Biden Defies Reality in United Nations General Assembly Address

Sept. 21, 2021 (EIRNS)—“I’m here today to share with you how the United States intends to work with partners and allies ... [in] the commitment of my new administration to help lead the world toward a more peaceful, prosperous future for all people,” President Joe Biden told the first day of Debate of the United Nations General Assembly today. The world, that is, except those nations arbitrarily labeled “authoritarian,” which when added up, represent at least half the human race.

He presented his administration as having “ended 20 years of conflict in Afghanistan,” closed a “period of relentless war,” in order to open “a new era of relentless diplomacy; of using the power of our development aid to invest in new ways of lifting people up around the world; of renewing and defending democracy.”

Neither Russia nor China were named (although Chechnya and Xinxiang were), but there was no mistaking those two powers are the prime targets of the asserted “relentless diplomacy” policy. Other nations being subjected to regime change and siege-like economic sanctions in the name of “democracy” and “anti-corruption” were named, among them, Belarus, Burma [sic], Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela.

No longer “continuing to fight the wars of the past ... as the United States turns our focus to the priorities and regions of the world, like the Indo-Pacific, that are more consequential today and tomorrow, we’ll do so with our allies and partners,” Biden proclaimed. The first three priority alliances he named were NATO, the European Union, and the Quad— all three thrown into strategic uproar over the unilateral unveiling of the newly created “AUKUS” alliance unmistakably aimed against China, just days before.

Similarly, his assertion that the United States is “not seeking a new Cold War or a world divided into rigid blocs,” was belied by his promise that “we’ll continue to uphold the longstanding rules and norms that have formed the guardrails of international engagement for decades ... like freedom of navigation.” And his promise that “we’ll stand up for our allies and our friends and oppose attempts by stronger countries to dominate weaker ones, whether through changes to territory by force, economic coercion, technological exploitation, or disinformation,” mixed in with other veiled attacks on China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

In short, Biden’s attempt to sound peaceful was about as credible as his claims that the U.S. was leading the world in generous aid against COVID, such as shipping a mere 160 million vaccine doses to other countries, “no strings attached.”