Biden’s ‘Weak’ Speech Tying Ukraine, Israel Funding Reflects ‘Bankrupt’ US Policy in Mideast
15:01 GMT 20.10.2023 (Updated: 16:25 GMT 20.10.2023)
© AP Photo / Andrew Harnik
Subscribe
In his address to the American people, US President Joe Biden announced he would be sending a budget request to Congress to “fund America’s national security needs.” By that, POTUS meant dishing out further support to the ongoing NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and aiding Israel in its fight against Hamas.
As a presidential address, Joe Biden’s speech tailored to garner support for supplementary funding of Israel and Ukraine was a “failure,” “illogical,” and “a sort of muddled vision of what he thought he was doing,” Professor Joe Siracusa, political scientist and dean of Global Futures, Curtin University, told Sputnik.
“What he did in it was he conflated what's going on in Gaza with what's going on between Ukraine and Russia. They're not comparable. So he conflated these two things, and then he asked for money to cover both of these in the House of Representatives, saying that both Hamas and Russia pose ‘existential threats’ to their neighbors. That's not true. Russia's relationship with its neighbor is a long, complicated one, going back to czarist Russia, Soviet Russia, in the modern times, not the same kind of thing,” the pundit clarified.
US President Joe Biden spoke to the nation on Thursday and announced he would be sending a budget request to Congress for funding for Israel and Ukraine. Support for the two countries was positioned as funding "America’s national security needs.” Aid to Ukraine was offered under the guise of a "smart investment," sure to pay dividends for future generations. Earlier reports indicated that the funding request may include as much as $60 billion in aid to Ukraine.
Furthermore, the speech by the 80-year-old POTUS “infantilizes the American public,” the political scientist believed.
“The American public doesn't know that much about foreign policy... Biden speaks for the foreign policy elite. These are the people who got us [United States] bogged down in Vietnam, who lost Iran, they lost Iraq… lost Afghanistan, and so on and so on. The foreign policy public in America is very small. But the elites or the neocons kind of run the show for Biden in the background,” Professor Joe Siracusa underscored.
20 October 2023, 06:48 GMT
'Tough Sell'
Asking Congress for supplementary funding for Tel Aviv, along additional aid to the Kiev regime amid waning resolve among lawmakers, as well as the American public, to further bankroll NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is a “tough sell” for Biden, Joe Siracusa assured. "I think Americans are just a little weary of this," he pointed out.
"I reckon that the Russian-Ukraine conflict has come to about an end. Most Americans are done with it because they understand there's an adjustment there. But in terms of bankrolling Israel, the United States is looking over its shoulder at increasing confrontation in the region or beyond. Those two aircraft carriers there are not to deter violence, because Joe Biden hasn't deterred violence anywhere. I mean, it happens anyway. They are there to tell Israel's enemies that an attack on Israel right now from either Iran or Hezbollah or other places will be met with American counteraction. And that's the one thing you do not want to fool around with," said the expert.
As to the Palestine-Israel conflict, which accrued an even more horrifying death toll after the attack on a northern Gaza hospital, “this war… was a failure in intelligence,” said the pundit, offering the opinion that “a lot of people… were asleep at the switch.”
On October 17, a deadly attack on the al-Ahli Hospital killed hundreds of people. Palestinian authorities and the Israeli military have since been pointing fingers at one another for the disaster. Hamas said that a missile was launched by the IDF, while Israeli officials put the blame on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement.
The entire international community was shocked by the catastrophe, with citizens across the globe rallying in support of Palestine and urging for a ceasefire. Amid the relentless Israeli strikes that have pummeled the Gaza Strip after Palestinian group Hamas launched a surprise large-scale rocket attack against Israel on October 7, and the complete blockade of the enclave, there have been warnings of a devastating humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in an area home to more than two million people.
Weighing in on the reportedly looming ground operation by Israel’s military, ostensibly targeted at wiping out Hamas in the enclave, by the time ground forces get in there, “Gaza is going to be turned into a parking lot,” Joe Siracusa said.
"Most Americans, they're like anybody else who is watching the war, they're appalled by what's going on… And secondly, they see that there's no end game here. What is the end game for the Israelis in Gaza? Is it to make them disappear? Is it to push them all into the Sinai Desert, is it to push them into the sea? I mean, the Israelis have no Plan B, there's no end game here. And the American people, they're hard working like anybody else. And they don't want to be played for suckers here.”
"I think the American public and the president's speech are miles apart," the analyst insisted.
19 October 2023, 06:41 GMT
Weighing in on how likely Joe Biden was going to get Congress to greenlight spending to the extent that he hopes, Professor Joe Siracusa voiced the opinion that he was “not going to get funding for the Ukraine war,” adding that “a lot of Americans are turned off of that.”
“The war in Ukraine is over. All we're going to talk about now is how it ends. Tying that up with expenditure to Israel was a mistake because a lot of people, they might want to do something for Israel as a knee-jerk reflex. But they don't want to give any more money to Ukraine. Ukraine looks like it's a waste of money.”
Furthermore, Biden’s remarks in his address to the American public to the effect that, “we're not really giving money to anybody... we're just giving them munitions from our stores and then we're using the money to replace these munitions” were ripped as “ridiculous” by the pundit.
He added that the “weak” speech and Biden’s funding pitch to Congress came at a time when there was only a temporary House speaker, and growing reluctance among lawmakers to further sink taxpayer funds into the Ukraine sinkhole.
19 October 2023, 17:12 GMT
'Wrong Side of History'
Looking at the current spiral of violence in the Middle East, and summing up American foreign policy in the region overall, Joe Siracusa succinctly assessed it as “bankrupt.” “It's intellectually bankrupt and it doesn't work. And we don't offer anything new because we have nothing new to offer,” he pointed out. As for Washington’s support for Israel and Ukraine, it “shows that America is on the wrong side of history," added the professor. According to him, history will judge the Russian military operation in Ukraine as “justifiable,” and the Israeli “annihilation of the Palestinians as unbelievable.”
Indeed, President Joe Biden was recently "humiliation" by Arab leaders on his visit to the Middle East. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas pulled out of a four-sided meeting with his US counterpart in the Jordanian capital Amman which Egypt was also set to attend. Jordanian King Abdullah II called off the summit shortly afterwards, forcing Biden to cancel his trip to Israel's eastern neighbor.
The snub came in the wake of the blast at the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, after which Biden, meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, endorsed Tel Aviv's claim that the massacre was caused by "the other team."
“In other words, we're on the wrong side of history now, and I think history will judge us very badly. I think this reinforces the multipolarity of the rest of the world,” said Professor Joe Siracusa.
16 October 2023, 20:54 GMT
