Biden addresses the general debate of the General Assembly’s 79th session. Biden’s final address to the United Nations as president was riddled with falsehoods and hypocrisies typical of US foreign policy, the writer says. – Picture: Loey Felipe / UN Photo
By Natalia Marques
When US President Joe Biden ended his final address to the UN General Assembly with “my fellow leaders, there is nothing that’s beyond our capacity if we work together”, it can be easy to forget that the United States is the number one obstacle to mutual co-operation around the world.
Biden’s mention of the various conflicts and aggressions around the world — from Ukraine to Sudan to Gaza — of course made no mention of the US’s complicity in each of these conflicts.
Biden calls for “a ceasefire and hostage deal” for Gaza in order to “bring the hostages home, secure security for Israel, and Gaza free of Hamas’ grip, ease the suffering in Gaza, and end this war”.
But while Biden calls for an end to the war, the US continues to send weapons and other forms of aid to Israel as it carries out genocide in Gaza, aggression in the West Bank, and extends the war to Lebanon.
Biden’s administration has ignored the popular demand for an arms embargo against Israel, supported by major labour unions, which represent almost half of all unionised workers in the US as well as 61% of the US population. Instead, the US has only expanded its military support for Israel, approving a US$ 20 billion dollar arms package to the Zionist state in August.
The US has maintained its unconditional support of Israel, even as Israel floats a possible ground invasion of Lebanon. Yet ironically Biden said of the war in Sudan, “the world needs to stop arming the generals”. According to the Palestinian Youth Movement, an international Palestinian diaspora organisation, “the Biden-Harris administration is responsible for the current massacres in Lebanon”.
The US’s support for Israeli genocide has received additional scrutiny after it was revealed that USAID and the State Department knew that Israel had deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza. US law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries which block deliveries of US-backed aid, and so US Secretary of State Antony Blinken seems to have deliberately told Congress that Israel did not block aid so that weapons shipments to Israel would remain unaffected.
Yet in his speech to the UNGA, Biden entreated Sudanese generals to “stop blocking aid to the Sudanese people”.
“We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance,” Blinken told Congress on May 10, despite being told the opposite by USAID and the State Department in April.
In Ukraine, not only were the US and Nato’s violations of Russian security red lines the chief cause of that war, but the West continues to be an obstacle to a peaceful settlement of the conflict. There has been no negotiation between Ukraine and Russia ever since the West allegedly forced Ukraine to withdraw from talks in April 2022, and the US in its usual fashion continues to supply billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine to continue the war.
And while Biden urged other UNGA member nations to “stand up” for the Ukrainian people, US military officials openly thirst for Ukrainian blood — complaining in a New York Times article from last year that the Ukrainian military has become too “casualty averse”, causing it to “race through precious [US-provided] ammunition supplies” as opposed to human lives.
Biden spent time lamenting the humanitarian situation in Sudan and claiming that “the United States has led the world in providing humanitarian aid” to the war-torn country. But like many global conflicts, the war in Sudan has its roots in the savagery of US imperialism.
According to Stephanie Weatherbee Brito of the International Peoples Assembly, “Through both military interventions and economic sanctions, the United States has shown its willingness to coerce any nation deviating from its interests.
“This has fostered a global environment where nations vie for power and influence. The US’s propensity to invade and punish perceived adversaries has spurred countries to bolster their military and geopolitical capabilities to safeguard their sovereignty in a world marked by violence and conflict, saturated with weaponry and lacking effective mechanisms to ensure peace.
“This is essentially what is happening in Sudan today, where the conflict has resulted in more than ten million displaced persons. The conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces serves to thwart the democratic process the people have been struggling for since 2018, as rival military groups struggle to control the country and its resources,” Brito said.
“Our task, our test, is to make sure that the forces holding us together are stronger than those that are pulling us apart,” Biden claimed in his address to the UN, despite his administration’s wielding of sanctions that cause economic devastation throughout the world.
For decades, the international community has been calling on the United States to lift deadly sanctions on Cuba that are part of an over 60-year-long blockade against the socialist nation. Most recently, a group of nearly 600 parliamentarians from 73 different countries penned a joint letter condemning the continued inclusion of Cuba on the list. And 35 former heads of state from across the globe penned a separate letter to Biden, urging him to remove Cuba from the US’s “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list.
But when it comes to US sanctions and other violations of the sovereignty of other countries, Cuba is but one facet. Comprehensive US sanctions target and put a stranglehold on the economies of countries such as Iran, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, and Syria. Other nations, such as China, are under constant attack on many fronts, whether through media fear mongering or military exercises near their territories.
And yet in his speech to the UNGA, Biden seems to deny that his administration has deliberately stoked conflict with China. “We also need to uphold our principles as we seek to responsibly manage the competition with China, so it does not veer into conflict,” Biden pontificated.
“We stand ready to co-operate on urgent challenges for the good of our people and the people everywhere.”
According to Amanda Yee, journalist, anti-imperialist activist, and host of The China Report on ‘BreakThrough News’, Biden’s China strategy has nothing to do with managed competition. “In reality, it’s a belligerent policy which will only escalate toward war,” Yee told ‘Peoples Dispatch’.
“What he calls ‘strengthening our network of alliances and partnerships across the Indo-Pacific’ really means the continuation of arming Taiwan, building more military bases on allies’ soil and in the South China Sea, sending cruise missiles to Japan, conducting war games exercises in South Korea — all to further build up the military encirclement of China.”
“I’ve made the preservation of democracy the central cause of my presidency,” Biden claimed during his address. And yet those in the US who have protested against their governments’ domestic and foreign policies have faced police violence, mass arrests, and even deportation.
As US presidential elections fast approach, whether the winner is Biden’s successor Kamala Harris or the ultra-conservative former president Donald Trump, anti-imperialist activists can expect more of the same repression.
* Natalia Marques is a Socialist, organiser in NYC @pslnational and writer @peoplesdispatch covering news for the working class.
** This article was first published on Peoples Dispatch