from The Nation:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/406441?rel=hp_picksThe Biden Speech: The Downsideposted by Robert Dreyfuss on 02/09/2009
Joe Biden's widely hailed speech hit a lot of the notes calculated to please his European audience. But there's a lot to worry about, too, in the vice president's address.
Most worrying was Biden's call for reenergizing NATO for so-called humanitarian interventionism, energy security, and "out of area" deployments, and for mobilizing US and NATO military force against selected regimes that the West doesn't care for.
Said the veep: (
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/02/07/8375/)
As America renews our emphasis on diplomacy, development, democracy and preserving our planet, we will ask our allies to rethink some of their own approaches - including their willingness to the use force when all else fails.
When it comes to radical groups that use terror as a tool, radical states that harbor extremists, undermine peace and seek or spread weapons of mass destruction and regimes that systematically kill or ethnically cleanse their own people - we must stand united and use every means at our disposal to end the threat they pose.
None of us can deny – or escape - the new threats of the 21st century. Nor can we escape the responsibility to meet them.
That sounds ominously like a call to use military force in cases of humanitarian crisis, a theme raised repeatedly by liberal interventionists such Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the UN, and Samantha Power, who's getting a vaguely defined job at the national security council. Going to war against countries that "ethnically cleanse their own people" sounds, to me, like a call to arms against, well, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma, various central Asian states, and a wide range of African countries.
Biden also issued a clarion call for NATO:
We must recommit to our shared security and renew NATO, so that its success in the 20th century is matched in the 21st. NATO's core purpose remains the collective defense of its members. But faced with new threats, we need a new resolve to meet them, and the capabilities to succeed. Our Alliance must be better equipped to help stop the spread of the world's most dangerous weapons, to tackle terrorism and cyber-security, to expand its writ to energy security and to act in and out of area effectively.
NATO must "expand its writ to energy security"? It's clear what he means: that NATO has to take responsibility for the Persian Gulf and central Asia. (That's a theme that I covered in a Nation profile of General James Jones, Obama's national security adviser, who pushed arrogant nonsense like while serving as NATO commander.
The Obama team is also getting ready to demand that NATO get more involved, militarily, in Afghanistan. Let's hope they get turned down, and publicly.
from LobeLog.com:
http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/Condi Rice Could’ve Written Biden’s Speech by Jim Lobe
{snip} One hopes the Obama administration is actually thinking more seriously than the Biden speech indicates . . . it sounded like a speech that Condoleezza Rice might have submitted in draft for White House approval before the vice president’s office and Elliott Abrams got their hands on it. Remember, this was the Obama administration’s first major foreign-policy address and thus a huge opportunity to begin charting its own path.
A few things were especially disappointing, beginning with the emphasis placed by Biden on the change of “tone” the new administration would bring to foreign policy. (This was exactly what Rice meant when she announced in her Senate confirmation hearings in 2005 that “the time for diplomacy is now.”) It’s nice to have a new “tone”, but what about some new content beyond the nominal gestures, like closing Guantanamo and forbidding torture, and the cliches about greater consultation and adherence to international law? In that respect, Biden offered little or nothing substantive.
I especially had problems with the way he spoke about Iran, mainly in the language of carrots and sticks that is so deeply resented in Tehran; to wit:
“We’ll be willing to talk to Iran and to offer a very clear choice: Continue down the current course and there will be continued pressure and isolation; abandon the illicit nuclear program and your support for terrorism, and there will be meaningful incentives.”
Note that we’re willing to talk “to” not “with” Iran “to offer them a very clear choice.” This is the language of ultimatum; it is not the language of “respect” that Obama promised in his Inaugural address and his interview with al-Arabiya’s Hisham Melham. The only thing that indicated “respect” was the condescending passage: “The Iranian people are a great people; the Persian civilization is a great civilization.” The Bush administration always made the same observation when its senior officials, including Bush himself, spoke about Iran . . .
In any event, precisely because it was the administration’s first major foreign policy address, Biden’s remarks are worth reading, and if you can find passages that offer hope for real, substantive change in U.S. policy that goes beyond what was promised in the campaign and the cliches about multilateralism and other rhetorical flourishes, (Jim Lobe) would be interested in hearing from you.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
