Biden’s Young Hawk: The Case Against Jake Sullivan

Either the national security adviser-designate and other “exceptionalists” are true believers, or rank cynics driven by ambition and enough intelligence or charisma to say what’s needed to justify U.S. aggression, says Danny Sjursen.

[consortiumnews.com]

{First, Jake says the U.S. is “unique … in having been founded on an idea, not on territory or tribe, and … a sense of aspiration, a sense of human rights and freedoms.” Well, maybe we can grant him aspiration, but ask Mexicans or those native “tribes” whose “territory” was conquered on behalf of that “idea” about America’s foundational “sense of human rights.”

Second, Sullivan surmises that “American foreign policy, unlike [others] through history, has not been zero-sum, has not relied on a notion that a dog-eat-dog world’s O.K., as long as you’re the biggest dog.” Strange sentiments, indeed, emanating from the capital of history’s hyper-ist of hegemons — one with a “sum” total of 800 military bases forward-deployed in at least 80 countries. Perhaps Jake just requires a recommended reading list of recent works on American empire

Third, Jake offers a nuance-free assessment of America’s global role that might seem beneath his intelligence and esteemed education. He’d have you believe that “we are a nation of problem-solvers in a world full of problems.” At best, this is artless and absent any real sense of recent history. Only given his own public service record since graduating Yale Law the very year America invaded Iraq, one suspects something more noxious afoot. By almost any serious measure, especially since 9/11, Americans are failed problem-solvers in a world full of problems they largely created.}

{From the West African Sahel to Libya to Somalia to Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there are more than one hundred million survivors of around a million dead loved ones killed in conflicts caused or catalyzed by U.S. wars of choice — who’d take serious issue with Sullivan’s arrogant assertion of American good will. Particularly since, in Libya and Syria, Jake played key roles shaping the disasters.}

Especially Venezuela along with a few other Latin American countries, Iran, Ukraine, especially Eastern Ukraine.

{Speaking of U.S. interventionism way back in the First World War, he admitted that:

“We are a race of headlong altruists. We rush to a foreign land in a deluge of embattled sympathy … We do everything in our power to proclaim our good intentions, our nobility of purpose, our loftiness of soul … and all because we think we’re too good for the rest of the world.”}

{He targets authors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer who dared to target the establishment “blob” Jake lives in. Sullivan thinks they did so in “bad faith,” naturally. The entitlement implicit in Sullivan’s review transcends past and present realities of U.S. policy disaster in a disturbingly offhand manner. In fact, Jake has the near-impressive gall to claim that such “scholars … owe policymakers a presumption of good faith and honest service.” Has he not heard tell of WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Libya, Syria, or the Afghanistan Papers?}

Entitlement idealism entrapment divides a citizenry within fake news.

{In practice, Jake was an early advocate of arming Syrian rebels when he worked for Clinton and, as Biden’s national security adviser, for supplying weapons to the Ukrainian military — which Putin “puppet” Trump later did. On Syria, it was Sullivan, after all, who typed a now infamous February 2012 email to Secretary Clinton, off-handedly noting that “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side.”}

{Jake’s so beholden to Tel Aviv’s “special relationship,” and probably terrified of Israel Lobby backlash, that he committed the cardinal sin of polite liberalness everywhere when, in September, he applauded a Trump policy. Sullivan said the new “peace” (without Palestinians, that is) between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was a “positive accomplishment” for the president, and that, “It’s good for the region, it’s good for Israel, it’s good for peace.” }

{However, given all the walking conflicts of interest in Biden’s batch of think tank imperialists (especially Michèle Flournoy’s fishy financial ties to the UAE), an honest update of Sullivan’s peace assessment is in order. Israeli-UAE normalization is in fact mainly good for Raytheon, good for Boeing, and good for Lockheed Martin. The first funds the two favored Obama-alumni soft-landing spots (CNAS/CSIS); the second donates to Sullivan’s own Carnegie Endowment home base; and the last — well, they manufacture the fifty F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets Trump just sold to Abu Dhabi for a cool $10 billion. What a world, am I right?}

These are the very type of people and conflicts of interest our DOJ and our representatives stood in silence to as Trump administration nominees were accepted knowing full well of their past and dealings. Then afterwards used their derelict of duty to manufacture a cover up of 2016 election cycle crimes and proceed into a chaotic distraction of 4 years of unethical procedures. It will be interesting to see how this round of cabinet picks goes through the process this time. Rinse? Recycle? Repeat?

{For decades now, the executive branch has gobbled up foreign policy power from a derelict congress happy to eschew constitutional responsibilities and their incumbent political consequences. Moreover, war policy in particular has even more recently shifted and centralized within the executive branch from senate-sanctioned cabinet departments like State and Defense to unilateral presidential appointees on the national security council.}

Evidently the writer seems to suggest, yes.