A breakdown of Biden's new defense cabinet and what it means for war & peace. Who is Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Avril Haines, Lloyd Austin, and Linda Thomas-Greenfield? Abby Martin presents an Empire Files update.

Transcript

For the past four years we’ve been covering Trump’s dramatic and belligerent escalations in the Empire’s wars. But there’s a new dawn on the horizon. President elect Joe Biden is being celebrated as a return to sanity on the world stage; who will restore peaceful cooperation between allies of democracy.

But those words, like most everything else from Team Biden, are just a bunch of meaningless rhetoric. Now, we can clearly deduce what a Biden foreign policy will look like, since he’s chosen all the major positions for his war cabinet these past weeks. Although not everything has been filled, he’s appointed enough people to let us know exactly how he plans to manage the empire.

Let’s look at his key foreign policy picks so far, starting with Antony Blinken for Secretary of State. Blinken served as Deputy Secretary of State under Obama, where he was a hardline advocate of the war in Libya, and tried to push Obama into launching the same type of all-out war against Syria. Although Biden campaigned on ending US support for the war in Yemen, Blinken sped up weapons shipments to Saudi Arabia for his old boss.

But the biggest indicator of his vision, that’s been totally ignored, is that Blinken was also Biden’s closest foreign policy advisor when Biden championed and voted for the invasion of Iraq, a criminal decision that haunts Biden to this day. Pretty much any politician who championed the Iraq war in those years has no credibility on foreign policy today, and all must issue apologies and retractions. But, somehow, Blinken has been immune to this, despite his role being absolutely critical to getting the Democratic Party needed to launch the war.

See, Blinken is your average pro-war neoliberal, just the other side of the imperialist coin who cloaks his warmongering in humanitarianism.

Like every good foreign policy wonk, Blinken has paid his dues to the war industry. Just prior to his nomination, he founded the shadowy WestExec Advisors consulting firm that quote “helps defense corporations market their products to the Pentagon.” Now their clients are really getting their money’s worth!

This cozy revolving door relationship is precisely why someone like Blinken was picked, to keep the gears on the war machine churning.

Moving on to Jake Sullivan, tapped by Biden’s team to serve as his National Security Adviser. Also an Obama foreign policy alumni, Sullivan was a close loyalist and top adviser to war hawk Hillary Clinton. In her memoir “Hard Choices”, Clinton recalled that Sullivan “was at my side nearly everywhere I went.” Yikes, not a good look! Hillary’s disaster hawkishness as Secretary Of State is part of the baggage that made her unable to beat Trump. Now we have the guy who was whispering in her ear, appointed to whisper in Biden’s.

Additionally, Sullivan is on the advisory council for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, an elusive think tank that tracks “Russian bots” via black box methodology and calls out “foreign influence operations” undermining our sacred democracy.

Interestingly, this anti-Russia group effort includes nefarious characters like George Bush’s DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, Iraq War neocon Bill Kristol,