The more Joe Biden continues with his erroneous, hapless foreign policy initiatives, the more America drifts farther away from the Global South.
Who said Americans don’t do irony? This boot camp which Biden runs, places the U.S. as the high order and grand master of human rights who ranks the pupils in the class and gives them an apple if they worship the U.S. And who stands by America at the high table? Israel of course!
The more Joe Biden continues with his erroneous, hapless foreign policy initiatives, the more America drifts farther away from the Global South. Biden’s administration will be marked in history as not so much the one associated with the Ukraine war, but the period in office which saw the rapid advancement of BRICS and the dwindling influence of Washington to world energy prices; some might also add to that list the dollar losing its gilt edge as more countries dump it as a reserve currency, often simply to protect themselves from U.S. sanctions and America seen as a spectator to global issues rather than a leader.
This ‘loser’ status is crystallised immaculately with the recent ‘Summit of Democracy’ chaired by Biden himself – a zoom conference attended by over a 100 countries which sets out to promote democracy, led by Washington delivering the moral tutelage to the ignorant masses rather like British missionaries in 1890 penetrating the East African coast and heading into the interior to bring ‘light’ to the lost. It’s all very old world and typically out of touch. Typically Biden.
The live conference is a farce and merely shows the world how the East is growing so fast and with such strength as the one word – delusional – tends to enter the mind. During the same week where many journalists and commentators were wrestling with the truth when they encapsulated what a 20 year anniversary of the Iraq war means to most Iraqis – a country far worse off since America invaded in the name of “democracy” – others were thinking farther back. During the same week of the democracy pantomime of Biden’s, historians were reminding us of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba who was Zaire’s first elected prime minister in 1960. The Americans and British didn’t think much of him and his anti-American ideas and promptly murdered him, replacing him with “their son of a bitch” Mobuto.
As the Lumumba assassination showed, in reality, the U.S. only believes in human rights if the argument works for them at a given moment, but never as a solid cause. It’s a rule which is constantly broken when elections produce leaders which aren’t favoured; when countries need to be overthrown and ‘our kind of dictator’ needs to be installed; when huge reserves of energy just can’t be left to the locals to sell at a profit.
In the 1960s, even with the assassination of Martin Luther King or Kennedy, the world still gave the hilarious mantel of human rights arbiter to the U.S. Remarkably, even against a backdrop of a blood-soaked civil rights movement, Vietnam massacres of children – and then the secret carpet bombing of Cambodia and scores of U.S.-backed coups in South America and Africa, U.S. still shone as a leader in human rights.
But the world was a different place. People were much more naïve and patriotic (Americans) – and certainly less able to see their own government as a neo-mafia institution, corrupt to the core and fed by military-industrial complex kickbacks. Kennedy was probably murdered as he threatened to cut the colossal military megadeals and even slim down the army. The world wanted to believe in the U.S. as a leader and even though, in many ways it looked unable to enshrine any of its own so-called democratic values, who else could be the world’s champion on human rights?
But today, as we reflect about Joe Biden’s murky links with Ukraine, the God-almighty shame of the U.S. withdrawal of Afghanistan which threw the country back into the dark ages and has made women a target of the Taliban’s rage, the Iraq war and the illegal occupation of Northern Syria – where the U.S. steals around a 100,000 of barrels of oil a day – many of the countries who joined Joe Biden’s democracy conference might ask, should it really be the U.S. giving the lessons?
Aside from the comical omission of two NATO members on the periphery of Europe – Turkey and Hungary – which is really about Biden not wanting to help those countries’ leaders in their impending elections, it’s a parody beyond belief to imagine that America could lecture the rest of the world in the 1960s on human rights and certainly not today. This is not only because of Biden’s international terrorism which he commissioned, blowing up gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea – removing the democratic process the Germans might have engaged in, given the choice, as to how/if they would engage with Russia – America is always drenched in the blood of those it slaughtered in the name of defending Uncle Sam’s right to be the chief abuser of human rights for its own political causes, while it takes the pulpit.
The Americans are simply incapable of leading by example. They are like the rowdy country club members who trash the bar each Saturday night through brawling, but are the same who complain on Monday morning about those who are late returning books to the library. They are the savages which they assume the rest of the world to be, simply by being brown-skinned and coming from lesser (financially) developed Global South countries. It is a rank absurdity that America still indulges itself with this role and yet the comedy continues to be piled on, when the observer strolls down the list of those who are invited. Turkey and Hungary were not invited as they don’t have views which are aligned to Biden and don’t play the servile role he would hope they would. China, obviously, was also not invited which, again, was not a message about its own human rights but more about Biden sulking that Xi brokered a peace deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia. It’s what superpowers do, Joe.
Other countries invited raise a few eyebrows though and remind us of that famous comment by Susan Rice about having to work with countries which the U.S. doesn’t always see eye-to-eye on, in terms of human rights. Rwanda’s inclusion is worrying though given the unparalleled brutality of its regime towards its critics. In the same part of the world, the DRC is also there, along with Kenya and Angola. Pakistan also is a tad incongruous for the same reasons.
But nothing smacks more of tone-deaf delusion than America standing on the podium with one of its greatest allies, Israel. The presence at this conference of Netanyahu’s right-wing government is a stoic reminder that the Biden camp is out of touch, given Israel’s ‘world leader’ status as it butchers Palestinians and steals their land all in a day’s work – and not a squeak of opprobrium from Washington.
Most African leaders will no doubt look at Biden and his cabal and will be as much inclined to accept human rights tutelage from them as they would take dental hygiene advice from a man with no teeth. The absurdity of the Biden administration is no longer the Magoo-type caricature struggling to leave the podium; it’s his ideas about how he believes the rest of the world views America which is the real joke which is going to stick. Even the most cynical world leader knows that the conference was about a struggling Biden administration trying to shore up support around the world for his own policies – chiefly Ukraine but also the brain-dead idea of containing China – and not using the traditional practice that previous U.S. presidents relied on for this: having a nice little war somewhere with U.S. soldiers killing people who dared to stand up and defend the oil that the U.S. is trying to steal. Times have changed but Biden hasn’t. It’s only a matter of time before the rising East will start its own annual democracy talk shops which will hold America to account for its own belligerency on a grand scale, followed by their own International Court, weapons inspection organisation. The list is endless.
