90 Miles From Tyranny

Friday, June 30, 2023

Biden Abroad: The Moral and Material Collapse of U.S. Foreign Policy

The American post-Cold War order from the Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush administration is over.

Barack Obama began its erosion with his tired lectures about the past sins of the United States.

Obama empowered radical Islamists. He invited Russia back into the Middle East after a forty-year hiatus. He snored while Vladimir Putin swallowed large areas of Ukraine. He nonchalantly allowed ISIS almost to take over Iraq. And he authored the Libyan misadventure.

Joe Biden has greatly amplified what Obama inaugurated. He accentuates the Obama-authored foreign policy disasters by his own family corruption.

If the U.S. had an honest media, a disinterested Department of Justice, and a professional FBI, the Biden family would likely be facing felony bribery charges and an impeachment vote for leveraging the interests of the U.S. for a few millions of Ukrainian and Chinese cash.

Biden has forfeited any moral credibility America once had in sermonizing to the world about the advantages of transparent democracy.

Instead, Washington under Biden went full Third-world. His family got rich from his offices, and Joe Biden warped government agencies in efforts to take out his next possible presidential rival.

Antony Blinken, Biden’s current Secretary of State, is known mostly for meekly accepting a dressing down from Chinese diplomats in 2021 and subsequent ritual humiliations.

Blinken was also the author of the 2020 election shenanigan of soliciting former intelligence authorities to publish a preposterous lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop had all the “hallmarks” of “Russian disinformation.” Blinken’s inspired farce was dreamed up to aid a then struggling candidate Biden in his last presidential debate.

The net result of the Obama-Biden continuum has been the moral and material collapse of U.S. foreign policy.

Americans are bewildered that China is now buzzing our jets. It plays chicken with American warships.

It mocks our homeland defenses by sending a spy balloon with impunity across the continental United States.

It is defiantly mum about its creation of a gain-of-function virus under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army, despite the ensuing Covid epidemic that killed over 1 million Americans.

The weird reaction of the Biden administration to these affronts is either to contextualize Beijing’s aggression or to ignore them entirely.

Under the earlier Obama-Biden “reset” of Russia, we also paid little attention to the past aggressions of Vladimir Putin, appeased his provocations, and earned the 2014 Russian take-over of the Ukrainian border and Crimea.

Then the resetters flipped during the Trump administration.

They now preposterously claimed that Donald Trump—who had neutered Putin by flooding the world with cheap oil, pulled out of an asymmetrical missile deal with Moscow, killed attacking Russian mercenaries in Syria, and greenlighted offensive weapons to Ukraine—was a Putin “puppet.”

After sleeping when Putin invaded Ukraine twice under Obama, and once under Biden (but not at all under Trump), the Left abruptly adopted Ukrainian resistance as their last chance to prove that Russians should have been guilty of “Russian collusion” and “disinformation.”

Their new legacy is a Chinese-Russian-Iranian anti-American axis.

U.S. arms stockpiles are drained so that a beleaguered Ukraine might have the third largest military budget in the world—and a Verdun-like deathscape of static warfare on the borders of Europe.

Biden desperately sought to revive the failed Obama Iran deal. His subtext was to return to the bankrupt notion that by empowering Iran and its henchmen in Lebanon and Syria, and Hezbollah and Hamas, America could...

Morning Mistress

The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #1431

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The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #2127

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

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Girls With Guns

FILE - Chinese President Xi Jinping and Cuba's President Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez walk during a welcome ceremony in Beijing, Nov. 25, 2022. They pledged mutual support over their fellow communist states' "core interests."

WASHINGTON — Top U.S. lawmakers are calling on the Biden administration to brief Congress on the spy station China is allegedly building in Cuba, but American analysts fear that China’s plans for America’s backyard may go beyond intelligence gathering.

If a war over Taiwan were to break out, these analysts warn, the Chinese military could operate in Latin America and the Caribbean to disrupt U.S. military operations or even strike the continental U.S.

In a June 22 letter to CIA chief William Burns and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Republican Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, requested that detailed information on China’s activities in Cuba be provided by July 14.

The lawmakers’ concern originated with a June 19 Wall Street Journal report quoting current and former U.S. officials as saying that China is negotiating with the Cuban government to establish a joint military training facility in the island nation just 166 kilometers from Florida. The enterprise could lead to the stationing of Chinese troops at the facility and expansion of Chinese intelligence-gathering against the U.S.

"It is imperative that we understand in full detail: the exact nature and objectives of the PRC’s intelligence gathering in Cuba and military partnership with the regime; the implications of such efforts for U.S. national interests; and what the Biden administration is doing to mitigate such efforts and deter their further expansion with Cuba and the Western Hemisphere,” the letter says.

"The American public needs to be assured that their government unequivocally condemns this escalation, and is working to do everything in its power to counter it,” the lawmakers wrote.

Some US success

Blinken told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on June 25 that Washington had made its concerns clear to Beijing and Havana and had had some success in preventing China from building military bases overseas.

Republican Representative Mike Gallagher, chairman of a select committee on U.S.-China strategic competition, told VOA Mandarin in a June 26 email, “If true, this [WSJ] report illustrates yet again why it is foolish for the Biden administration to shelve defensive actions and disclosures simply to secure a diplomatic audience with General Secretary Xi [Jinping]. The [Chinese Communist Party] is the only party seeking to upend the peaceful status quo, and prioritizing endless dialogue over competitive policies invites aggression.”

VOA Mandarin emailed the Chinese Embassy in Washington for comment on the latest developments but has not received a response. The spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on June 20 that he was unaware of this situation.

However, a June 26 op-ed in China’s official Global Times referred to U.S. alarm as “the disinformation campaign hyping up the so-called Chinese spy base in Cuba.”

If established, a Chinese facility in Cuba could have military and strategic consequences for U.S. homeland security, warned Gordon Chang, a distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute think tank.

In a June 23 article, Chang wrote that adding nuclear missile silos in Cuba would give China’s People's Liberation Army the advantage of “shorter flight times" — meaning less warning time.

“Moreover, U.S. missile defenses — and radars — are currently oriented to attacks from over the Arctic, from the north. Cuba gives China venues for...