Some 680 days were wasted in the domestic and international affairs of the U.S., says Charles C. W. Cooke of National Review in his article titled "Biden’s pointless presidency." The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger as well sees the fact that no one taking U.S. President Joe Biden seriously is actually his big advantage: He can say and do whatever he wants to without harm to the country and nation. Put together, according to the two conservative gentlemen, a good two-year period has been wasted nationally and internationally.
The truth looks different when you look at the U.S. from where it stands. But first, let’s go back a little.
Mr. Biden recently began differentiating between what he calls "the MAGA Republicans" and "the regular GOP." With the "Make America Great Again" crowd, Biden was referring to those who tried to invade the U.S. Capitol; he thinks that those who consider themselves MAGA Republicans condone political violence. It is quite wrong – and harmful – to designate millions of Americans who support the idea behind the MAGA slogans as supporters of the Capitol raid; in Henninger’s terms, this is just Joe or a blowhard Senate majority leader who was not famous for his well-thought-of speeches for the last half a century.
The other side is the non-semi-fascistic part of the GOP that the Politico magazine happily celebrates as the sign of finally Biden’s embracing collaboration "after two years of noxious feuding." Perhaps it is too early to immortalize the parliamentary bracing of two political parties in the House and Senate, but what these conservative gentlemen of the media elect not to see (or try to have us believe) is the fact that embracing at the presidential level between the two parties has been going on since Bush junior declared that one is either with the U.S. or against it. President George W. Bush, in an address to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001, had said, "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." What everyone was invited to support was what the president called "war with fear" in his flowery sentences; but in essence, it was war with those that the U.S. helped to further radicalize while it was fighting with the Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan. That radicalization had already started against the colonialism in the Middle and Far East for a long time. The U.S. and the British schemes to replace "radical Islam" with their own product called "moderate Islam" had been put in operation after what the RAND Corporation described in its "Project Air Force" document as "the tectonic events": 9/11 and Operation Enduring Freedom, the global war on terrorism, and the war in Iraq and its aftermath. The RAND Corporation brought the attention of the U.S. Air Force (why?) to the fact that those "tectonic events" had "dramatically affected the Muslim world and attitudes toward the United States."
All those documents and details of the U.S. and U.K. operations in the region are well-known and heavily reported; therefore, we do not have to go into details. What has remained obscure is the fact that since then, all the U.S. presidential administrations, Democrat or Republican, kept implementing the blueprint the Deep State developed and put into operation.
Trump and his men
The very term "The Deep State" (a body of people, influential members of government agencies and the military) had become a part of the American political vocabulary after Donald Trump took the presidential office. Trump and his men, especially those who considered themselves outsiders, right-wing activists, as Steve Bennon and others, started using it to denote "a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy," as defined by Monmouth University Polling Institute.
The way Trump and Bannon used the term might have suggested that the new administration was undoing what the U.S. Deep State had been doing for the last couple of decades. Especially Bannon and Alexander Jones, an American far-right and "alt-right" radio show host and a prominent conspiracy theorist, used the term to portray the "Globalist" and Neo-Conservative remapping plans of the Middle East.
In fact, that plan had three prongs to rectify the post-World War II global errors: Remapping the Middle East; amending the post-Soviet structures that were facilitating Russia to recreate the Soviet Empire and ceasing the Chinese economic expansion. The Bush-era scheme was intending to dismember countries in the Middle East and create friendly new nations to correct the mistakes the British Empire had done when it was redoing the post-colonial system. Those plans were so detailed that they even proposed to create countries based on their popular denominations and sects.
The U.S. blueprint sought to use familiar tactics to dissolve the Russian Federation into its 85 federal subjects, 21 of which are republics. The U.S. has surrounded Russia making many former Soviet allies NATO members. The inflammation in that siege in Ukraine was something expected. Georgia was another probable point to complete the fire circle; but the Caucasians were much more skillful than the stage actor of Ukraine.
