David Brooks and Jim Cason
Correspondents
The newspaper La Jornada
Thursday, August 22, 2024, p. 29
Chicago. The super falcons Biden administration officials are working hard to ensure that presidential candidate Kamala Harris continues to funnel billions of dollars into failing wars in Ukraine and Gaza while threatening further conflict with China, says University of Chicago political scientist Professor John Mearsheimer.
“Joe Biden is a warmonger. He believes that the United States is ‘the indispensable nation,’ and he believes that we should be the world’s policeman and use military force to do so,” Mearsheimer explained in an interview with The Day in his office at the university as the Democratic Party leadership arrived for its National Convention in this city.
The renowned professor, whose speeches broadcast on YouTube have attracted more than 30 million visitors, explains that “in the United States there are many people who favor a foreign policy of moderation, more realistic, with more limited objectives… And there are people who believe that the United States should dominate the planet, that we should be here and there and everywhere. That we have a right and a responsibility to be the police of the world.” These hawks They have maintained control of the Democratic Party in government and today are the ones behind the unconditional support for Israel and Ukraine.
Progressives, and especially young people, inside and outside the party, argue against this war policy, and indeed, they have the support of a majority in public opinion, but Mearsheimer points out that “they have been categorically rejected at every turn by the super falcons of the Democratic Party.”
Significantly, there is also an internal debate within the Republican Party over these war policies, the expert analyst notes, which can be seen in the reluctance of some leaders in Congress, such as vice-presidential candidate JD Vance himself, to continue sending weapons to Ukraine. But the lines of debate among Republicans are less clear and predictable as Donald Trump vacillates between threats of military force and international isolationism.
Whoever wins the presidential election, this whole political dynamic will not change, and may even get worse. I think the United States is in trouble in three different areas of the world. One is Europe, and here we are talking about the war in Ukraine. Second is East Asia, and there we are talking about the competition between the United States and China. Third is the Middle East, and there we are talking mainly about the American support for the genocide in Gaza perpetrated by Israel.he says.
There is the potential for a significant military victory for Russia in Ukraine. If we assume that the Ukrainian army in Donbas collapses and Ukraine will lose even more territory than the 20 percent it already lost, what will the United States do? Are we willing to send American troops to fight and die?asks Mearsheimer. He concludes that this conflict is the result of erroneous decisions by successive American presidents.
He says that the war in Ukraine is a consequence of NATO’s expansion that began after the end of the cold war. Then-President Bill Clinton believed that the United States was the essential nation that it had to impose its will on the world, and it was the decision of its government to extend NATO to the east. Years later, the decision in April 2008 to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia was the precursor to the current war. Mearsheimer emphasizes that the Russian government had made it abundantly clear that it perceived NATO expansion to Ukraine as an existential threat and explicitly said that it could not allow it. In fact, in 2008 both France and Germany opposed NATO expansion because they understood Russia’s position.
▲ Political scientist John Mearsheimer said in an interview with The Daythat President Joe Biden He is a warmonger who believes that the United States is the indispensable nation. The image is from the archive.Photo Joe Sterbenc
However, the US government, under Barack Obama, persisted in trying to integrate Ukraine into the Western alliance. For Mearsheimer, the outcome was predictable. In the end, the Russians annexed Crimea and a civil war broke out in the Donbas in 2014. The United States reacted to this by redoubling its efforts, which eventually led to Russia invading Ukraine on February 24, 2022..
Asked why the United States insists on continuing with these policies, despite the results, he replied: The United States thought it was so powerful that it could make Russia swallow further NATO expansion. He added that Americans failed to understand balance-of-power politics and overestimated what could be achieved with military force.he explained. And the end result is that they are now losing that war..
The problems for a potential Harris administration are not limited to Ukraine on the international stage. Not only is the Israeli government carrying out genocide in Gaza with American weapons, Mearsheimer notes, it is also trying to extend the conflict to Lebanon and Iran. This is a war that we do not want, a war that Iran does not want, but Israel does. So the question is: How did we allow ourselves to be drawn into this conflict? And the answer is very simple: the Israelis can do whatever they want and we will support them.Mearsheimer criticizes.
The reason for this, he emphasizes, is the power of “lobby “Israeli” in the United States. Mearsheimer is co-author of the book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policypublished in 2007, which thoroughly documents the enormous political influence of this Zionist lobby over 50 years. The United States has a relationship with Israel that is unparalleled in history. Washington gives Tel Aviv unconditional support, offering it a significant amount of economic, diplomatic and military assistance.he said. While he acknowledges that Israel’s brutal war in Gaza has forced politicians in the United States to adapt their positions, he still believes that Israel still has a blank check and that this could lead the United States into a wider and more dangerous war in the Middle East.
The biggest challenge, Mearsheimer believes, may be in Asia, where failures by both Democrats and Republicans are leading to a dangerous confrontation with China. The logic of competition with Beijing is different than it was during the cold war with the Soviet Union, but in both cases the risk of errors that are leading to a conflict would not only be another war, but the end of the world.
Almost as if to prove this point, the New York Times reported this week that President Biden approved a highly classified strategic nuclear plan for the United States to, for the first time, reorient its deterrence strategy to focus on China’s rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal.
For Mearsheimer, all this shows that within the leadership in charge of foreign policy, It’s just that almost no one understands basic realist logic, which is another way of saying that they don’t understand how the world works..
