President Joe Biden took office vowing to get American troops out of “forever wars.” Tonight, in his State of the Union address, he offered a vision of indefinite U.S. involvement in conflicts around the world.
In April 2021, speaking about the war in Afghanistan, the president lashed out at those who believe that “withdrawal would damage America’s credibility and weaken America’s influence in the world. I believe the exact opposite is true.” . Tonight, Biden attacked skeptics who “want us to walk away from our leadership in the world.”
He began his speech with a call for more U.S. military aid to Ukraine, arguing that “the free world is at risk, emboldening those who would do us harm to do as they wish.” Subsequently, Biden announced broad plans for US involvement in Gaza.
While the U.S. military will build a new port in Gaza to deliver food to the Palestinians — and, the president promised, “no American soldiers will be on the ground” — the Biden administration will continue to arm the Israeli military campaign that Biden said “has It has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined.”
The Biden administration has moved on weapons to Israel at the expense of the American taxpayer, and is providing target intelligence to the Israeli army. “Creating stability in the Middle East also means containing the threat posed by Iran,” Biden added, publicizing his own air strikes on Yemen.
That air campaign put a spanner in the works Peace talks in Yemen– which, ironically, the Biden administration had brokered a couple of years earlier.
Biden he positioned himself as a dove of peace during the 2020 presidential debates, and one of his first major decisions in office was to follow through on the long-planned U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. “It is time to end the war forever,” the president announced in an April 2021 speech, rejecting an “approach in which US exit is tied to conditions on the ground.”
“We need to have clear answers to the following questions: What conditions require that we be allowed to leave?” he asked her in that speech. “By what means and how long would it take to reach them, if they can be reached at all? And at what additional cost in human lives and resources?”
Today Biden answered these questions: wars will continue for the foreseeable future.