President Joseph Biden’s post-Trump global policy agenda will principally remain interventionist throughout the world, especially across the vast expanse of the Asia-Indo-Pacific land-maritime zone. For his first year in the White House, Biden will strive to stop America’s rising domestic turmoil wrought by a decaying capitalist system. Yet simultaneously, US imperialism is expected to wield its maximum power for control across the international system’s multiple domains, to preserve and advance Washington’s wide-ranging strategic interests into the foreseeable future.
It has now been a year since the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally disrupted and roiled the international equilibrium. This universally triggered a worldwide economic downturn, worsened political enmities, heightened security-related tensions and conflicts, and further sharpened class struggles in many countries. But despite a degenerating international strategic environment, the United States will aim to decisively intervene in world affairs to avert being overcome by rival strategic competitors.
In fact, this anticipated external policy thrust was already outlined by Biden prior to his recent presidential inauguration. During the 2020 US presidential electoral campaign, he affirmed customary US foreign policy tenets from Truman to Trump. And foremost in Biden’s thoughts on international relations is for America to staunchly uphold a multilateralist and alliances-based approach geared to constantly advance Washington’s core interests and geostrategic concerns—even in violation of international laws.
Toward this prospective course of action, America will consequently impose a path of contention against a core set of states labeled by Washington as “near-peer competitors” and “rogue regimes.” In pursuit of this consciously deliberate foreign policy direction, US-led regional multilateral mechanisms of intervention—modeled on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) political-military project—will be formed to enhance American imperialism’s global shield and sword. By pursuing this line of compete-coerce-confront, the United States will forcefully aim to contain and diminish the asymmetric powers and capabilities of its avowed state-based adversaries.
But who are US imperialism’s global enemies for 2021? According to the predominant view of the US foreign policy-national security apparatus today, the topmost external threats to America’s global security interests are China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. From this “US Global Enemies” shortlist, it is very evident that all four of these countries are not only geographically located within the eastern hemisphere, they also share a common anti-US hegemony stance on the world stage. From Washington’s standpoint, all four rivals basically comprise a formidable hemispheric united front dedicated to resist America’s spheres of influence, forays, and onslaughts across the eastern hemisphere’s enormous land-maritime space.
Hence, the Biden White House may yet react to this volatile global strategic environment by forging a “hemispheric arc of denial”—built on a span of regional alliances—across the eastern hemisphere. This would act as US imperialism’s battering ram against the Beijing-Moscow-Pyongyang-Tehran united front to deny them any room for expansive maneuvers. The major goal will be to attain effective hemispheric dominance by shifting the global balance in America’s favor.
Therefore, some of the potential components of this design for imperialist aggression would most likely entail the following: a) a reconsolidation of Nato to block Russia’s incursions into eastern and central Europe; b) developing closer links between the US military’s Africa Command and the African Union to undermine China’s rapidly growing influence across the African continent; c) uniting Arab states and the Zionist state of Israel (via the 2020 Abraham Accords) to finally operationalize the Middle East Strategic Alliance to counter Iran; and, d) broadening the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue to include other Asia-Indo-Pacific countries and transforming it into a collective security alliance to fully boost its strategic posture toward China.
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Rasti Delizo is a longtime international affairs analyst and an activist in the socialist movement.