As Americans' support for Ukraine is steadily shrinking amid the failure of Kiev's counteroffensive and Israel's war in Gaza, President Joe Biden proclaimed that the only way to ensure peace is to continue fighting.
"When Biden decided to support Ukraine, he decided to attach his political wagon to Ukraine," Joe Siracusa told Sputnik. "He started giving them money. Then he started beating the war drums. The intelligence agencies decided that China was public enemy number one. Russia was public enemy number two, which is nonsense. And so what he did was he did it on his own authority. The American people were not called in to consultation. There was not a war declaration in the courses. He's in effect in a quasi-proxy war with Russia. If you give people arms, ammunition, airplanes and tanks to kill soldiers of another nation, you're literally at war with them."
20 November 2023, 08:09 GMT
The Biden administration never concealed its desire to bleed Russia white, something that was said out loud by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin after Washington and its Western allies derailed Russo-Ukrainian peace talks conducted in Istanbul in March 2022, just a month after the beginning of the conflict, with Turkiye's mediation. Biden has been largely guided by a Cold War mentality: he "had some unfinished business" with the USSR and "always wanted to finish" Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed, per Siracusa.
In addition, "[Biden] is a captive of the foreign policy establishment and the political elite in Washington and in my lifetime, got us involved in Vietnam, got us involved in Afghanistan, got us involved in Iraq, got us involved in Iran and all the rest of it. These are people who have the American people permanently terrified. And of course, they're all beholden to the military-industrial complex," the political scientist underscored.
Likewise, when it comes to the unfolding Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Biden's refusal – together with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – to impose a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip by no means contributes to peace, let alone a two-state solution, per Sputnik's interlocutor. The Gaza war has already claimed the lives of over 12,000, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. And even though Biden insists in his op-ed that he remains committed to maintaining two states for Israelis and Palestinians, the US foreign policy establishment will never let this happen, according to Siracusa.
"Taking a bad bet that is allowing the Israelis to do what they wanted for the last 20 years," the political scientist said. "And to place that bet on a two-state solution assumes that the people you're dealing with are not only blind, but they're stupid. Everybody can see a two state solution won't work because it only works if the Palestinian Authority can step up, and no one wants that to happen and it's not going to happen. So we could see that. And Netanyahu knows this, too. So what we have is not a stalemate. We've got a situation that is very dynamic, but it's going in the wrong direction."
"And the destruction there is so bad. I mean, who's going to pick up the bill? Who's going to put this place back together? You know, 60% of the housing is gone. And, you know, the figures, the infrastructure is gone. The sewage systems are gone. The schools are gone. I mean, at the very best, Gaza, if it's there, is just rebuilt a little bit, will be a basket case for the next hundred years," Siracusa concluded.