{"id":59716,"date":"2026-06-14T10:23:39","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T18:23:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=59716"},"modified":"2026-06-14T10:23:39","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T18:23:39","slug":"bidens-closed-circle-on-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/14\/bidens-closed-circle-on-russia\/","title":{"rendered":"Biden\u2019s Closed Circle on Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from The Realist Review<\/a>:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Joe Biden\u2019s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions.[1]<\/a><\/sup> \u00a0And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to do so, after all, only policy hands and political operatives who had come up through the ranks of the Clinton and Obama administrations or had longstanding ties to the citadels of the foreign policy community were invited into the fold.[2]<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The message BidenWorld sent early on was that heterodox voices, even tepid ones, were not welcome. Consider the case of a respected expert on Russian affairs, Dr. Matthew Rojansky, who was then serving as the director of the Kennan Institute at the Congressionally-funded Woodrow Wilson Center. Rojansky had been denied a position on the Biden NSC because he was viewed as \u201csoft\u201d on Russia. Administration officials feared that appointing Rojansky would, as a contemporaneous report by Politico put it, \u201csignal a conciliatory U.S. policy toward Moscow.\u201d[3]<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 The incident had echoes of the 2009 Freeman affair, when a foreign lobby (Israel\u2019s) mobilized its allies in the media and on Capitol Hill to block an appointment it deemed threatening to its agenda. This time around, another foreign lobby (Ukraine\u2019s) slammed the door on Rojansky. From the start, Biden\u2019s White House was a closed circle \u2013 new names, new faces, and new thinking were not welcome.<\/p>\n

The parallel one reaches for to best describe the inner workings of the Biden White House is that of the Reagan White House. Back then, a chief executive of questionable sentience relied on a tight circle of political operatives to run the day-to-day operations of the White House. During Reagan\u2019s first term, that job fell to a \u201cTroika\u201d consisting of Chief of Staff James Baker, Counselor to the President Ed Meese, and Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver. Meese did policy, Deaver was the image-maker. Baker was in charge of everything else. Joe Biden had a Troika of his own: White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti, and Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed. Klain and Ricchetti were longtime centrist Democratic operatives. Reed was the policy wonk. No friend of progressives, Reed came up through the ranks as a centrist policy adviser to Senator Al Gore in the 1980s. He later served as a domestic policy adviser to President Clinton.<\/p>\n

On the foreign policy side of the ledger, what was old was new again. Like Presidents Carter and Clinton \u2013 and his erstwhile Democratic rivals Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders \u2013 Biden embraced a vision of the world divided between democracy and authoritarianism. While the script had been slightly updated since the end of the Cold War, the story was a familiar one: The US and its NATO allies were now said to be threatened by an \u201cauthoritarian axis\u201d led by Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia. The axis is also said to include Iran, North Korea and other revisionist powers. Discussions regarding our putative \u201cfriends\u201d and \u201callies\u201d that also happen to be authoritarian (Saudi Arabia, Turkey) or ethno-nationalist (Israel, Ukraine) are usually excluded from the schema. In December 2021, Biden hosted a \u2018Summit for Democracy\u2019 that brought together leaders from over 100 countries in support of a rather amorphous strategy to \u201cdefend\u201d democracy \u2013 a cause that Biden claimed was \u201cthe defining challenge of our time.\u201d<\/p>\n

More thoughtful men than Biden saw things rather differently. George Kennan, for one, felt that there was nothing \u201cmore egocentric than the embattled democracy.\u201d The problem, as Kennan correctly foresaw, was that an embattled democracy will tend \u201cto attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision to everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side is the center of all value.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/sup> \u00a0While Kennan wrote those words in 1961, it would be hard to find a better description of the politics of the New Cold War. The main deliverable of Biden\u2019s \u201cdemocracy\u201d conference was the creation of a Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal, which, at a cost of nearly half-a-billion dollars to US taxpayers, would seek to promote \u201cdemocracy, fight corruption, and defend human rights worldwide.\u201d [5]<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

As with so many of the ideas and programs championed by the Democratic establishment since the end of the Cold War, the \u201cautocracy vs. democracy\u201d paradigm borrowed liberally from the neocon playbook. Biden\u2019s old friend, the late Senator John McCain, had long called for the creation of a global \u201cLeague of Democracies.\u201d Speaking at Stanford University\u2019s Hoover Institution in 2007, McCain said the new league would, \u201cform the core of an international order of peace based on freedom.\u201d It would be able to \u201cbring concerted pressure to bear on tyrants in Burma or Zimbabwe, with or without Moscow\u2019s and Beijing\u2019s approval.[6]<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0 McCain\u2019s proposal might just as easily have come from the pen of Samantha Power. As with the men and pigs at the conclusion of George Orwell\u2019s Animal Farm<\/em>, when it comes to the neocons and the Democratic elite, it is now impossible to say which is which.<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n

The Great Betrayal: How The Democrats Became The Party of War, <\/strong><\/em>hailed by Professor Richard Sakwa as \u201ca brilliant, timely, and important achievement,\u201d is available now from OR x Nation Books<\/a>.

  1. For example, no dissent on matters relating to Israel was welcome; see: https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/news\/biden-silencing-dissent-gaza<\/a>. For reporting on Biden\u2019s tyrannical streak, see, for example, https:\/\/thebrunswicknews.com\/president-biden-has-notorious-temper-yells-curses-frequently-in-private-report\/article_107fcc8f-b3f8-5dad-a447-083dbde1eaa1.html<\/a> ↩<\/a><\/li>
  2. Including The Brookings Institution, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The German Marshall Fund, The Center for Strategic and International Studies, The Center for American Progress, The Center for a New American Security, and The Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. ↩<\/a><\/li>
  3. https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/2021\/04\/19\/biden-russia-expert-483000<\/a> ↩<\/a><\/li>
  4. For Kennan, see: https:\/\/responsiblestatecraft.org\/2021\/12\/17\/hang-up-the-magical-thinking-and-try-strategic-empathy-on-for-size\/<\/a> ↩<\/a><\/li>
  5. On the Democracy Summit and Biden\u2019s remarks, see: https:\/\/bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov\/briefing-room\/statements-releases\/2021\/12\/23\/summit-for-democracy-summary-of-proceedings\/<\/a> ↩<\/a><\/li>
  6. For McCain\u2019s remarks, see: https:\/\/www.hoover.org\/sites\/default\/files\/uploads\/inline\/docs\/McCain_05-01-07.pdf<\/a> ↩<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/section><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Reprinted from The Realist Review:\u00a0 Joe Biden\u2019s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions. \u00a0And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":647,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_seopress_news_disabled":"","_seopress_video_disabled":"","_seopress_video":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas_manual":[],"_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable_all":"","_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas":[],"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_social_image_id":59726,"_social_image_url":"","_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1321],"class_list":["post-59716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"0","custom_donate_message":"","_social_image_id":"59726","subtitle":"An excerpt from The Great Betrayal<\/a><\/I>."},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/647"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59716"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59718,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59716\/revisions\/59718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59716"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=59716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}