President Biden: The “Drunk Uncle” of American Foreign Policy

Someone had to say it. I remember when Biden wanted to support the “Syrian Rebels” the same ones that turned out to be ISIS. America’s foreign policy needs a lot of work.

Behind the Sudden Death of a One Billion Dollar Secret CIA War in Syria

Critics in Congress had complained for years about the costs — more than one billion USD over the life of the program. Reports that some of the CIA-supplied weapons had ended up in the hands of a rebel group tied to al-Qaeda further sapped political support for the program.

The shuttering of the C.I.A. program, one of the most expensive efforts to arm and train rebels since the agency’s program arming the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the 1980s, has forced a reckoning over its successes and failures. Opponents say it was foolhardy, expensive and ineffective. Supporters say that it was unnecessarily cautious, and that its achievements were remarkable given that the Obama administration had so many restrictions on it from the start, which they say ultimately ensured its failure.

Read the rest here at the NY Times.

Does it sound familiar?

We had tried something similar in Afghanistan by clandestinely supplying money and training to the “Afghan Rebels” fighting the Soviets in the 80s.

Guess who we trained? It rhymes with Osama…

Cause and Effect.

The CIA has claimed that they provided money to the Pakistani and Saudi Intelligence services and not to any particular group tied to Bin Laden or any other terrorist group, but I would submit that they failed to pay much attention to whom the Saudis and Pakistanis were giving that money. And the CIA never told the Saudis or Pakistanis that they couldn’t let that U.S. money fall into the hands of Islamist terrorist organizations either. Which you think they would have done given that the region was flush with such groups even in the 1980s.

Our foreign policy then was very short-sighted. We wanted to screw with the USSR in Afghanistan and give it its own “Vietnam” and we didn’t think too much about the second and third-order effects that could come from it.

And we were about to do that all over again in Syria: pursue a myopic goal of thwarting Russian aims without any thought given to what might happen if we actually succeeded in doing so.

The Obama-Biden Dream Team racked up more drone kills than President Bush, destabilized Libya, pulled out of Iraq leaving a power vacuum (kicking off a massive refugee crisis in the EU), and killed the first American teenager in Yemen. The young teen was visiting his grandparents, his only “crime” was that his dad was an American radical.

The liberal press largely gave Joe and Barack a book of free hall passes on that one.

One person I know and respect, Jeremy Scahill, was the only one to really call them out. But his attempts to push this narrative with the liberal press largely fell flat with, Dirty Wars. One of the reasons he likely co-founded the Intercept.

I highly recommend Scahill’s book to up your Foreign Policy IQ. There are some great insights in it into how the American intelligence and war machine function. If you are interested you can purchase the book here.

The Need for a Coherent Foreign Policy

Foreign policy is not uncomplicated. But it’s made more complicated when you have lost your true north and the compass is spinning in circles because you have no coherent strategy.

America hasn’t had a clear and concise foreign policy in a long time.

It’s how we spent around a trillion in Afghanistan with not much to show for it beyond the headstones of more than 7,000 dead U.S. service members.

Biden has a real opportunity to change that but, given the recent escalations in Israel, it seems unlikely that he has a concrete foreign policy plan.  And news organizations seem unable to distinguish between Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists and an actual nation-state like Israel trying to protect itself from rockets into cities full of civilians.

In conclusion, this Navy SEAL sees a drunk uncle at the table, making everyone very uncomfortable, including the Israelis.