What do we know about Joe Biden? Biden is a professional politician. Senator, Delaware, since 1973, and Vice President from 2009 to 2017, with Barak Obama.
He is not a leader who stirs up passions. He is relatively simple, without stridencies, of the European taste.
He supported the expansion of the NATO alliance in Eastern Europe (in 1991, NATO consisted of 16 countries; today, 30) and its intervention in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Despite being in opposition, it supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
His electoral campaign has been characterized by being traditional, low intensity, more reactive than proactive. However, he knew how to take advantage of social networks, which were positioned at his side. It has benefited from the extreme situation generated by the Covid, being highly probable that he would not have won the elections without the appearance of this pandemic.
It has had the almost unanimous support of all the media. With his prominent affable and conciliatory character, he applies the "goodism" strategy of the Obama era.
He is penalized by his advanced age, 78, and possible cognitive problems. Therefore, it is foreseeable that the presidency's burden will be carried de facto by others, starting with Vice President Harris.
What do you have in favor of Biden?
He is an establishment man: white, traditional, ruling, Christian-Catholic elite. He is accepted by the system, which he will continue to serve with pleasure. He brings the image and discourse of moderation and serenity.
He is the second Catholic President, after J. F. Kennedy. Practically, of Sunday mass. But not all Catholics support him (they mean 20% of the country) since they are divided on abortion legislation.
It has the almost total support of Jews and other religions, such as Muslims or Buddhists. Not with the Mormons, who nearly all of them are Republicans, as a good part of the Protestants are.
The election of Kamala Harris as Vice President was very successful. She represents minorities and immigrants. Besides, she has the "street button," provoking demonstrations of support or repulsion to the political adversaries, with great facility.
She has a feminist vocation, betting on women's empowerment and facilitating their access to positions of responsibility.
He has been promoted as the new Messiah, the one who will save the world from all evils.
Who supports Biden?
Biden has a close relationship with the powerful investment group Blackrock, the world's largest asset manager with some $8 trillion in assets. It is believed that, as early as 2017, Larry Fink, BlackRock's CEO, began preparing a "shadow government" with some of its top executives, with the Democrats in mind.
Now, some of Biden and Harris' top economic advisors will be covered by BlackRock staff. The truth is that Fink has spent the last few years openly criticizing Trump's trade war with China. What is unknown is what the plans are from now on.
The other pillar on which Biden relies is the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). As has been the case in every administration over the past seven decades, except Donald Trump's, the Obama cabinet's top positions were filled almost exclusively by CFR members.
In fact, Trump had become the black beast of the CFR, going against most of its initiatives, both economic (e.g. the TPP and TTIP trade agreements) and geopolitical (nuclear deal with Iran and the climate change deal).
Currently composed of some 5,000 members, a real elite director, the CFR has a reputation for being globalist and interventionist - with military and hybrid actions - and favoring Anglo-Saxon predominance in all the levers of power: finance, media...
As if this support were not enough, Joe Biden will have the defense industry's manifest support by companies as powerful as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon, backed by the interested analysis of some of the leading interventionist and globalist think tanks.
What has Joe Biden promised?
It has gone from Trump's "America first" to "America again," with the idea of getting "a strong country to lead the world."
He has pledged to "rebuild, reclaim America's place in the world" as a "champion of freedom and democracy once again.
Its four priorities are health management (led by scientific and medical experts), the economy, social equality, and climate change.
In the field of health, and thinking about the Covid, it aims to vaccinate 100 million people in the first 100 days of management, using 160,000 million dollars, plus 20,000 million for distribution of doses and another 50,000 for testing.
In economics, he promis
es millions of manufacturing jobs in a new economic rescue plan and a $1.9 trillion stimulus program to improve the economy of homes and businesses while recovering national production (he wants to see "Made in America" again).
On the issue of migration, he intends to legalize 10 million undocumented immigrants in the first 100 days of his term. And he plans to end Trump's Muslim veto.
It strongly supports ecology and the environment to aim that in 2045 fossil fuels will not be used. And, of course, as a star promise, to return to the Country of Climate Change agreement.
On the other hand, he has promised to resume the nuclear agreement with Iran.
How is Biden/Harris similar to Obama/Clinton?
Obama promised to bring justice, freedom, and peace to the world. He guaranteed that America is Europe's best friend. Obama set himself the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. He secured new dawn in the Middle East. He promised to fight climate change.
However, Obama intervened in Libya in 2011, with consequences that are still being felt. He spied on high European officials, a major scandal that went almost unnoticed, without popular demonstrations. Obama kept the Guantanamo prison open. He exported twice as many weapons as Bush in his eight years in office.
Obama performed on countless stages with intervening actors, special forces, intelligence, and armed drones. He encouraged the (misnamed) Arab springs, with disastrous consequences. He escalated the war in Syria. And his promised social project was a failure.
He supported the U.S.'s role in NATO, as fundamental in strengthening European allies and counteracting Russian power. Obama supported the enlargement of the Alliance, including to Ukraine and Georgia. It advocated the deployment of battalions on the border with Russia.
Although he advocated the denuclearization of the world, he never complied. In fact, he planned to invest $350 billion in the next ten years to modernize his entire nuclear arsenal.
Although he did not stop supporting Israel, he did so without all the firmness Tel Aviv would have liked. Relations became tense because of the subject of the nuclear agreement with Iran, since Israel considered that Teheran had ambitions without sanctions. There were terrible personal relations between Obama and Netanyahu. He advocated the "Two States" solution.
He made significant gestures with Cuba, such as visiting the country, opening the diplomatic delegation in Havana, or putting an end to the "dry feet, wet feet" policy. But little more progress was made in normalizing relations.
