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Since U.S. President Joe Biden announced on April 14 that the United States would fully withdraw from Afghanistan by September 2021, there has beendiscussion among regional observers and, according to reports, among diplomats about the possible staging of U.S. forces just over the horizon from Afghanistan.
The Taliban made clear in a statement on May 26 that it would not accept U.S. forces based in countries near Afghanistan.
In his April 14 remarks, Biden stressed that the administration would “not take our eye off the terrorist threat” and would “reorganize our counterterrorism capabilities and the substantial assets in the region to prevent reemergence of terrorists of the threat to our homeland from over the horizon.”
by Oliver Boyd-Barrett / May 16th, 2021
Trading Genocides
On April 24, 2021, US President Joseph Biden declared that the massacre of 1.5 million Turkish Armenians in 1915 constituted genocide. As to whether genocide is the word Americans can consent to use about Native Americans who suffered death, torture, displacement, apartheid and disease at the hands, mainly, of European settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a lot less clear, although some state governors have gone for it. As for slavery, not until July 2008 did the US House of Representatives apologize for American slavery of blacks and the subsequent discriminatory laws and practices that have continued to marginalize and oppress a population that today constitutes over 47 million or 14% of the US population. 9 States have officially apologized for their involvement in the enslavement of Africans.
It is Time to Stop Looking for a Reset with Russia
Russian President Vladimir Putin on April 7, 2021. (Kremlin photo, https://tinyurl.com/56f5jf4m; CC BY 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
As Biden himself noted, his administration’s push could have gone further and it probably should have. Biden chose to prioritize de-escalation. He opted for the most limited prohibitions on Russia’s sovereign debt, and some experts have already pointed out that U.S. organizations can still buy Russian debt on the secondary market. The additional sanctions also left Putin’s circle of oligarchs and their families unscathed.