Mr Biden’s speech is his first major campaign event of the 2024 election season
President Joe Biden marked the third anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol by warning that the issue of American democracy will be “what the 2024 election is all about,” as he runs against former president Donald Trump once more.
Mr Biden, who spoke near the Valley Forge historical site where George Washington and the Continental Army were encamped during the winter of 1777 and 1778, told attendees that they were there “to answer the most important of questions: Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?”
“This isn’t rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time,” he said.
Mr Biden said his speech, his first major event of the 2024 election season, was “deadly serious,” and about a topic that needed to be raised at the outset of his campaign.
A big part of the problem is America’s responsibilities to our network of allies. We used to regularly betray the treaties we signed, it was extremely common in our dealings with first peoples. We stopped about a century ago though, since then we’ve tried to actually stand by our word when we gave it, though more in letter than spirit.
Since we had this pre-existing military alliance with Israel though, it immediately put us in a very difficult position of having to betray an ally in the midst of conflict, or betray our principles. Since Netanyahu benefits from prolonging the war as long as possible to save his own ass, we’re largely stuck in this fucked up position. So, Biden tries to make the best of it, and use our insider position to try to do wield what influence he can. Ultimately though, Israel doesn’t actually need us. If we fully withdrew, Gazans would still be dying en masse, just to less accurate weaponry.
So, we probably just need to withdraw ourselves from Middle Eastern security, to be frank. But the details of how best to accomplish that are over my head. We do have treaty obligations all over the globe though, not just to NATO, but all sorts of other countries too. There’s a Rio Treaty for instance, which actually has us in a military alliance with almost all of S America. We’re actually allied with around half the globe, which is just … a lot.
Then on top of that all, you have our military-industrial complex which is just doing its war profiteering thing, exactly how Pres Eisenhower, the repub pres and WW2 general who coined the term “military-industrial complex” in the first place, warned us it would. We were scared of the USSR for decades, which is what gave it such a strong foothold, but it didn’t go away after it became unnecessary. And now war seems to be spreading over the world again, so … yeah.
All that said, I do think we need to keep the pressure up on Biden to call out Israeli war crimes. He doesn’t really want to, it seems, but he needs to, and it would not be a violation of our treaty obligations to do so.
It’s really just one of the ugliest situations a person could come up with. It’s not like hamas is good people either, they’re as bad as the IDF when it comes to caring about innocent Gazans.
Personally I support an international coalition replacing the IDF, so Israel can’t just massacre them all and take the land. But Arab countries so far refuse to support that.
I also support a solution like what was done in kosovo. A multinational arab peacekeeping force would do wonders to de-escalate the situation, combined with a the US taking a step back from vetoing everything about this in the UN+ dumping ammo stocks in Israel.