The Consequences of US Foreign Policy are driving the West into greater isolation

President Biden where he has stood and where he has been for the past 4 years has sought to project the US as the renewed leading force of a broad coalition of democratic nations seeking to defend the “rules-based international order” against encroachments by hostile authoritarian powers such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. “We founded NATO, the greatest military alliance in the history of the world,” he told D-Day veterans while in Normandy, France, on June 6. “Today NATO is more united than ever and even more ready to keep the peace, to deter aggression, to defend freedom around the world.”

At the recent G7 Summit in Italy he supported measures supposedly designed to integrate the “Global South,” the developing countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, into a broad US-led coalition. Measures that will involve these countries “in a spirit of fair and strategic partnership”. It’s like that;

Not at all. All of Biden’s rhetoric barely hides an inescapable reality: The US is more isolated than at any time since the end of the Cold War. All US rhetoric is increasingly based on a tight-knit group of allies (including puppet countries), who are predominantly Anglophone and part of the Anglo-Saxon colonial diaspora. The apparent Anglo-Saxonization of American foreign and military policy has become a distinct and challenging feature of the Biden presidency.

To give you some idea of ​​Washington’s isolation in international affairs, just consider the wider world’s reaction to the Biden administration’s stance on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

  • After Russia’s war broke out in Ukraine, Joe Biden tried to portray the conflict there as a heroic struggle between the forces of democracy and brutal autocracy. But while he has been generally successful in rallying NATO forces behind Kiev, persuading them to provide weapons and training to Ukrainian forces while reducing their economic ties to Russia, he has largely failed to win over the Global South or rally his support for sanctions against Russian oil and gas.
  • In the Gaza war, Biden applied the same ecumenical rhetoric to rally global support for Israel in its bid to neutralize Hamas after its devastating October 7 attack. But for most non-European leaders, his attempt to portray support for Israel as a noble response proved completely untenable when Israel launched its full-scale invasion of Gaza and the slaughter of Palestinian civilians began. To many of them, Biden’s words seemed like pure hypocrisy, given Israel’s history of violating UN resolutions on the legal rights of Palestinians in the West Bank and its indiscriminate destruction of homes, hospitals, mosques, schools and aid centers in Gaza. . In response to Washington’s continued support for Israel, many leaders of the Global South have voted against the US on Gaza-related measures at the UN or, in the case of South Africa, taken Israel to the International Court of Justice of Justice) for perceived violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

The reality

Here’s the reality: As a world power the US now has a reduced number of close, reliable allies, most of which are NATO members or countries that rely on the US for nuclear protection (Japan and South Korea) or are predominantly English-speaking ( Australia and New Zealand). We can sarcastically claim that the only countries that really trust the US are the so-called “Five Eyes”.

It is an “elite” club of five English-speaking countries, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, who have agreed to cooperate on foreign and military policy and to share top secret information. All became parties to what was originally the bilateral UKUSA Agreement (United Kingdom-USA Agreement), a 1946 treaty for secret cooperation between the two countries in so-called “signals intelligence”, that is, data collected by electronic means, including monitoring telephone lines or listening to satellite communications. The agreement was later amended to include the other three countries. Almost all Five Eyes activities are conducted in secret and their existence was not revealed until 2010. It could be said that it is the most secretive, powerful club of countries on the planet.

The seed of this US foreign policy

The seed of this “elite” club can be traced back to World War II, when American and British cryptanalysts, including the famous computer theorist Alan Turing, met secretly at Bletchley Park (in Buckinghamshire, England) to share information gathered from solving the German ‘Enigma’ code and the Japanese ‘Purple’ code. It was originally an informal secret agreement, which was formalized in the British-US Communication Intelligence Agreement of 1943 and, after the end of the war, in the UKUSA Agreement of 1946. This arrangement allowed the exchange of information between National Security Agency (NSA) and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), an arrangement that continues to this day and surrounds what has come to be known as a “special relationship” between the two countries.

