by Ramin Mazaheri (@RaminMazaheri2) and cross-posted with PressTV

John Kennedy’s “Camelot” was a magical time for US leftists. Too bad its promise was not fully realised – his attempted armed overthrow of the Cuban Revolution failed to return Washington’s fascist allies to power.

It’s so interesting how Lyndon Baines Johnson was brought down by mass protests which were not equaled until Donald Trump. The difference is that the anti-LBJ protests were completely anti-imperialist and internationalist in nature – against his continuation of Kennedy’s war on the Vietnamese people – whereas the “never-Trump” movement is totally self-absorbed in Americanism and vitally concerned with immediately reasserting American dominance and prestige.

Coinciding with the current installation of Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter is being whitewashed (again) in a popular new movie called “Rock & Roll President”. His creation of the Taliban, looking the other way on death squads of progressive clergy in El Salvador and Guatemala and his attempted destruction of the Iranian Revolution are all apparently less important to his legacy than his taste in music.

Bill Clinton was the first Baby Boomer president and he certainly changed things. He totally rolled back the Reagan-Bush Cold War policy of not attacking socialist nations by bombing Yugoslavia into an unstable fragmentation which persists 30 years later.

Barack Obama deserved his Nobel Peace Prize for perhaps as long as five minutes into his presidency – then he bombed seven Muslim countries, increased the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and armed horrific wars in Libya, Syria and Ukraine to advance US interests.

It is fairly said – given the wars on American Indians – that Donald Trump, for all his fomenting of instability in the few nations courageous enough to openly oppose US imperialism, was actually the least belligerent president since Thomas Jefferson. During Trump’s tenure US Democrats drew gasps around the world with the way they virulently criticised Trump for his reluctance to extend Obama’s military conflicts and to start new ones.

But why such surprise at the warmongering of today’s Democrats? Listed above is the post-WWII legacy of Democratic leaders, and it is consistently refreshed by non-American blood.

Joe Biden is about to take the reins of foreign policy, and a bigger creation of the totally anti-internationalist, fake-leftist Democratic establishment could not be found. History shows we need to be prepared, so it’s worthwhile to look at the countries which Biden is likely to try and destroy.

After all, Democrat presidents always try to destroy somebody.

Countries too strong to be invaded, but whom Biden will try to provoke into war

North Korea: Pity the families still devastated by the last remnant of the Cold War: the US-divided Korean Peninsula. A united Korea would almost certainly create a hyper-competitive, top-5 global economy. That’s why Japan and the US won’t allow it – fear of Korean strength. Biden is certain to reverse Trump’s negotiations – despised across the US mainstream – for a minor detente. But victory in war here is impossible – it was tried and it failed, and despite perhaps the most horrific US war crimes ever.

Iran: Due to 70 years of sanctions North Korea is the performance straggler in East Asia, but in the Muslim World Iran is the performance leader despite decades of murderous sanctions. Fear of Iranian strength is the reason why Biden isn’t likely to spectacularly reverse US policy Iran. Washington and Tel Aviv will not consent to see two things: Iran as a thriving, peace-promoting regional leader in the Middle East, and a thriving, progressive Muslim republic anywhere. Biden will likely rejoin the JCPOA but merely return to Obama’s policy: not honoring it, intentionally subverting it and yet publicly claiming the opposite. This time-wasting is unfair for Iranians but very useful for Pentagonians and lobbyists, who have only ever had one policy: to implode Iran’s revolutionary government. There won’t be a military attack on Iran because it would only end in disaster – it’s the same as with North Korea, but Iran doesn’t need a nuclear bomb: they are the Muslim World’s performance leader.

China: For all his anti-China rhetoric Trump wasn’t as belligerent militarily as Obama was – his “pivot to Asia” proved that US-China detente was over. One simply cannot compare a trade war to a Cold War and remain credible, after all. Biden will only ramp up these provocations, as Washington simply cannot tolerate a competitor which rejects the neoliberal form of capitalism in favor of “mutually-beneficial cooperation” in business. The US lost the war against China long ago – now they are losing the battle for global political-cultural attention: China was the only major economy to grow in 2020, and one of the few to defeat the coronavirus. Biden will continue to uselessly beat America’s head against the wall here, and also try to force US allies to uselessly do the same.

Russia: US military supremacy is not only excluded from the Iranian waters of the Persian Gulf but also in the skies – Russia’s involvement in Syria proved that. Fomenting war in poor, neighboring Ukraine was proof that the US knows that direct involvement in Russia is totally unwinnable. The only way that Washington can keep detente – the only solution between equals – off the table is to hysterically and pathetically insist that Russian operatives (such as Trump) are destroying America from within. Absurd, but America is still fighting a Cold War, one must remember: the fight for everyone to accept the American Dream.

