Some suggest that the maxim to “keep your friends close but your enemies closer ” originally comes from Sun-Tzu’s, The Art of War but it’s definitely in The Godfather (2).
As we saw earlier this week with the love-fest in Moscow, not only has Joe Biden and by extension America, broken that fundamental and governing principle of “keep your enemies closer” with Russia, China and Iran now coalescing and China playing powerbroker and the architects of a peace deal in Ukraine but they’ve alienated many of America’s friends and allies in the West as well. The ground is shifting.
That takes a special kind of skill-set.
Robert Gates, Obamas Secretary of Defence was right when he said, “Joe Biden has been wrong on the major foreign policy issues in the last 40 years..” as was Obama himself with his observation: “Never underestimate Joe Biden’s capacity to fuck things up”
As for America, over the last 20+ years they’ve left many parts of the world a moonscape. And for no reason.
Both Libya and Iraq were successful and stable economies albeit under dictators but dictators who knew and understood what they were contending with, with their myriad religious and cultural schisms.
But America had to blunder in to feed the Military Industrial Complex President Dwight Eisenhower warned about, with their totally fabricated WMDs, and the mythical, non existent links between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 (and I was suckered into that like many others) just like the fabricated Tonkin Gulf incident was used as a pretext to escalate the Vietnam war by Johnson.
During the eight-year Iraq war, 300,000 Iraqis and 4,600 Americans were killed and according to the Australian War Memorial two Australians died in the Iraq war between 2003 and 2009.
America spent $815 billion on the war and plunged Iraq into a civil war with millions of Iraqi refugees remaining displaced to this day.
No explanation has ever been given for the their Libyan venture. Nothing..
If the International Criminal Court is going to go after Putin for his Ukraine invasion, they should also target Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice over Iraq and Obama and Hillary Clinton over Libya, as war criminals.
At least Putin could argue he had a pretext with the prospect of a hard border with nuclear NATO countries but America over Iraq and Libya had absolutely no pretext whatsoever.