Joe Biden pauses while he delivers a speech at a campaign event for democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. (Evan El-Amin / Shutterstock)
Danny Sjursen. The Nation: What Our Forever Wars Will Look Like Under Biden
Expect the new president to eschew starting new wars while avoiding to end existing ones.
Hard as it is to believe in this time of record pandemic deaths, insurrection, and an unprecedented encore impeachment, Joe Biden is now officially at the helm of the US war machine.
He is, in other words, the fourth president to oversee America’s unending and unsuccessful post-9/11 military campaigns. In terms of active US combat, that’s only happened once before, in the Philippines, America’s second-longest (if often forgotten) overseas combat campaign.
Yet that conflict was limited to a single Pacific archipelago. Biden inherits a global war—and burgeoning new Cold War —spanning four continents and a military mired in active operations in dozens of countries, combat in some 14 of them, and bombing in at least seven. That sort of scope has been standard fare for American presidents for almost two decades now. Still, while this country’s post-9/11 war presidents have more in common than their partisan divisions might suggest, distinctions do matter, especially at a time when the White House almost unilaterally drives foreign policy.
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WNU Editor: President Trump is the first US President in my life time who did not start a new war and/or escalated an existing one. I do not expect President Biden will achieve the same result. What I expect in a Biden administration is an escalation of a war or two (Afghanistan is on the top of my list), and maybe the start of an insurrection/war here or there (a few African countries are on my list).
