Ignoring nuclear-armed Israel, the Biden team continues the US’s obsession with Iran’s nuclear program. Biden has committed to renegotiate “a better deal” regarding Iran after Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, his the deal includes Trump’s demand to include Iran’s whole regional policy.

The new US administration will be augmenting troops in Syria and expanding and building new military bases there. Damascus is in a weakened state with the pandemic, economic blockade, and continued military hostilities by the US and its “partners.”

Biden announced that the US will no longer support “offensive operations” in the Saudi-led war on Yemen, a human rights catastrophe. It remains to be seen what continuing “defensive” lethal aid to the Saudis entails. The Saudis have the world’s fifth largest military, costing an astronomical 8% of their GDP. Some US military sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been temporarily suspended. In response, the CEO of military merchant Raytheon commented: “Peace is not going to break out in the Middle East anytime soon.” He should know, as Biden’s defense secretary formerly sat on his board of directors.

Treatment of Latin America and the Caribbean as the US’s proprietary backyard, under the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, is being challenged by a rising “pink tide”: recent leftist electoral wins in Mexico, Argentina, and Bolivia and a possibility in Ecuador in April; popular uprisings in Argentina, Haiti, and elsewhere; and continued resistance by Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua.

Biden, the day he entered office, had the power of executive order to restore Obama’s openings to Cuba that had been reversed by Trump. Now, over a month in office, Biden has not ended limits on remittances, restrictions on travel, or other illegal sanctions on Cuba. Biden continues the illegal policy of regime change for Cuba of the previous twelve US presidents: covert and overt destabilization, blockade, and occupation of Guantánamo. Obama’s openings to Cuba, by his own description, were not a deviation from previous policy but an attempt to achieve regime change by different means.

Venezuela featured prominently in the presidential campaign speeches of Trump and Biden, with both promoting regime change. US-anointed counterfeit president of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó has lost his credentials with the European Union. But the farce – initiated in 2019 by Trump – is being continued by Biden, who backed down on his campaign pledge to possibly negotiate directly with the democratically elected president, Nicolás Maduro.

Biden, once in office, has deported thousands of emigres back to Haiti and other countries. This is “a disappointing step backward from the Biden administration’s earlier commitments to fully break from the harmful deportation policies of both the Trump and Obama presidencies,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

US foreign policy reflects the personal qualities of the person occupying the Oval Office, party affiliation, and the constellation of state and corporate powers behind the administration. Eclipsing these factors are larger geopolitical developments, especially now with the emergence of China as the world’s workshop.

China is already a rival and an quick upcoming peer of the US in terms of economic power. China’s remarkable economic growth has been predicated by its integration in and indeed dependence on the international capitalist market, which is so far dominated by the US because of the dictatorship of the dollar for international deals; which may change sooner than the US expects, with the upcoming China & Russia international bank and perhaps even a new trading currency that would upstage the dollar. So far, although China is the world’s leading exporter, only a miniscule 4% of the international exchange of currencies are denominated in the Chinese yuan compared to 88% in US$. Tellingly, close to half the trade between China and Russia, two countries sanctioned by the US, is denominated in US$.

Following Obama’s “pivot to Asia” in 2012, Biden’s policy portends a continuation of Trump’s hostility toward China only with further intensification. The US military buildup to confine China includes land, air, sea, and even space forces with the South China Sea as a hotspot of contention.

Trump negotiated a peace agreement between the Taliban and the US-backed government in Afghanistan, now in its twentieth year of war. The Biden administration has indicated that it will not honor the agreement, which requires a US troop drawdown instead of Biden’s announced buildup.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is entering its 71^st year of official war with the US with no end in sight. When Trump met with DRPK President Kim Jong-un in 2019, the Democrats screamed “treason.” To be sure, Biden will not make the patriotic mistake of trying to reduce tension between the two nuclear powers.

The US is ringing Russia and China with “missile defense systems,” which had been illegal until George W. Bush abrogated the US-Russia ABM Treaty in 2002. A “missile defense system” is designed to shield against a retaliatory response after a first-strike nuclear attack. Congress recently authorized a new generation of US intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

China’s official policy is “not to be the first to use nuclear weapons at any time or under any circumstances.” Russian policy is to use nuclear weapons only “when the very existence of the state is threatened.” On contrast, the US reserves the right to “first use” nuclear weapons.

A trillion-dollar plus nuclear weapon modernization, started by Obama and continued by Trump, lurches on under Biden with the entire US nuclear arsenal scheduled to be upgraded. The consequences are far greater risks of launching an accidental nuclear war and an accelerated arms race with Russia and China. Head of the US Strategic Air Command, Admiral Charles A. Richard, warned just this month that in a conflict with Russia or China “nuclear employment is a very real possibility.”

