Joe Biden is Washington Troublemaker-in-Chief
By F. William engdahl
27 September 2016
Barack Obama may be the nominal Commander-in-chief of the United States’ Armed Forces. However, it’s becoming clear that Vice President Joe Biden is far more than your ordinary passive Vice President. Indeed, a close look at his agenda internationally in recent months gives the clear impression that ‘ol Smilin’ Joe is in fact Washington Troublemaker-in-Chief
I’ve mentioned in an earlier piece, in passing, that Biden seems to play a role similar to that of Vice President Dick Cheney in the George W. Bush White House–running the show in key global policy decisions under a passive and largely clueless President. Or the role that G.H.W. Bush, former CIA Director played during the eight years of the Reagan Presidency. The latest example is Biden’s nasty meddling into the highly-sensitive geopolitics of the South China Sea and East China Sea disputes with China.
During the ongoing annual opening of the UN General Assembly in New York, Joe Biden held a private talk with Japanese conservative Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe in which, according to the official statement from Biden’s office, “The Vice President reiterated the United States’ ironclad commitment to Japan’s security. Both leaders agreed to increase coordination on East China Sea and South China Sea issues.”
For those who have bothered to look closely at the Washington role in giving the Japan Abe regime backbone in bolder, provocative moves against China in recent years, the Biden statement about US’ “ironclad commitment to Japan’s security” and his statement about agreeing to “increase coordination on East China Sea and South China Sea issues,” can only be seen as a dramatic escalation of future military tensions against China—one completely ignored by mainstream Western media.
Even more notable, while Vice President Biden was “hotting up” the South China Sea issue with his old pal Abe, President Obama was in a smiling photo op with China’s Premier Li Keqiang at the same UN meeting. In his China meeting Obama scrupulously avoided mention of the South China Sea islands dispute where Washington played a key disrupting role against China. The official White House summary of the Obama-Li Keqiang talks stated that the meeting made “no specific reference to maritime issues. But the White House says the leaders discussed climate change, trade and other key issues.” Washington, in a rather transparent “hard cop-soft cop” game with Beijing.
Biden’s game
Biden is clearly an enforcer for a faction of what we might call the permanent establishment, the hidden real government that runs on automatic imperial pilot regardless who is nominal US President. That “permanent establishment” is currently becoming “dis-established” everywhere in the world. It sees with horror that its grip on the entire world is crumbling. It does only what it has always tried in such cases—war, war, war. Only of late, those wars—war against Russia over Ukraine, war against Assad’s Syria, an attempted war against Erdogan in Turkey, a war against the growing economic muscle in the world of China—have been impotent flops. Biden, a dutiful servant of those interests, carries the flag of war to where he is sent, much like the character in Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks.
Biden’s Abe talks were clearly meant to keep the Japanese government on track to repeal Article 9 in the postwar US-drafted Constitution that states: “…the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes… land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”
In September 2015 in another meeting with Abe, Biden praised Abe’s party for passing a major softening of Article 9 that allows Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to defend the country’s close allies in combat for the first time under its constitution. As part of the US “Asia Pivot” aimed at militarily encircling China, Washington has strongly pushed Japan to take a more active military role along with Australia, Vietnam, the Philippines and South Korea.
Troublemaker
Behind Joe Biden’s toothy grin lies a nasty operator with a regime change agenda wherever a nation stands on its own feet to assert its rights. A brief review of other recent Biden interventions makes this clear.
It was Joe Biden who went to Brazil in May 2013 to see if newly-elected Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff could be convinced to repeal a law that in effect cut US oil majors out of developing (and controlling) one of the largest oil discoveries of recent decades offshore Brazil. When she refused, Biden gave her the kiss of death and the National Endowment for Democracy and Washington’s Human Rights warriors launched a regime destabilization that severely weakened her.
Similarly, on February 6, 2014, just days before the US-orchestrated coup d’ etat in Ukraine that drove an elected President, Viktor Yanukovic into forced exile, Victoria Nuland, US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, the neo-con former Chief-of-staff of Dick Cheney, in that infamous “fuck the EU” phone intercept with US Ukraine Ambassador Geoff Pyatt, mentions the decisive role that Joe Biden was playing. Biden in effect legitimized what Stratfor head, George Friedman termed “the most blatant coup in US history.” In her phone call to Pyatt that February, Nuland excitedly says that Biden would come to Kiev to “midwife” the coup, to give the US-chosen puppet regime of neo-nazis and gangsters what she termed an “atta boy,” as in “good doggie!”
Most attention was on Nuland’s barroom vulgarity towards the EU, remarks in any ordinary self-respecting government would have been grounds for her immediate dismissal. The very significant and revealing reference to Biden’s role giving the coup, and especially Nuland’s choice of Arsenij Jazenjuk as unelected Prime Minister, the official Imprimatur of Washington, was overlooked. As reward evidently for Joe Biden’s coup backing, Burisma, a Ukrainian oil and gas company, appointed Joe’s son, Hunter Biden, to its Board of Directors.
Similarly, this August 25, in the aftermath of the failed CIA and Pentagon coup against Turkish President Erdogan through the Turkish military networks loyal to CIA-man Fethullah Gülen, it was Joe Biden who went to Ankara to make a desperate bid to keep Turkey in NATO at a time Erdogan was in deep negotiations with Russia and was signaling changed policies towards Syria and Bashar al Assad. Biden arrived just 18 days after the fateful Erdogan meeting with Russia’s President Putin in St. Petersburg where discussion of reviving the Gazprom Turkish Stream pipeline across Turkey to the EU was prominent on the agenda.
In his private talk with Erdogan, Biden agreed to a concession on US support for Syrian Kurds by demanding the Kurds withdraw across the Euphrates River. Three days before Biden’s arrival in Ankara, on August 22 Turkish military had begun shelling strongholds claimed by the Kurdish YPG in northern Syria north of Manbij, according to NTV. Turkey is clearly intent on preventing US-backed consolidation of an independent Kurdish space on her border to the Turkish Kurd region. In those Ankara talks Biden in effect threw US-backed Syrian Kurds under the rolling bus in a frantic bid to keep Erdogan’s Turkey from a strategic alliance with Russia in the region.
Biden’s statement after his Erdogan talks were obsequious beyond belief for the representative of supposedly the world’s mightiest, only Sole Superpower. Biden declared, “The attempted coup went to the heart of who your people are — principled, courageous and committed. And for a people who have struggled so long to establish a true democracy, this was, from my perspective and the President’s perspective, the ultimate affront. So my heart goes out to not just the government, but to the Turkish people…We’ve stood with you from the moment it began, Mr. President, and we stand with you now. We are your allies. The American people also stand in awe of the way your countrymen respond to the way you respond personally…” Barf bags are available near the exit…
In Texas we would say Biden was eating a huge portion of “humble pie.” Indicative of Biden’s desperation, the same Biden had met Erdogan last January to castigate the Turkish President for raids on the media controlled by the CIA’s Fethullah Gülen, saying Erdogan was violating principles of “democratic free press.”
The backroom talk in Washington is that in the event Hillary Clinton’s severe illness prevents her from running, Biden would be a possible stand in candidate. The people who promote such thoughts are clearly either ignorant of who Joe Biden really is, or they are seeking to advance the now-bankrupt globalization agenda of the boring old patriarchs of the American oligarchy. Either way Joe Biden is a troublemaker the world does not need as either Vice President or President.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”