In its National Security Strategy of February 2015, it showed its true face. In the prologue, signed by him, he stated: We possess a military capability whose power, technology, and geostrategic reach is unparalleled in human history; the United States has a unique ability to mobilize and lead the international community; an undeniable truth: America must lead; America leads from a position of strength. In short, nowhere did the multipolarity that it proclaimed appear.
For her part, Hillary Clinton exerted pressure on her husband, Bill Clinton, to bomb Belgrade in 1999 (it was carried out by NATO, without a U.N. Security Council resolution); she supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003; she backed the NATO campaign in Libya in 2011; after Gaddafi's death, Hillary said: "We came, we saw, we killed him"; she was not opposed to preemptive strikes and Iran. Her tendency was militaristic and in support of the military-intelligence industry.
On the social level, she planned a profound immigration reform that would include undocumented immigrants' possibility of obtaining legal residency and even citizenship.
In the international arena, the confrontation with Russia was manifest and fierce. He expressed a personal dislike for Putin. Hillary wanted to increase U.S. and NATO troops in European countries to put pressure on Moscow.
In Syria, she advocated establishing a no-fly zone to protect civilians, although it was actually directed against Russia. She sought to carry out various actions aimed at deposing Al Assad while indirectly confronting Russia.
What provision can we make for Biden's mandate?
His policy, both in the domestic and international aspects, will be very similar to that of the Obama period, perhaps even extreme in some respects.
In terms of foreign policy, according to their declarations, there will be no real multilateralism, but instead, another way will be sought for the United States to continue to dominate, and above all, to try to prevent the definitive overcoming of China. If this is not done, it will be the beginning of the end of the U.S. empire.
The forms and mood will change, but the strategic and geopolitical ends will remain the same. The U.S. will continue to use armed drones massively in conflict scenarios.
Biden will continue to demand a greater economic contribution from NATO member countries in one way or another. The pressure on Germany to break the agreement with Russia on North Stream 2 will continue.
Conflicts will be rekindled or initiated, especially to the detriment of Russia, China and Iran. Some of them may be Ukraine, Belarus, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, or Libya. Without ruling out other scenarios in Africa, South America, or Southeast Asia. It is not unlikely that the terrorist threat will resurface with force to justify further interference.
Washington will push the European Union even further against Russia. Among other measures, Biden will promote the presence of NATO troops in the Russian border's vicinity. Again, he may propose an enlargement of the Atlantic Alliance, inviting Georgia and Ukraine, and even other countries close to Russia, to join.
It is challenging for Biden to reverse the Abraham Accords and relocate the U.S. embassy in Israel from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.
We may experience a radicalization of national politics, with an increase in internal tensions, mixed with racism, classism, extremism, poverty, and growing social inequalities. The confrontation between the rural world and the Bible States (Republicans) and the big cities (Democrats) will continue.
It remains to be seen how the coronavirus will evolve in the country. What is clear is that it will not disappear or become more benign just because Biden is the new president. It will not be easy to get the 100 million people promised vaccinated in 100 days, even for purely bureaucratic reasons.
As for immigration, it seems complicated to legalize 10 million illegal immigrants in just three months. On the one hand, there can be an avalanche of people who want to enter the United States to search for a better life. On the other hand, the first to reject this process will be immigrants already legalized since they will see it as a direct threat to their jobs.
Socially, Biden will have the support of the media. The same people who have mercilessly attacked Trump will now hide their failures, mistakes, excesses, and arbitrariness from him. Among other things because they will not admit that they have made a mistake in the forecast. He will also continue to have the classic support for the Democrats from actors, intellectual singers, and Hollywood.
Maximum political correctness will be imposed, and actions will be seen to discredit Republicans and conservative ideas. A witch-hunt will begin against the Trump Administration people, and not only against those of its greatest confidence; a thorough purge will be sought.
It will increase the limitation of freedom of expression, arguing hateful or extremist speech, or any other justification, as long as it avoids the propagation of any idea that is not in line with government policy. Cultural indoctrination and the mastery of progressive narrative will be imposed.
There are many doubts about what Biden will really do for the environment, especially in the short term—especially considering that the US is the second-largest polluter in the world, after China.
On the military plane, the struggle to dominate space will become more acute, with possible incidents that have not been seen before. It will continue to develop new high-tech weapons and attempt to modernize the nuclear arsenal.
It remains to be seen what it will do with the New START Treaty (reducing strategic nuclear warheads and their delivery vectors, between Russia and the U.S.), which expires on February 5 this year. Trump was refusing to extend it unless China joined, a country that plans to double its nuclear capacity in the next decade.
It will be demonstrated: that U.S. democracy is a mixture of oligarchy and plutocracy; that communication increasingly drives politics; the growing importance of social networks; the ease of manipulating voters and public opinion; the overwhelming Democratic, and leftist in general, control of the media, national and international; that the much-used word "populism" has become the definition of politics exercised by politicians we don't like.
Trump acted bizarrely and bizarrely, without a doubt. But he had the advantage of being transparent. He showed himself as he was, and that's how he proceeded. With Biden, there is a risk of a return to bending, farce, and cynicism. A bit like his short careers to give an image of dynamism and joy, which are only ridiculous and artificial. It can make good the saying: there is no worse demon than the one who does not smell of sulfur.
Also, some of the many who have profited from their constant attacks on Trump may even miss him and say: against Trump, we lived better.
One of the questions that must be asked is whether, from now on and following the example of what was done to Trump, every time a politician lies or does not comply with what he promised, they will also close his network accounts or cut off his television broadcast? The truth is that, if so, we would be left without seeing a good part of the politicians in Europe.
Finally, and as I wish, the important thing is that democracy triumphs and that the political and social reins are returned to the people, without impositions or tricks. That would be a real democracy, the one that risks disappearing
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