Thread by @caitoz

What Biden's Warmongering Will Actually Look Like

"More starvation sanctions. More proxy conflicts. More cold war. More coups. More special ops. More drone strikes. More slow motion strangulation, less ham-fisted overt warfare."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/what-bidens-…

There's a news story about a US military convoy entering Syria being shared around social media with captions claiming that President Biden is already "invading" Syria which is getting tons of shares in both right-wing and left anti-imperialist circles.
i24news.tv/en/news/middle…

Another inaccurate narrative that's gone completely viral is the claim that Biden is sending more troops to Iraq.

https://twitter.com/amuse/status/1352303194899165184

Biden may well end up sending more US troops to Iraq and Syria at some point during his administration. But if the antiwar community keeps staring at the movement of ground troops, they won't be paying enough attention to the areas where Biden's hawkishness is likely to manifest.

Trump's base has been forcefully pushing the narrative that the previous president didn't start any new wars, which while technically true ignores his murderous actions like:

Just because you don't start any new wars doesn't mean you're not a warmonger.

Rather than a throwback to "new wars" and the old-school ground invasions of the Bush era, the warmongering we'll be seeing from the Biden administration is more likely to look like this.

More starvation sanctions. More proxy conflicts. More cold war. More coups. More special ops. More drone strikes. More slow motion strangulation, less ham-fisted overt warfare.
caityjohnstone.medium.com/the-modern-us-…

It is certainly possible that Biden could launch a new full-scale war; the empire is in desperate straits right now, and it could turn out that a very desperate maneuver is needed to maintain global domination. But that isn't the method that it has favored lately.

It appears clear that this would be the Biden administration's preferred method of warmongering if given the choice based on who's going to be in it.

The incoming Secretary of State Tony Blinken now advocates replacing the old Bush model of full-scale war with "discreet, small-scale sustainable operations, maybe led by special forces, to support local actors".

https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1330692793136713732?s=20

Biden's nominee for CIA Director William Burns urged caution in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion and later expressed regret that he didn't push back against it.
archive.is/Tvsze

Rather than picking bloodthirsty psychopath Michele Flournoy for Defense Secretary as many expected, Biden went with the less cartoonishly evil Raytheon board member Lloyd J. Austin III.
caityjohnstone.medium.com/biden-picks-ra…

Too much of the antiwar community is still stuck in the early 2000s. The western war machine just doesn't generally kill that way anymore, and we need to adjust our perspectives if we want to address the actual murderousness as it is actually showing up.

If you keep looking out for obsolete ground invasions, you're going to miss the new form of warmongering completely.

The political/media class likes to keep everyone focused on the differences between each president and his immediate predecessor, but we can learn a whole lot more by looking at their similarities.

Biden's warmongering is going to look a lot like Trump's--just directed in some different directions and expressing in slightly different ways--despite all the energy that has been poured into painting them as two wildly different individuals.

Once you see beyond the partisan puppet show, you see a single oligarchic empire continuing the same murderous agendas from one sock puppet administration to the next.