Given such an international climate, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the 2021 doomsday clock to 100 seconds before midnight. Although the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons became international law on January 21, the US has not ratified it. On the brighter side, Biden extended the New START nuclear arms treaty for four years.

“American leadership” of the world, touted by both Republicans and Democrats, is not democratic. No one, no citizen of any country in the world elected the US to be the world’s nanny ; not even American citizens themselves, I gather. And outside Hollywood productions, in the reality, the USA is no longer a leader of the world. The American Empire has been in free fall for twenty years ; only Washington and Hollywood can’t see it. And its decline is celebrated around the globe in every continent. International polls show the US is rated among the most feared, hated, and dangerous countries in the world and the greatest threat to world peace.

Meanwhile, the Vox Populi project reports majorities or pluralities of the US people support reducing the military budget, achieving peace by avoiding foreign intervention, negotiating directly with adversaries to avoid military confrontation, decreasing US troops overseas, and constraining the president’s ability to attack a foreign adversary.

The last word is not only a problem of semantic. There lies the real problem. That is what the world hates and fears, that USA’s vision of « adversary » is that of any country that keeps its coorporations from making profit. And this won’t change, as Biden was elected thanks to the same « gracious donors » as his predecessors.

Hence, in regards to foreign policy, I’m afraid everything will be as before. And that is the real problem: to assault and put the blame on the assaulted or on somebody else, and above all, to cash in on other people's losses, in short, to start a war in order to feed the weapons industry, cause maximum damage, and afterwards impose US contractors to do the work of reconstruction. Shame on them, from the beginning to the end.

The February 25 U.S. bombing of Syria immediately puts the policies of the newly-formed Biden administration into sharp relief. Why is this administration bombing the sovereign nation of Syria? Why is it bombing “Iranian-backed militias” who pose absolutely no threat to the United States and are actually involved in fighting ISIS? If this is about getting more leverage vis-a-vis Iran, why hasn’t the Biden administration just done what it said it would do: rejoin the Iran nuclear deal and de-escalate the Middle East conflicts?

According to the Pentagon, the U.S. strike was in response to the February 15 rocket attack in northern Iraq that killed a contractor working with the U.S. military and injured a U.S. service member. Accounts of the number killed in the U.S. attack vary from one to 22. Just like the Israelis do in Palestine and the Nazis in the occupied countries with civilians: One of theirs dies, in a foreign country where they shouldn't be in the first place, they retaliate taking at least twenty lives. A man who is doing business, exploiting Syria's natural resources in detriment of the country's developpement is worth 22 Syrian fighters against the invaders.

The Pentagon made the incredible claim that this action “aims to de-escalate the overall situation in both Eastern Syria and Iraq.” This was countered by the Syrian government, which condemned the illegal attack on its territory and said the strikes “will lead to consequences that will escalate the situation in the region.” The strike was also condemned by the governments of China and Russia. A member of Russia’s Federation Council warned that such escalations in the area could lead to “a massive conflict.”

Ironically, Jen Psaki, now Biden’s White House spokesperson, questioned the lawfulness of attacking Syria in 2017, when it was the Trump administration doing the bombing. Back then she asked: “What is the legal authority for strikes? Assad is a brutal dictator. But Syria is a sovereign country.”

The airstrikes were supposedly authorized by the 20-year-old, post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), legislation that Rep. Barbara Lee has been trying for years to repeal since it has been misused, according to the congresswoman, “to justify waging war in at least seven different countries, against a continuously expanding list of targetable adversaries.”

The United States claims that its targeting of the militia in Syria was based on intelligence provided by the Iraqi government. Defense Secretary Austin told reporters: “We’re confident that target was being used by the same Shia militia that conducted the strike [against U.S. and coalition forces].”

But a report by Middle East Eye (MEE) suggests that Iran has strongly urged the militias it supports in Iraq to refrain from such attacks, or any warlike actions that could derail its sensitive diplomacy to bring the U.S. and Iran back into compliance with the 2015 international nuclear agreement or JCPOA.

“None of our known factions carried out this attack,” a senior Iraqi militia commander told MEE. “The Iranian orders have not changed regarding attacking the American forces, and the Iranians are still keen to maintain calm with the Americans until they see how the new administration will act.”

The inflammatory nature of this U.S. attack on Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, who are an integral part of Iraq’s armed forces and have played a critical role in the war with ISIS, was implicitly acknowledged in the U.S. decision to attack them in Syria instead of in Iraq. Did Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, a pro-Western British-Iraqi, who is trying to rein in the Iranian-backed Shiite militias, deny permission for a U.S. attack on Iraqi soil?