Countries which Biden may attempt to destroy so they can live the American Dream of ‘stability for the 1%’

Cuba: Far-right Latin-American immigrants (from Cuba, Venezuela and elsewhere) have entered their second and even third-generations in the US. The 2020 election showed their essentially reactionary natures shining through – they were credited as being the force which swung Florida in favor of Trump. In order to turn Florida blue we could see Biden building on Trump’s appalling increase of the US-led blockade on the Cuban people. The vagaries of the circus which is US politics may demand a reboot of Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs attack, as useless as that would be against an almost supremely-united Cuban people whose political intelligence is among the best in the world.

Venezuela: Venezuelan strength is always underestimated in Western media, but there is no indication Biden has any intention of pulling back on Washington’s longstanding “Monroe Doctrine”, which declares Latin America to be Washington’s backyard. Iran and Venezuela keep bravely enriching the obvious ideological ties between the two socialist-inspired nations with commercial ties – could Biden force the US Navy to intervene? Trump showed a reluctance for open war, but did Biden ever vote against a war?

Mali: Defeated in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria – whither Washington’s two-decade war on the Muslim world? Could the US reverse its longstanding policy of ceding West Africa to French imperialism and open up a new front on the opposite end of the Muslim world? France invaded Mali in 2013 without UN approval but there is now unprecedented grumbling about their own “endless war”: If any Western nation could possibly elect a semi-leftist president it would be France, and that could happen in 2022. Surely Biden is open to ideas here, given how many of his cabinet were involved in the destruction of Libya. Are we really wise to imagine Biden will peacefully pull out of the Muslim world? He has certainly promised nothing of the sort.

The United States: This is not an unnecessarily provocative addition. Biden, whom I refer to as “Corporate Joe” due to his half-century of turning his home state of Delaware into perhaps the world’s biggest tax haven for big business, already helped destroy Main Street in order to pay for bailouts of Wall Street during the Great Recession. The economic catastrophe in 2021 is going to be even worse for Main Street than it was in the awful 2020, so the path for America is crystal clear: massive economic redistribution and Roosevelt-era levels of government-controlled investments. Of course, those two things are totally anathema on both sides of the aisle in the US, but they say the times make the man: Just like Obama, Biden has the same chance to break with the failed decades of “trickle-down”, economic right-wing ideology – will “Corporate Joe” admit how spectacularly wrong he has been for so long? On a cultural level, Biden has not condemned the hysterical, vengeful, McCarthy-era tactics being shockingly threatened against 75 million Trump voters – will Biden foment civil discord as a way to distract from even more neoliberal, far-right economic policies that will surely prove unpopular? Is “never-Trumpism” never-ending?

The sun sets on the Trump era, but yesterday predicts what tomorrow will bring

In both economic and foreign policy Democrats had the same advantages as they did in 2008: a world begging them to right the wrongs of the previous Republican administration, control of both houses of Congress and an American people who desperately needs just a few bowls of government gruel from the richest country in the world.

These advantages went totally unused.

We are not cynical to say these advantages went unused by accident or negligence or foolishness, but rather that they went unused by design.

We are 100 percent correct to say that Democrats’ refusal to do the right thing from 2008-2016 directly provoked the rise of Trump, a politician whose only utility in world history is that he showed just how insistently the American system and its political/cultural elite refuse to help the lower classes of their own nation and of the world.

Biden has much to reverse, but both his record and that of the Democratic Party give us what grounds for optimism?

However, it’s inauguration week in the US – if we aren’t optimistic about a Biden administration now, history strongly suggests Biden will likely not give us another chance.

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Dispatches from the United States after the presidential election

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (1/2)November 5, 2020

Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (2/2)November 6, 2020

4 years of anti-Trumpism shaping MSM vote coverage, but expect long fightNovember 7, 2020

US partitioned by 2 presidents: worst-case election scenario realized November 9, 2020

A 2nd term is his if he really wants it, but how deep is Trump’s ‘Trumpism’? – November 10, 2020

CNN’s Jake Tapper: The overseer keeping all journalists in line (1/2)November 13, 2020

‘Bidenism’ domestically: no free press, no lawyer, one-party state? (2/2) – November 15, 2020

Where’s Donald? When 40% of voters cry ‘fraud’ you’ve got a big problem – November 17, 2020

The 4-year (neoliberal) radicalisation of US media & Bidenites’ ‘unradical radicalism’ – November 22, 2020

80% of US partisan losers think the last 2 elections were stolenDecember 3, 2020

Trump declares civil war for voter integrity in breaking (or broken) USA December 5, 2020

Mess with Texas via mail-in ballot? States secede from presidential vote – December 8, 2020

Biden won? 2016-2020 showed what the US does to even mild reformers – Dec 18, 2020

Alleged Nashville bomber not Muslim: Western media disappointed – January 2, 2020

This week in the US: The ‘model nation’ for no nation anymore – January 7, 2020

Biggest threat to global leftism returns to power: US fake-leftism (1/2) – January 8, 2021

US post-Capitol: Armed, hysterical, depressed and yet out for blood – Jan 13, 2021

Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.