The Strategic Disconnect

I found another Tablet piece from early 2021 trying to make sense of what might be the Biden foreign policy, this one by Martin Peretz, the controversial former publisher and sometime editor-in-chief of The New Republic. Peretz, a Zionist and something close to a neoconservative, saw a "Mideast blind spot" in Antony Blinken, of whose foreign policy vision he otherwise enthusiastically approved, and he raised the conundrum of Robert Malley:

The twinned issues where Blinken has remained conspicuously reticent and indistinct are the Middle East and the elephant in the Middle East, Iran. In lieu of asserting himself, the secretary of state has approved the reopening of nuclear talks with Iran and outsourced them to Robert Malley, whom he appointed or allowed to be appointed U.S. special envoy to that country. Blinken’s reliance on Malley, and Malley’s own history of finding any opportunity to engage with groups and countries that demonstrably align themselves against American interests, point to a large lacuna, so far, in the otherwise sober vision Blinken has laid out.

It is worth noting here that Malley, besides being an architect of President Barack Obama’s Iran deal and a longtime proponent of outreach to Iran and Hamas, is a childhood friend of Blinken’s: The two grew up together in Paris, Malley as the son of a European-style Jewish communist with anti-imperialist politics and links to Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro, and Blinken as the stepson of an active and influential Zionist businessman and philanthropist who was also a public supporter of détente between the West and the Soviet Union. The divergences and convergences of their fathers’ politics are not irrelevant to understanding the sons.

. . . The assignment of Malley—who, when he is out of government, runs his inherited anti-imperialist priorities through dogmatic internationalists like George Soros, for whom the idea of a national interest is inherently suspect—shows that Blinken hasn’t looked very hard at the reality of Iran’s actions on the ground, or paid much attention to the recent history of attempted rapprochements with the regime, especially Malley’s. (Soros has not been mentioned in the debate over Malley’s appointment, but he should be: No one can claim that Malley’s proximity to an ideologically driven billionaire who funds a multinational, activist NGO empire and has real interests in international decision-making, currency, and oil markets is irrelevant or an unfit subject of discussion.)

. . . Maybe Blinken and Biden feel constrained by Obama’s Mideast realignment policy and obligated to continue his intended legacy-making initiative, at least for a time; maybe Malley is leveraging the public strength of Obama’s legacy, and the former president’s sway with key administration figures like Susan Rice, to exercise undue influence in the Biden White House.

Peretz's speculations are on point for 2021, but the problem is that things have changed. Susan Rice's position in the Biden administration slowly faded despite high early expectations, and she left the administration entirely this past April:

On April 24, 2023, President Biden announced that Rice would be departing from her position as director of the Domestic Policy Council on May 26, 2023.

Also in April, Robert Malley began the process of having his security clearance suspended and being placed on leave from his position of special envoy for Iran. Nevertheless, every indication is that Blinken (and by implication, Biden) has continued the Obama policy of Realignment, tacitly encouraging Iran to play an active role in counterbalancing Israel and continuing a policy of payments to the regime there.

But the big event since Peretz's 2021 piece has been the Russian reinvasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a reassertion of its 2014 claim that Ukraine was part of Russia, which in turn had been provoked by US support for the coup against Ukraine's then-president Viktor Yanukovych, who had been favorable toward Russia. After Russia reoccupied the Donbas and Crimea in 2014, the conflict was dormant, especially during the Trump administration, until it broke out again with the Biden presidency, possibly encouraged by Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan.

All of a sudden, Biden doubled down on a neoconservative policy in Ukraine, effectively orchestrating a Western attempt to remove Ukraine completely from the Russian sphere of influence and move it into the EU and even NATO -- but in the quadrant to the south, the object continues to be to disengage from supporting Israel and outsource the Middle East stability project to a nuclear Iran. In short, the plan seems to be to decolonize the Middle East, effectively abandoning Western interests in Israel, Lebanon, Syria, the Arabian peninsula, and Iraq, while simultaneously recolonizing Ukraine as a Western proxy.

Is there a grand vision here? It's hard to see one. If Robert Malley isn't pulling the strings now -- if indeed he was ever pulling the strings -- who is? One possible explanation might be here:

When people talk about “Ukrainian grain” they’re actually talking about grain that is now owned by US and EU mega-corporations such as Vanguard Group, Kopernik Global Investors, BNP Asset Management Holding, Goldman Sachs-owned NN Investment Partners Holdings, and Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.

Several large US pension funds, foundations, and university endowments are also invested in Ukrainian land through NCH Capital – a US-based private equity fund, which is the fifth largest landholder in the country.

Ideology may be less an answer than money alone, and there we might go back to Joe Biden and the renewed question of what he and his closest retainers were up to at the Penn Biden Center. The Comer committee is rasing entirely reasonable questions in a letter to Special Counsel Robert Hur:

The letter to Hur comes as Comer appeared to discover an omission in Biden’s narrative about the mishandling of classified information. Joe Biden’s senior aide, Annie Tomasini, who reportedly told Hunter Biden multiple times that she loved him, handled the president’s classified documents at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, DC, 20 months before Joe Biden’s lawyer disclosed the discovery of the documents to the public, Comer revealed last week.

Comer also believes the president’s timeline of events omitted multiple visits from at least five White House employees: Dana Remus, Anthony Bernal, Ashley Williams, Annie Tomasini, and an unknown staffer. “There is no reasonable explanation as to why this many White House employees and lawyers were so concerned with retrieving boxes they believed only contained personal documents and materials,” according to Comer.

So the committee now wants to see what Hur has. This may eventually begin to explain the inchoate strategic policies we've been seeing.