World Should Watch Out: Biden, In His Closing Days, Is As Irresponsible As Ever

Even as Donald Trump threatens BRICS nations with 100 per cent tariffs if they abandon the dollar standard and launch their own reserve currency (an unlikely prospect for now), outgoing President Joe Biden is outdoing himself in making the world more and more unsafe, leaving a scorched-earth for Trump to navigate when he takes over on 20 January 2025.

To Biden goes the dubious distinction of weaponising everything, from finance to law to human rights, thus precipitating the very thing that makes a BRICS currency theoretically attractive to so many non-US allies.

Trump should know that the recent spike in gold and early talks on a new BRICS currency are directly related to the Biden bid to confiscate Russia’s dollar reserves in order to force the latter to withdraw from Ukrainian territory. As long as the dollar remains the main reserve currency, any country which has a problem with the US will feel vulnerable.

Given the extreme bad blood between the Democrats and the Trump-led Republicans, Biden wants to ensure that Trump is unable to do any of the big things he wants to do in his four-year second term, whether it is ending the Ukraine war or improving relations with fellow-democratic countries like India.

In just the last month, a lame duck Biden has approved the use of long-range ATACMS missiles against Russia (with Britain and France following suit), agreed to export anti-personnel mines to Ukraine (thus single-handedly destroying a global treaty to restrict their use), encouraged Turkey-supported forces and some of the deadliest Islamist insurgent groups to attack Syria’s Aleppo, backed a military-Islamist coup in Bangladesh, and used dubious means to target Indian intelligence agencies (Research & Analysis Wing) and the Adani group to light fires under the Modi government.

Today neither Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval nor Home Minister Amit Shah can afford to land in the US or Canada without fearing arrest, as the US has allowed rogue Khalistani terrorists and intelligence agencies to weaponise the law against them. 

With Biden laying landmines for Trump to step on when he arrives at the White House, the latter will find it extremely difficult to manoeuvre. He may find it difficult to force Ukraine to agree to a peace deal with Russia, now that Biden has allowed Volodymyr Zelenskyy to escalate it.

That Ukraine cannot win this war should be obvious to anyone but the US and Western media, but who cares as long as Trump does not find it easy to stop the fighting? The purpose of the Ukraine war is not to help Ukrainians live a life of freedom and economic prosperity but to get them to kill themselves in trying to keep Russia stuck in a fruitless war. Not without reason has Tulsi Gabbard, Trump's nominee to oversee national intelligence, called Biden and his Vice-President Kamala Harris war-mongers.

In fact, looking at the long arc of US foreign policy and geostrategy, from the end of the Cold War and even before, one feature stands out. Uncle Sam has sought to maintain its sole superpower status by lighting fires everywhere and breaking up countries, often using violent Islamists or insurgent groups as pawns in these efforts.

In the past, the US (along with various groups) has been instrumental in breaking up Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Sudan, Libya, Syria and Indonesia (East Timor), among others, and it is now busy generating insurgencies in Myanmar and the borders around Manipur.

With Bangladesh now under the grip of Islamists after the 5 August coup that ousted Sheikh Hasina, India faces hostile Islamic neighbors on both its eastern and western flanks. We are back to where we were before 1971, when the US supported an Islamist regime in Pakistan that perpetrated a genocide of Hindus in East Pakistan. The same process has begun all over again. India faces a huge strategic threat from an Islamic Bangladesh, as all of the northeast can be destabilised from there. Since India cannot just launch another war in Bangladesh to protect its Hindu minorities, the US has once again negatively impacted Indian interests. 

In the war to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan, the US created Al-Qaeda, which finally ended in 9/11. In supporting the collapse of Iraq under Saddam Hussein and Libya under Muammar Gaddhafi, the US created ISIS (Islamic State), remnants of which are now fighting to liberate Syria from the Bashar Assad regime. 

In destabilising so many countries, the US has not only created more extremist groups but also ensured that the democratic parts of Europe are inundated with refugees from a completely alien culture, often Islamic, thus sowing discord within Europe.

Europe is now as hopelessly divided between “liberal” and anti-immigration parties, which means that none of them is powerful enough to tell the US to mind its own business. Thanks to the mindless expansion of the European Union (EU) and NATO to the borders of Russia, the EU has a large number of smaller states bordering Russia that feel threatened enough to join NATO (Finland and Sweden being two of them). These small states now support US foreign policy even if it is against broader European interests. Thus Germany, the natural leader in the continent, has been hemmed in by shriller American allies from Eastern Europe. Germany’s political and economic trajectory is now downwards.

As far as India is concerned, the US wants to slow down its rise, both politically and economically, by doing two things: one is to fan internal divisions using the Christian and Muslim lobbies, not to speak of Dalits. The other is to flank India with two hostile forces on the east and west, with China anyway pressuring India to the north. Ideally, the US would like India to break up into at least two or three bits so that each is forced to listen to what Uncle Sam has to say. 

The US policy of dividing the world into warring nations and fostering regional and internal civil wars, which will inevitably affect the US itself, seems to matter little in the short term to US strategists. This folly has forced Russia and Iran into China’s arms, and today even North Korea is busy fighting Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

Robert Hanlon’s sharp contribution to Murphy’s Laws is that one should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. US policy can be explained either way: by malice and stupidity. The world should protect itself. Ever since the Berlin Wall fell, US foreign policy has gotten worse and worse.

Also, Biden has been among the most irresponsible presidents in recent times. Two unending wars in Ukraine and West Asia are testimony to that.