‘America is back.’ Speaking to the 57th annual Munich Security Conference, Joe Biden made that point for the umpteenth time in his short presidency. His crisp declarative sentence requires decoding, of course. To his audience of European elites, he was offering this assurance: ‘Trump is gone and won’t be returning anytime soon: trust me.’ […]
A ‘long-term strategic competition with China’ came first, followed by Russian troublemaking and the ‘global, existential crisis’ of climate change. Arms control got a nod, as did the imperative of addressing ‘Iran’s destabilizing activities across the Middle East’.
Biden also pledged that for now at least US troops would remain in Germany. This was the closest he came to a big reveal. At this supposedly pivotal point of inflection, the best the American president could come up with was to sustain a military presence created seven decades earlier in response to conditions that no longer exist. At gatherings such as the Munich Security Conference, this qualifies as enlightened statesmanship.
Washington’s own disastrously destabilizing activities across the Middle East over the past two decades went unmentioned. So too did increasingly desperate US efforts to conceal the fact that the Afghanistan conflict, the only real war in Nato’s entire existence, is ending in failure. Läs artikel