Why U.S. Elections Do Not Change Its Foreign Policies

 October 08, 2020

Why U.S. Elections Do Not Change Its Foreign Policies

John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle about CIA torture under the Bush regime, warns of the foreign policy a Joe Biden administration would pursue:

Literally the last thing I would do is to urge anybody to vote for Donald Trump. The president has been a disaster in every sense of the word and in both foreign and domestic policy. The country can’t take four more years of a Trump presidency. But Biden is no panacea. He’s a center-right placeholder. [..]

If you think things will change in foreign policy under a President Biden, think again. It’ll be the same old expansionist, militarist policy that we had under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. So go into the voting booth with your eyes open.

In my view Biden is more right than center. Even his campaign slogan is shared with the British conservatives.

A Joe Biden administration would extend the hostile policies towards Russia and China and would continue to push for regime change in Venezuela, Syria, Iran and Belarus.  This even as the organ of U.S. foreign policy orthodoxy, Foreign Affairs, states that U.S. induced regime changes never achieve their aims:

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s repeated assertion around the time of the Iraq war that Washington’s pursuit of “stability at the expense of democracy” in the Middle East had produced neither was broadly true. But it turned out to have a corollary—that pursuing democracy at the expense of stability might also produce neither, but at even higher cost. 
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Regime change will always tempt Washington. [..] The long, diverse, and tragic history of U.S.-backed regime change in the Middle East, however, suggests that such temptations—like most quick fixes that come along in life and politics—should be resisted. The next time U.S. leaders propose intervening in the region to overthrow a hostile regime, it can safely be assumed that such an enterprise will be less successful, more costly, and more replete with unintended consequences than proponents realize or admit. So far, at least, it has never been the other way around.

U.S. foreign policy does not change from presidency to presidency. In a recent interview President Bashar al-Assad of Syria explained why that is the case:

Question 9: You definitely follow the presidential campaign in the United States. And do you hope that the new US President, regardless of the name of the winner, will review sanctions policies towards Syria?

President Assad: We don’t usually expect presidents in the American elections, we only expect CEOs; because you have a board, this board is made of the lobbies and the big corporates like banks and armaments and oil, etc. So, what you have is a CEO, and this CEO doesn’t have the right or the authority to review; he has to implement. And that’s what happened to Trump when he became president after the elections –

Journalist: He used to be CEO for many years before.

President Assad: Exactly! And he is a CEO anyway. He wanted to follow or pursue his own policy, and he was about to pay the price – you remember the impeachment issue. He had to swallow every word he said before the elections. So, that’s why I said you don’t expect a president, you only expect a CEO. If you want to talk about changing the policy, you have one board – the same board will not change its policy. The CEO will change but the board is still the same, so don’t expect anything.

Question 10: Who are this board? Who are these people?

President Assad: As I said, this board is made up of the lobbies, so they implement whatever they want, and they control the Congress and the others, and the media, etc. So, there’s an alliance between those different self-vested interest corporations in the US.

Caitlin Johnstone would likely agree with that view. She argues that the two political camps in the U.S. hardly differ:

When you look at US politics, it appears as though there are two mainstream political factions that very strongly disagree with one another. “Divided” is a word that comes up a lot. “Polarized” is another. 
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But beneath all the hurled insults and heated debates, these two factions are actually furiously agreeing with one another. They’re agreeing the entire time.

They agree that the US government should remain the center of a globe-spanning empire; they just angrily quibble over a few of the details of how that empire should be run [..]. 
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On all issues that most severely affect real people on mass scale, these two political factions are in emphatic agreement. They just pour a whole lot of sound and fury into the tiny one percent of the spectrum wherein they have some disagreement.

They do not allow for any mainstream discussion of if the oligarchic empire should continue to exist; all their issues, arguments and histrionics revolve around how it should exist.

This is what they are designed to do. 
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[P]olitics isn’t real in America. It’s a show. A two-handed sock puppet show to distract the audience while pickpockets rob them blind.

If you want to see things clearly, ignore the fake drama of the sock puppet show altogether and focus on advancing the real debate: that the US-centralized oligarchic empire is corrupt beyond redemption and should be completely dismantled.

I find it hard to disagree with these views.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/10/why-us-elections-do-not-change-its-foreign-policies.html