Several of Biden’s nominees, including his pick for defense secretary, have spent years on boards of defense corporations, profiting from military contractors and peddling influence in Washington, D.C. on behalf of the war industry. Kelley Vlahos of the Quincy Institute discusses Biden’s national security team and the largely continuous arc of U.S. policy through Republican and Democratic administrations.
The Arab world was rocked by a bitter diplomatic rift that erupted between Doha and Riyadh in 2017 after Saudi Arabia and its regional allies imposed a crippling blockade on Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorism. But it appears a deal to end the dispute is now within reach.
The Atlantic Charter is heralded in The Internationalists as a ‘remarkable document’, the next step towards a post-war order built on cooperation and world organization. For Stephen Wertheim, by contrast, the Charter marked ‘the zenith of American interest in joining with the British Empire to police the world’, its substance echoed by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox in calling for ‘American–British domination of the seas one hundred years hence.’
“This just seems to be Pompeo setting himself up for a [presidential] run in 2024 and bending over backwards to pander to the pet agendas of these various autocrats as well as to the interests of American evangelicals,” Sheline said. Saudi Arabia has been courting conservative U.S. Christians, touting its growing closeness to Israel, their prime concern in the region.
On Thursday, December 3, 2020, the SETA Foundation at Washington, DC hosted a virtual panel to discuss ‘Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy.’ The discussion featured Stephen Wertheim, deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute. The panel was moderated by Kadir Ustun, Executive Director at SETA DC.
The Quincy Institute, the year-old think tank dedicated to military restraint, is out with a new blueprint for the Biden administration outlining a substantial overhaul of U.S. foreign policy. “Marginal adjustments to the current approach will prove insufficient,” it says. “A deeper rethinking of American foreign policy is warranted.”
It’s not just Joe Biden under pressure in the post-Trump transition. It’s the American way in the world, the mindset of a global enforcer. It became a habit through the long Cold War with the Soviet Union; it’s come to feel like a bad habit in a string of bad wars since Vietnam—maybe a habit to be broken as the Trump years turn to Biden’s time.
Sam hosts Stephen Wertheim, deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, to discuss Joe Biden’s foreign policy appointee and why the president-elect should resist the Washington-establishment’s desire to the old foreign policy playbook of intervention and militarized responses abroad.
In his new book Tomorrow, the World, the scholar Stephen Wertheim writes that for US foreign policy elites since the end of the Second World War, “primacy became the only basis through which the United States could participate in the world… In other words, the only way to practice internationalism, to constrain and transcend power politics, was to dominate power politics.”
The assassination of top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh has made a difficult situation even harder for the incoming Biden administration. Reentering the Iran nuclear agreement was already going to be an uphill battle. Now, as tensions mount, only a big swing might save the day.