At Kadhimi’s request, NATO is increasing its presence from 500 troops to 4,000 (from Denmark, the U.K. and Turkey, not the U.S.) to train the Iraqi military and reduce its dependence on the Iranian-backed militias. But Kadhimi risks losing his job in an election this October if he alienates Iraq’s Shiite majority. Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein is heading to Tehran to meet with Iranian officials over the weekend, and the world will be watching to see how Iraq and Iran will respond to the U.S. attack.

Some analysts say the bombing may have been intended to strengthen the U.S. hand in its negotiations with Iran over the nuclear deal (JCPOA). “The strike, the way I see it, was meant to set the tone with Tehran and dent its inflated confidence ahead of negotiations,” said Bilal Saab, a former Pentagon official who is currently a senior fellow with the Middle East Institute.

But this attack will make it more difficult to resume negotiations with Iran. It comes at a delicate moment when the Europeans are trying to orchestrate a “compliance for compliance” maneuver to revive the JCPOA. This strike will make the diplomatic process more difficult, as it gives more power to the Iranian factions who oppose the deal and any negotiations with the United States.

Showing bipartisan support for attacking sovereign nations, key Republicans on the foreign affairs committees such as Senator Marco Rubio and Rep. Michael McCaul immediately welcomed the attacks. So did some Biden supporters, who crassly displayed their partiality to bombing by a Democratic president.

Party organizer Amy Siskind tweeted: “So different having military action under Biden. No middle school level threats on Twitter. Trust Biden and his team’s competence.” Biden supporter Suzanne Lamminen tweeted: “Such a quiet attack. No drama, no TV coverage of bombs hitting targets, no comments on how presidential Biden is. What a difference.”

Thankfully though, some Members of Congress are speaking out against the strikes. “We cannot stand up for Congressional authorization before military strikes only when there is a Republican President,” Congressman Ro Khanna tweeted, “The Administration should have sought Congressional authorization here. We need to work to extricate from the Middle East, not escalate.” Peace groups around the country are echoing that call. Rep. Barbara Lee and Senators Bernie Sanders, Tim Kaine and Chris Murphy also released statements either questioning or condemning the strikes.

Americans should remind President Biden that he promised to prioritize diplomacy over military action as the primary instrument of his foreign policy. Biden should recognize that the best way to protect U.S. personnel is to take them out of the Middle East. He should recall that the Iraqi Parliament voted a year ago for U.S. troops to leave their country. He should also recognize that U.S. troops have no right to be in Syria, still “protecting the oil,” on the orders of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now, of Joe Biden. The USA is not welcome in Syria. It wasn't invited there as Russia and Iran were. So, technically and diplomatically, Washington shouldn't have no business there. Still... Barack Obama saw the prospect of big money coming from the conflict, helped the "rebels" linked to ISIS to combat Bashar el Assad, Donald Trump carried on and passed the batton to Joe Biden, since all of them serve the same financial masters.

After failing to prioritize diplomacy and rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement, Biden has now, barely a month into his presidency, reverted to the use of military force in a region already shattered by two decades of U.S. war-making. This is not what he promised in his campaign and it is not what the American people voted for.

As I said earlier, that is the real problem with the USA's so called "liberal" administrations. On one side, they never miss an opportunity to give moral lessons to every foreign government that crosses the line and establish damaging sanctions for the population in order to benefit from it. On the other side, they never miss the opportunity to intervene abroad on domestic matters and to commit criminal acts or even terrorist acts from which their benefactors can benefit, but always manipulating the narrative of being the good guys. Just like the Israelis with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Perhaps, that is why Tel Aviv and Washington (backed by LA and New York) stick together no matter what: "Regardless the horror of my crime, I got your back. And you got mine."

PALESTINA

For Palestinians, exile is not simply the physical act of being removed from their homes and their inability to return. It is not a casual topic pertaining to politics and international law, either. Nor is it an ethereal notion, a sentiment, a poetic verse. It is all of this, combined.

The death in Amman of Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, an intellectual whose work has intrinsically been linked to exile, brought back to the surface many existential questions: are Palestinians destined to be exiled? Can there be a remedy for this perpetual torment? Is justice a tangible, achievable goal?

Mourid Barghouti was born in 1944 in Deir Ghassana, near Ramallah. His journey in exile began in 1967, and ended, however temporarily, 30 years later. His memoir “I Saw Ramallah” – published in 1997 – was an exiled man’s attempt to make sense of his identity, one that has been formulated within many different physical spaces, conflicts and airports. While, in some way, the Palestinian in Mourid remained intact, his was a unique identity that can only be fathomed by those who have experienced, to some degree, the pressing feelings of Ghurba – estrangement and alienation – or Shataat – dislocation and diaspora.