The repressive Chinese regime provided ample opportunities for the U.S. in Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet, especially the Muslim majority in Uyghuristan and ethnic Tibetans, as well as Mongolians, as prime targets for social engineering maneuvers. These maneuvers have been continuing for quite some time now. But to tackle China militarily could be inconceivable (a) without a new military alliance (like, say, something among Australia, India and Japan) (b) with Russia still intact as a natural ally for China.
Trump must have found these plans on his desk when he moved into the Oval Office. His narrative about making America great again, however, has not impeded him declaring Russia and China as the primary threats to U.S. global hegemony. His national security strategy plan presented China and Russia as major rivals, and he promised to counter those competitors that want to realign global power in their interests. That plan was verbatim a replica of former President Barack Obama’s national security strategy document, which, in turn, repeated Bush’s security strategy plan.
Trump had been, on the one hand, blaming Obama for spending the tax dollars of the American people on the defense of Europeans, and on the other, spending even more on Europe’s defense against Russia.
He was calling Obama’s interference in the Middle East a "Globalist Scheme," but the Trump administration was doing nothing to stop that globalism. Trump’s Secretary of Defense James Mattis had resigned his post when Trump said he was calling off the plan to break up Iraq and Syria the previous Bush and Obama administrations devised and sending all U.S. troops back home. Trump appointed Mark Esper, a career soldier and a Gulf War commander, as his new secretary of defense, and stopped criticizing the NeoCon/Globalist plans in the Middle East. His Middle East envoy would later spill the beans, and after that point, they told the president that the number of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Syria had been reduced but never informed him about the exact numbers of troops in the area.
So, if the notion of "Deep State" is defined as "the secret manipulation or control of government policy," then what is the Biden government, supposedly a Democratic administration, doing in the Middle East to undo what the Trump administration had done?
Trump forced NATO’s European allies to increase their defense budget; but not trusting their promises, he increased the U.S. naval and land force presence in the countries around the Russian Federation and in the Aegean Sea. Trump said that Greece was the most strategic and reliable ally in the Eastern Mediterranean; and in his National Defense Authorization Act he allocated $50 million for improvements to the facilities at the U.S. naval base at Souda Bay, Crete. Trump commissioned the United States Navy ship, the USS Hershel Williams, to be permanently based at the Souda naval base.
Despite the Greek delusions that all these policy implementations were aimed to fortify Greece against Türkiye, Trump’s plan to increase the U.S. presence in the Aegean Sea came in extremely handy when the Russian invasion of Ukraine started. Now, the Biden administration is sending more tanks to those Greek bases which may or may not work to occupy Russia. But they are definitely working the conservative Greek government up. The U.S., since the Obama government, has been forgetting that Greeks cannot arm the Aegean Islands as any other nation can arm and build military installations on their islands. The U.S. is not a party to them, but Greece and several other EU countries are part of the Lausanne and Paris agreements that transferred Turkish islands to Greece when Türkiye was considered as the part of the defeated axis countries. Stationing troops on islands violates the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and 1947 Treaty of Paris.
According to Article 13 of the Treaty of Lausanne, signed in 1923 following the end of World War I: "With a view to ensuring the maintenance of peace, the Greek government undertakes to observe the following restrictions in the islands of Mytilene, Chios, Samos and Nikaria: No naval base and no fortification will be established in the said islands."
The Dodecanese islands were handed over to Italy with the Treaty of Ouchy signed after the 1912 Turco-Italian War and remained under Italian sovereignty until the 1947 Treaty of Paris. With Italy taking the side of the defeated countries in World War II, the Treaty of Paris was signed with the Allied countries on Feb. 10, 1947, and these islands were ceded to Greece. When Türkiye accuses Greece of violating the agreements, Greece starts to play the victim role. Like the previous administration, the Biden administration defends its bases on the Greek mainland and islands as an alliance within an alliance.
The RAND Corporation’s report on the impact of 9/11 and the war in Iraq and its aftermath described them as tectonic events. The warm embrace the U.S. and its Western allies holding Greece is going to have a similar tectonic effect in destabilizing NATO.