Military Technology 04/2021

President Joe Biden was sworn into office this January with major and, some would argue, unrealistic expectations. At the top of Biden’s ‘to do’ list was leading the US out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Internationally, US relations with most of its allies and friends were frayed around the edges, and required a significant reset from the last four years of an ‘America First’ foreign policy. To his credit, the nation’s 46th president has achieved significant, early policy successes. The US is surfacing from the pandemic, with daily life returning to an approximation of the 2019-era ‘norm.’ Beyond the US, President Biden pragmatically and decisively ended the nation’s 19-plus year Afghanistan mission, which had no military or political end-states in sight. These achievements aside, the president has missed significant opportunities to right US relations with other nations, reinforce US vital interests and help stabilise global hot spots. Most glaringly, President Biden’s ‘Russia problem’ continues to fester. In one case, the US remains the victim of cyberattacks attributed by the US government to Russian military and other entities, including criminal syndicates. Beyond alleged Russian-sponsored cyber interference in the 2020 US elections, this spring, Russian-based criminals launched a cyber attack that shut down a pipeline supplying gasoline to the eastern US. On a positive note, the US has strengthened economic sanctions against Russia, and selectively expelled that nation’s diplomats. Yet, Biden has apparently failed to send clear, proportionate signals in the cyber domain – evident at the highest levels of Russian government – that the US will not tolerate future cyber attacks on its government and infrastructure. Nations that support a vibrant flow of goods and services, individuals, and ideas and other intellectual content, tend to peacefully coexist with each other. This paradigm is being upended, as the US has not responded to the humanitarian crisis of acute C-19 vaccine shortages globally. Nations, including Brazil, India and Columbia, are on the brink of disaster. The US most recently met its moral obligations to the global community, in the early 2000s, when it overcame the large logistical challenges to send then-miraculous AIDS drugs to Africa, where its citizens were dying in waves because they lacked them. Hesitancy has gripped 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, preventing the US from meeting its moral duty to quickly help others with C-19 vaccines. This spring, the latest confrontation between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors temporarily derailed the Biden administration’s top Middle East priority – negotiating a return to the Iran nuclear deal. The president clearly bungled his response to the situation and, in doing so, established the template for US defence, political and diplomatic cooperation with Israel for the remaining 43 months of his first term in office. Further, by failing to promptly and vigorously condemn Israel’s violations of international law and human rights, even before the shameful and ill-advised launch of Hamas rockets into Israel, his vision of the US leading the world on human rights has been scuttled. During the early months of the Biden presidency, the US has strengthened its increasingly asymmetric role in the Middle East. The US’s clout with Israel remains focused on the volume of financial aid, including Foreign Military Sales (FMS), to the nation, now amounting to over $3.8 billion a year. Approved and requested FMS contracts with Israel continue to move through the State Department, Pentagon and Capitol Hill bureaucracies, with no sign of being curtailed. In another example of the US failing to move on from being Israel’s enabler in the Middle East, to the role of an impartial bystander, the president prevented even UN Security Council statements calling for a cease-fire during the latest kerfuffle among this region’s neighbors. On a positive note, as this issue was being published, neither Israel, nor Hamas and its patrons, had provided any indication they wanted a bigger war. And in a bit of dripping irony: none of the warring parties has a military solution; with each combatant claiming ‘victory.’ Several suggested courses of action the US president should take to reestablish personal and US credibility as an honest peace broker in the Middle East region include: more aggressively seeking the estab- lishment of a Palestinian state, with full recognition from the US, and selectively curtailing or cancelling FMS contracts with Israel, in response to instances of that nation’s ‘bad behaviour’ with its neighbors. President Biden’s window of opportunity to genuinely strengthen foreign affairs with allies and friends – old and new – around the globe, and fto oster improved relations with emerging peer-competitors, is slowly closing. As a former Vice President and US Senator, Biden clearly understands the workings of ‘official Washington,’ and is no stranger to diplomacy and foreign affairs. Yet to be determined, however, is whether the Biden presidency will demonstrate the foresight, moral courage and commitment to being an agent of change in the Middle East, during the C-19 pandemic and elsewhere. Marty Kauchak Missed Opportunities 6 · MT 4/2021 Comment After a 23-year career in the US Navy, from which he retired as a Captain, Marty Kauchak regularly covers a broad range of topics for Mönch and is MilTech ’s North American Bureau Chief.