In his memoir, translated into English in 2000 by acclaimed Egyptian author, Ahdaf Soueif, he wrote, “I tried to put the displacement between parenthesis, to put a last period in a long sentence of the sadness of history … But I see nothing except commas. I want to sew the times together. I want to attach one moment to another, to attach childhood to age, to attach the present to the absent and all the presents to all absences, attach exiles to the homeland and to attach what I have imagined to what I see now.”

Those familiar with the rich and complex Palestinian literature of exile can relate Mourid Barghouti’s reference – what one imagines versus what one sees – to the writing of other intellectuals who have suffered the pain of exile as well. Ghassan Kanafani and Majed Abu Sharar – and numerous others – wrote about that same conflict. Their death – or, rather, assassination – in exile brought their philosophical journeys to an abrupt end.

In Mahmoud Darwish’s seminal poem, ‘Who Am I, Without Exile’, the late Palestinian poet asked, knowing that there can never be a compelling answer: “What will we do without exile?”

It is as if Ghurba has been so integral to the collective character of a nation, and is now a permanent tattoo on the heart and soul of the Palestinian people everywhere. “A stranger on the riverbank, like the river … water binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway to my palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing makes me enter the gospels. Not a thing …,” Mahmoud Darwish wrote.

The impossibility of becoming a whole again in Mahmoud and Mourid’s verses were reverberations of Ghassan’s own depiction of a Palestine that was as agonizingly near as it was far.

“What is a homeland?” Ghassan Kanafani asks in ‘Returning to Haifa’. “Is it these two chairs that remained in this room for twenty years? The table? Peacock feathers? The picture of Jerusalem on the wall? The copper-lock? The oak tree? The balcony? What is a homeland? .. I’m only asking.”

But there can be no answers, because when exile exceeds a certain rational point of waiting for some kind of justice that would facilitate one’s return, it can no longer be articulated, relayed or even fully comprehended. It is the metaphorical precipice between life and death, ‘life’ as in the burning desire to be reunited with one’s previous self, and ‘death’ as in knowing that without a homeland one is a perpetual outcast – physically, politically, legally, intellectually and every other form.

“In my despair I remember; that there is life after death … But I ask: Oh my God, is there life before death?” Barghouti wrote in his poem ‘I Have No Problem.’

While the crushing weight of exile is not unique to Palestinians, the Palestinian exile is unique. Throughout the entire episode of Palestinian Ghurba, from the early days of the Nakba – the destruction of the Palestinian homeland – till today, the world remains divided between inaction, obliviousness, and refusal to even acknowledge the injustice that has befallen the Palestinian people.

Despite or, perhaps, because of his decades-long exile, Mourid Barghouti did not engage in ineffectual discussions about the rightful owners of Palestine “because we did not lose Palestine to a debate, we lost it to force.”

He wrote in his memoir “When we were Palestine, we were not afraid of the Jews. We did not hate them, we did not make an enemy of them. Europe of the Middle Ages hated them, but not us. Ferdinand and Isabella hated them, but not us. Hitler hated them, but not us. But when they took our entire space and exiled us from it they put both us and themselves outside the law of equality.”

In fact, ‘hate’ rarely factors in the work of Mourid Barghouti – or Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, Abu Sharar and many others – because the pain of exile, so powerful, so omnipresent – required one to re-evaluate his relationship to the homeland through emotional rapport that can only be sustained through positive energy, of love, of deep sadness, of longing.

“Palestine is something worthy of a man bearing arms for, dying for,” wrote Ghassan Kanafani. “For us, for you and me, it’s only a search for something buried beneath the dust of memories. And look what we found beneath that dust. Yet more dust. We were mistaken when we thought the homeland was only the past.”

Millions of Palestinians continue to live in exile, generation after generation, painstakingly negotiating their individual and collective identities, neither able to return, nor feeling truly whole. These millions deserve to exercise their Right of Return, for their voices to be heard and to be included.

But even when Palestinians are able to end their physical exile, chances are, for generations they will remain attached to it. “I don’t know what I want. Exile is so strong within me, I may bring it to the land,” wrote Mahmoud Darwish.

In Mourid Barghouti too, exile was ‘so strong’. Despite the fact that he fought to end it, it became him. It became all Palestinians.

Mourid will certainly join Mahmoud, Ghassan in Heaven, as well as their countrywomen and countrymen slaughered by the Israelis from 1948 to 2021.

Those are my wishes and of all Palestinians stripped off their land and human rights from the moment the first wave of Yishuv, Jewish settler, set foot in Palestine in 1919, until now.

Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif reads Mourid Barghouti poem