And after the chatter of “beautiful souls”, in the end Biden swiped (badly) America First
It was really hard to imagine a more disastrous debut on the international stage for Joe Biden. While the fall of Afghan institutions was likely marked in the face of the US disengagement decision, the Biden administration made dramatic misjudgments that turned what could have been an orderly withdrawal into a hasty and largely indecent flight.
The modalities of the abandonment of the Middle Eastern country represent a gigantic image damage for the United States and for the West as a whole. The status and international credibility of the US presidency are certainly deeply damaged and this could have important consequences also in terms of future political viability.
Obviously from Biden, in his address to the nation on August 16, came an "institutional" defense of the decisions taken, whose formal coldness contrasts with the chaotic and dramatic situation in Kabul. We could not expect anything different: Biden certainly cannot admit sensational errors and finds himself having to minimize the political significance of the Taliban success.
However, beyond the need to conceal the heavy embarrassment the US administration has found itself in, there are some significant political elements that can be identified in the new president's speech.
In fact, on a purely ideological level, the arguments used by Joe Biden to defend the disengagement from Afghanistan seem more like a reworking of some "Trumpian" guidelines than the projection of the expectations of the great "opinion making" that, not only in America, but throughout the West he supported his campaign.
In fact, Biden argued that the real purpose of the presence in Afghanistan was in retaliation following 9/11 and more generally in the fight against terrorism. The president, on the other hand, has openly disavowed any objective of "nation building" and even more so of "exporting democracy". He also explicitly referred to the concept of "national interest" as a guide to American foreign policy.
Even more than the events in Kabul, perhaps it is the very language of Joe Biden that today represents a slap in the face to that world of "beautiful souls" which saw the triumph of "good feelings" in the expulsion of Donald Trump from the White House.
"America is back" had been repeated to us until we were exhausted. The Biden-Harris presidency was to be that of the return to multilateralism, of international commitment and solidarity, of empathy for the weak, of attention to human rights and women's rights.
But it took only a few months for the illusory dreams and rhetorical impostures of the progressive world to collide with reality. And reality is not the sweetened and politically correct narrative conveyed by the media, it is not the desk construction of social engineers. The reality is, essentially, what Trump had seen and understood before and better than many others – it is an imperfect world which also includes cultural borders and walls and which cannot be "redeemed" by a naive and oleographic universalism.
Moreover, what deserves to be noted is that the justifications provided by Biden for the withdrawal from Afghanistan are absolutely absent from any properly "left" argument. There is no reference to anti-militarism or pacifism. The United States does not withdraw "for peace". The United States withdraws "for the national interest".
In short, in many ways, in the words of the president we can see more reflections of “right-wing non-interventionism” than “rainbow” suggestions à la Sanders .
It could be said that in the end Biden swept the "America First" . He did it badly, handling the Afghan scenario in terms of utmost incompetence. But one cannot fail to point out that with his attitude and his communication he represented, perhaps above all, a sensational disavowal of the rivers of solidarity and progressivist gossip – probably good for winning an election, but not for governing under the test of facts.
The post And after the chatter of "beautiful souls", Biden finally plagiarized (badly) America First appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/e-dopo-le-chiacchiere-delle-anime-belle-alla-fine-biden-scopiazzo-male-lamerica-first/ on Thu, 26 Aug 2021 03:57:00 +0000.