** This is the first of a two-part statement analyzing the militaristic past of outgoing US President Biden and likely future of incoming President Trump **
As Joe Biden spends his final days in the office of the US Presidency, it is important to look back at his record as a war-making and peace-destroying President, carrying on the militaristic legacy of every President before him who has occupied the office of the most consistently war-making country in the world. Indeed, Biden has left incoming President Donald Trump with a fully loaded (and in terms of the nearly $1 trillion US military budget, very well-funded) weapon to unleash upon the people of the world. Genocide Joe Funds War, Destabilization, and Militarism throughout the World The darkest stain on Biden’s legacy will undoubtedly be the US-supplied and US-protected Israeli genocide of Palestine. Biden allowed an unending flow of weapons to go towards the Zionist state even while open threats of exterminating the Palestinian people were made for years by governments and citizens alike. Since October 7th, Biden has directly handed over $17.9 billion to the Zionist killing machine and has committed billions more to come, including an $8 billion package at the close of his Presidency and after the news has seen hospitals leveled, neighborhoods wiped out, other nearby countries aggressively invaded and possibly over 200,000 deaths in Gaza alone. Many of Biden’s supporters and opponents have tried to paint the outgoing President as a peace-maker by pointing to his act of pulling US troops out of the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, the US’s longest war project on record. However, this was after sending millions of dollars to expand the US presence and fund local warlords who used their positions in the Afghan government and military to create their own regional fiefdoms, rife with corruption and violence, to terrorize their own people as the cost of keeping the country “stable” for US military positioning and the profits of mining and agricultural corporations. On the extreme reverse, Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was done with little concern for the people themselves, who now live under the doubly harsh rule of the US-created Taliban government and one of the severest US sanction regimes in recent years. It is inarguably beneficial for the people of any country to have a foreign power leave their country. But it is just as inarguable that Biden’s actions were not done out of empathy for the workers, farmers and other common people of Afghanistan who were left with no other choice of government besides the extremely repressive Taliban and who are willfully blocked from their much-needed medicine, agricultural inputs, building materials, and other public funds adding up to $200 million in seized government assets still being held by the US government. Biden’s legacy will include the start of the bloody war in Ukraine that has so far claimed the lives of 43,000 soldiers and almost as many civilians. Biden continued the military build-up of NATO troops and training camps that Obama started and Trump expanded, bringing the world’s largest military alliance closer to Russia than ever before as he funded a bloody civil war led by the US-backed Kiev regime right on Russia’s border. Biden ignored all warnings of an all-out war starting between Russia and Ukraine and then crushed every round of peace talks between the two countries by promising a seemingly endless supply of weapons, the latest being long-range missiles that fired deep into Russia itself, threatening to escalate the conflict even further. Biden has expanded US military presence in Latin America as well. He gave $750 million to Central American governments for their repressive police forces ostensibly to stem the flow of migration into the US. Yet, it is actually the US agricultural, mining and real estate companies stealing land and displacing the indigenous and peasant communities with the violent backing of US-funded local police and military that is forcing people to flee their countries and migrate abroad for survival. Instead of offering an easier path for those forced to migrate by his own policies, Biden passed executive orders narrowing access to asylum and speeding up deportation removals. He also created new military agreements with repressive governments in the Caribbean and laid the groundwork for a full invasion of Haiti, a country devastated by US companies since its foundation. He would also follow in his predecessors’ footsteps by attempting to discredit the Venezuelan election system, funding black ops forces to attempt to overthrow the government there, and continuing one of the most brutal sanction regimes in history when those attempts failed. In Africa, Biden re-sent troops into Somalia where counterinsurgency operations by the US and NATO have brutalized the mostly pastoral and fisherfolk communities to support US-friendly local warlords in protecting US economic interests. He signed off on the creation of 2 new military bases in Kenya while the people live in abject poverty under economic polices that sell off the country to foreign investors. He oversaw the advising of repressive militaries in Angola to build US-owned railroads and in Congo to mine cobalt in what much of the world has called a genocidal situation. Among other militaristic actions on the continent, Biden facilitated weapons transfers to the occupation regime of Morocco to continue its settler colonial project against the Saharawi people of Western Sahara. Biden created more military agreements in the Pacific than at any period of time since the decade following World War 2. These agreements with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia (together with the United Kingdom), and the Pacific Islands Forum have led to an unprecedented expansion of US military bases, exercises, and forward positioning of military forces and missiles including nuclear weapons up to the very borders of China and North Korea. This massive military build up in the Pacific has caused environmental devastation, violence against poor communities, particularly women, and force entire countries to live in a constant state of fear if a war will start in their home tomorrow. Militarization of the Border, Cuts to Services, Repression of Organizing in the US At home in the US, Biden’s Countering Domestic Terrorism program has seen state and municipal police budgets skyrocket and a heightened increase in police violence against Black and other communities of color, migrants, workers on the picket line and activists in the streets. Trump’s boastful promises to unleash the police on anyone calling for peace in the have been set up for success by Biden himself. These last four years of militarization and war build-up underline what Biden has never ceased to proclaim as the coveted “rules based order” of the US’s presence in the world. It is not hard to follow the paper trail of Biden’s military record to see that they cover the tracks of incredibly exploitative trade and investment deals such as the Partnership for Global Investment and Infrastructure across Europe and the Atlantic, the India-Middle East-Economic Corridor across South and West Asia, and the Indo-Pacific Economic Partnership across the Pacific. The US rules-based order has paved a path of blood across entire nations under Biden’s pen. Biden’s Democrat party stated in their party platform under an ill-fated Harris presidency that “the Democrats will revitalize American diplomacy to ensure that the United States remains the world’s pivotal power and a principled force for peace and prosperity.” While the reins of the world’s most powerful military machine will pass to Trump in a few day’s time, Biden’s four years already spoke to this intention of his own Presidency from day one. Billions of dollars were spent by Biden on a genocidal holocaust in Palestine, on a frozen stalemate in Ukraine, and countless other situations in which people striving for only peace and stable livelihood were gunned down by the hired gangs of monopoly capitalists in Washington, London, Berlin, Tokyo and many other imperialist capitals around the world. Yet there remains little for the failing infrastructure, relief from record inflation and precarious employment and devastating environmental destruction for the people of the US itself. As wildfires consume entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles, as they did in Lahaina Hawaii, the massive military bases in Southern California and Hawaii are made some of the most climate-resilient structures on the planet. Truly, the US war machine brings death and destruction to the people of the US itself while it spreads it around the world. Joe Biden’s record as President is a world torn apart by conflict and genocide engineered and funded from the White House with an earnings check sent to Wall Street. There is much to fear when it comes to the war threats of the incoming Trump regime, but Biden’s record is a sobering reminder that a less maniacal warmaker in the White House is still a warmaker and not a genuine alternative. Only a global mass movement for a just and lasting peace in solidarity with all peoples’ struggles around the world can bring about the end of the US war machine.
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