Obama Alums and Biden’s Foreign Policy
In 2008, Senator Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign distanced itself from one of Washington’s foreign policy practitioners, Robert Malley. Malley had been meeting with the Palestinian militia Hamas, whom former President Bill Clinton had placed, in 1997, on the US State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO).
Malley had also met with Syria’s dictator Bashar Assad, and was known for his close ties with Assad’s ambassador in Washington Imad Mustafa, often dining at Mustafa’s Washington residence. In 2011, the FBI expelled Mustafa after intercepting his calls threatening Syrian-Americans who showed up at rallies in front of the White House to protest Assad’s brutal suppression of an uprising against his rule.
Fearing Malley’s toxicity, Obama kept the controversial Malley out in the cold throughout his first term. But after his reelection, the former president was willing to take more risk. In 2015, he appointed Malley as the “czar” of the war on ISIS. From there, Malley crept into Obama’s National Security Council (NSC) and took over the Syria and Lebanon desks, and eventually Iran.
Malley is one of a trio. Steve Simon, another Obama NSC alum, visited Damascus and met with Assad in 2015, two years after Assad had hit a Damascus suburb with the internationally prohibited sarin gas. Assad’s attack led to the UN Security Council to pass a resolution that forced the Syrian dictator to dismantle his chemical arsenal, hand over his stock and join the UN’s Organization against the Proliferation of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
The third Obama NSC Alum was Phil Gordon, who advocated for Washington to reverse its policy and reach out to Assad.
This Obama trio is now back and trying to draw the contours of the foreign policy of President Elect Joe Biden. In an article in the New York Times, Malley and Gordon cleverly tried to connect foreign policy to Biden’s proclaimed goal of restoring normalcy in the post Trump era.
Even though they are not experts on China or the rest of Asia, Malley and Gordon wanted their piece to look global, so they inserted a bit on China, on how Biden should reverse Trump’s tariffs to end the trade war with Beijing. They also argued that Trump’s policy has done enough damage in Afghanistan that it does not matter if the outgoing president withdraws all troops before he leaves.
But most importantly for Malley and Gordon are three pieces of foreign policy that they enmeshed into the greater outline. Malley and Gordon want Biden not to only go back to the nuclear deal with Iran, but to reverse Trump’s terrorism sanctions on Tehran. Mind you, even Obama himself, who signed the nuclear deal with Iran, repeatedly said that the deal covers nuclear issues only, that America will continue standing up to “Iranian destabilizing activity in the region” and its sponsorship of terrorism. So much so that, two months after signing on the Iran nuclear deal on October 18, 2015, Obama signed on the Hezbollah Sanctions Law on December 18, 2015.
Unlike how Obama designed it, Malley and Gordon want America’s rejoining of the Iran nuclear deal to reverse Trump’s classification as terrorist organization of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is responsible for killing hundreds of Americans in Beirut, close to 1,000 US troops in Iraq, and for attacks on Iranian dissidents inside Europe.
Then, Malley and Gordon want Israel punished and want Biden to “make plain that his administration would oppose an outcome in which Palestinians were denied equal rights.” Again, Obama himself gave up on Palestinians making peace after he had gotten close to cracking a peace deal between them and Israel, a deal that made Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas so angry that he turned it down..
Finally, Malley and Gordon oppose US sales of 50 F-35 fighter jets to the UAE. But why? What did the UAE, one of America’s staunchest allies, not to be sold America’s top flight jets? The answer is that the Iranian regime opposes UAE’s peace deal with Israel, and thinks that a strong UAE threatens Iranian dominance in the Gulf.
Malley and Gordon make it sound as if they are keen to see America rejoin global multilateralism, but in fact, they are doing the bidding of all of America’s enemies, from Iran’s mullahs to Assad, Hezbollah and the pro-Iran militias in Iraq.
During his days in the Senate, President Elect Biden cut his teeth in foreign policy. He also has many other foreign policy practitioners on his campaign who were never intimate with Assad or biased toward Iran’s brutal regime.
On foreign policy, Biden restoring normalcy means America going back to its golden days of George H W Bush, not settling for Obama’s mediocre practitioners recycling their past failures.