Then in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, this information sharing agreement was extended to include the other three English-speaking countries, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. For secret information sharing, the classification “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY” was then placed on all documents shared, hence the label “Five Eyes”. France, Germany, Japan and a few other countries have since sought entry into this exclusive club, but without success.

Although largely an artifact of the Cold War, the Five Eyes intelligence network continued to operate into the post-Soviet era, spying on militant Islamic groups and government leaders in the Middle East, while also monitoring Chinese business, diplomatic and military activities. in Asia and elsewhere. According to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, such efforts were conducted under specialized top-secret programs such as Echelon, a system for collecting business and government data from satellite communications, and PRISM, an NSA program for collecting data transmitted over the Internet .

The US government’s preference to rely on English-speaking countries to advance its strategic goals is particularly striking in the Asia-Pacific region. Washington is clear: The primary goal in Asia is to build a network of US-friendly states committed to containing China’s rise. This was spelled out, for example, in the Biden administration’s “Indo-Pacific Strategy” in 2022. Citing China’s show of strength in Asia, Washington called for a joint effort to counter “China’s bullying of neighbors of East and South China’ and thus protect the freedom of trade. “A free and open Indo-Pacific can only be achieved if we build collective capacity for a new era and pursue this through a network of strong and mutually reinforcing alliances,” the Strategy document says.

The grid of this Geopolitical Strategy

This grid, the Strategy says, will extend to all US allies and partners in the region, including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines and South Korea, as well as friendly European countries (especially Britain and of France). So anyone willing to help contain China is welcome to join this US-led coalition. Thus, the renewed projection of Anglo-Saxon solidarity is becoming more and more evident.

But of all the military deals the Biden administration has signed with its Pacific allies, none is seen as more important in Washington than AUKUS, a strategic partnership agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Announced by the three Member States on 15 September 2021, it contains two “pillars” or areas of cooperation. The former focuses on submarine technology and the latter on artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, and other advanced technologies. As in the Five Eyes arrangement, both pillars involve high-level exchanges of classified data, but also involve an impressive degree of military and technological cooperation. We note the obvious: There is no equivalent US agreement with any non-English-speaking country in Asia. For Australia to join the deal, it first had to scrap a $90 billion submarine deal with France, causing a serious rift in the Franco-Australian relationship and proving, once again, that Anglo-Saxon solidarity supersedes all other relationships.

New threats to US security

Not surprisingly, the Biden administration, facing increasing hostility and isolation on the world stage, has chosen to further strengthen its ties with other English-speaking countries rather than make the policy changes needed to improve relations with the rest of the world. Biden and his top foreign policy officials focused on encircling China above all else, supporting and increasing Anglo-Saxon solidarity.

However, this actually creates new threats to US security. For many countries in contested zones in the emerging geopolitical chessboard, especially in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, which were once under British colonial rule, this looks like a possible Washington-London neo-colonial reset, which is extremely infuriating to them. Add to this the inevitable propaganda from China, Iran and Russia about a growing Anglo-Saxon imperial nexus, and we end up with an obvious recipe for widespread global discontent.

The common language and Anglo-Saxon imperial-colonial remnants cannot and should not be the deciding factor in shaping US foreign policy. If the US is to prosper in an increasingly diverse, multipolar world, it will have to learn to think and act in a way that includes a reduced degree of an exclusively Anglo-Saxon global alliance of powers, including other allied countries.

The “rules-based international order” policy, rules set by the US, is certainly not the best way to integrate the “Global South”, but it is a policy that leads the West into isolation.

About the author

The Liberal Globe is an independent online magazine that provides carefully selected varieties of stories. Our authoritative insight opinions, analyses, researches are reflected in the sections which are both thematic and geographical. We do not attach ourselves to any political party. Our political agenda is liberal in the classical sense. We continue to advocate bold policies in favour of individual freedoms, even if that means we must oppose the will and the majority view, even if these positions that we express may be unpleasant and unbearable for the majority.

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