
On Foreign Policy, Biden Leaves a Global Trail of Destruction
There is no ambiguity about President Joe Biden’s foreign policy record: it was bloody, and it was disastrous.

There is no ambiguity about President Joe Biden’s foreign policy record: it was bloody, and it was disastrous.

The mainstream narrative is that Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine single-handedly caused an inflationary surge in commodity prices. But in fact, it was Wall Street speculators reacting to Putin’s war that forced up prices.

The latest Western sanctions mean “total economic and financial war on Russia,” according to a European finance minister. There’s little reason to hope this will stop Putin’s war — but it will bring a longer-term attrition that mainly hurts ordinary Russians.

Credit Suisse, the bank whose donors gave over $100,000 to Joe Biden’s campaign, has ties to Russian oligarchs and has been repeatedly found guilty of serious financial crimes. Yet Biden’s administration is considering waiving any punishment for the bank.

French demographer Emmanuel Todd’s new book argues that secularization has left Western societies weak and divided. But his account of the US and Europe’s secular nihilism is deeply reductive, leaving no space for forward-looking political change.

Across Eastern Europe, the war in Ukraine has reinvigorated narratives that present life under Soviet rule as akin to Nazi genocide. It’s bad history — and it indulges the nationalist groups who collaborated with Adolf Hitler.

Claims that former Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters deployed antisemitic imagery at recent concerts in Berlin are baseless. The charges are being elevated by media figures and politicians who detest his advocacy for Palestinian liberation.

Through Angela Merkel’s reign, neoliberal European integration provided the scaffolding for Germany’s export-led growth. But war on the continent and a series of crises have tested this model’s limits, producing splits within Olaf Scholz’s government.

Soviet symbols are widespread in today’s Russia, including in propaganda for the war in Ukraine. But in the classroom, the Soviet legacy is reduced to a nationalist cult of World War II, while burying even the notional idea of a more equal society.

The gargantuan military aid bill that passed last week and the Democrats’ Build Back Better package relied on similar legislative strategies for passage. The party saw the strategy through to secure money for war while abandoning it to fund social programs.

Keir Starmer’s attacks on the Left show he's desperate to reassert Labour’s role as America’s closest ally. But with events from Afghanistan to Ukraine showing the limits of US interventionism, British centrists are longing for a now-past age of neocon power.

Canada’s pretense of being a champion of peace and mediation conceals the aim of its foreign military training operations. These operations are not instances of bighearted largesse — they are strategic, geopolitical power projections.

Between 2010 and 2020, a wave of protests erupted around the world. In some cases, these movements strengthened socialist forces. In others, they opened the door to the Right. Vincent Bevins spoke to Jacobin to explain the causes of this divergence.

After a decade that produced a series of shocks, the European Union seems to have weathered its worst moment of crisis. Yet the EU still suffers a fundamental lack of democracy — and the Left should be in the forefront of demanding its reform.

Neocons are taking advantage of the neo-McCarthyism Donald Trump has stoked against pro-Palestinian activists on the left to go after more antiwar voices on the right in his own administration. Such witch hunts never stop at their original targets.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin’s evil genius matters less than pressures from the ultrarich, US foreign policy, and the ravages of the neoliberal Yeltsin years.

The state of democratic rights for journalists in some of the world’s leading Western powers is becoming increasingly worrisome.

Bernie Sanders has been able to withstand Donald Trump's onslaught of attacks even as Joe Biden, like Hillary Clinton before him, is watching his lead collapse.

Far-right candidate Călin Georgescu pulled ahead in the first round of Romania’s presidential election last Sunday. His denunciation of “globalists” and the European Union is more rhetoric than practical program, but it resonated with many crisis-hit voters.

It should be a matter of course that self-identified leftist and progressive members of Congress should vote down the annual bloated, dangerous, war-profiteer bonanza that is the military budget.