Get That Nuclear Briefcase Away from Joe Biden!

In an interview on March 18 on ABC’s Good Morning America, President Joe Biden said that Vladimir Putin was a “killer” and that “he will pay a price for his efforts to undermine the 2020 U.S. election.” He also said that Putin “does not have a soul.” When the interviewer asked him, “What price must Putin pay?” Biden’s response was, “You will see shortly.” It is of little use to dwell on the bullying and belligerent tone adopted by the president in his interview.

Nevertheless, Biden’s most recent outburst is not without precedent. In the past, and with the time and composure at his disposal to write (in close collaboration with his advisers) an article for Foreign Affairs about what he planned on doing should he arrive at the White House, Biden unleashed a tirade of abuse contrary to the most basic tenets of international diplomacy. In the March/April 2020 edition, the magazine published a response from the Democratic candidate entitled “Why America Must Lead Again.” The (predictable and reiterated) central thesis was that the world needs a leader and that the United States must regain this role, bestowed upon it by none other than God and abandoned by Donald Trump, who attempted to “Make America Great Again” by abdicating from his responsibility to maintain the international order and by disparaging America’s allies and friends. In light of this unforgivable defection, Biden proposed that Washington once more take its seat at the “head” of the international negotiating table to restore the lost hegemony. His advisers told him neither that this “head of the table” no longer exists, nor that the international system is of an irrevocably polycentric character. Instead of any single head, there is a triangular table at which the United States, China and Russia all sit in disharmonious coexistence.

The language used in some passages of Biden’s article is reminiscent of some of Trump’s bravado and outright insolence. This is confirmation that the confrontational and violent approach of the Republican was barely more overt than that of his opponents and that, ultimately, Republicans and Democrats are one and the same. In the essay in Foreign Affairs, Biden qualified Putin’s government as an “authoritarian kleptocracy”; in the televised interview a year later and now as president, instead of moderating his language, he gave it an even more gangsterlike tone. Not only did he insult Putin, and by extension, the Russian Federation; he also called Xi Jinping a “bully” and said that he presided over a country that robbed the intellectual property rights and the assets of large American corporations and depositors. In conclusion: Russia and China are the enemies of the United States, and they must be treated as such.

That is why what he said “in the heat of the moment” in a live interview with ABC had already been written a year earlier. The only difference is that now he is president of the United States, the country with the largest nuclear stockpile on the planet — which, as far as we know, is in the hands of a lunatic who is capable of saying and writing the things referenced above. The response in the face of this alleged Russian interventionism is something that the whole world will see very shortly. What might it be? New sanctions against Russia, against government officials, perhaps even against Putin himself? Or might it be to do what Washington did to so many other presidents and political leaders around the world: to assassinate him? Biden assured us that he knows Putin very well and that he spoke with him in January this year. On that occasion, he told him, “I know you, and you know me. If I establish that this [the interference in the U.S. electoral process] has occurred, be prepared.”

Biden’s delirium is extremely dangerous and reflects the type of character that dominates the team of cabinet secretaries and advisers in his government, as well as in the governments of Trump, Barack Obama and in those of their predecessors. They are unequivocal demonstrations of the state ideology of the empire, launching itself with renewed belligerence against Russia and China. The fake news promoted by many of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, principally the CIA and the NSA but not limited to them, drowns in its own ridiculousness when they assert that Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and Hezbollah all meddled in the 2020 presidential election in addition to Russia! A useful lie, nonetheless, because the gigantic military-industrial-financial complex, the “deep state” that really calls the shots in the U.S., needs wars or military threats to sustain the profitability of its businesses, even if that means pushing the world to the edge of catastrophe.

It happened many times in the past, and it is happening again. The objective: stir up the international environment once more to restore the lost hegemony of the United States, an impossible step backward given the current distribution of economic, technological, political and military power at the global level. That is why Noam Chomsky has been warning for some time now that these restoration attempts might well lead to a nuclear catastrophe, most probably due to a calculation error. In such an event, it would already be too late for what happened in the 2020 election to be brought to the light of day.

*Editor's Note: The quotes in this article, though accurately translated, could not be independently verified.