The leaders of his foreign policy team — Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security advisor Jake Sullivan — are veterans implicated in the failures of the past. The hawkish Blinken was an ardent champion of the Iraq War, surely the most disastrous adventure since Vietnam. Sullivan, Hillary Clinton’s favorite strategist, was instrumental in the Libyan debacle, which he exuberantly framed as an example of the “Clinton doctrine’ before it left Libya in violent chaos. And now, even the most rabid neocons are back in the saddle.

 

 

After the Iraq debacle, one would have thought these ideologues had, in James Fallows’ words, “earned the right not to be listened to.” They would be retired in disgrace, left to write their memoirs and apologias in deserved obscurity. Two phenomena enabled their return to establishment graces. The first, of course, was Trump — and the accompanying Trump derangement syndrome. The neo-conservatives in particular were welcomed back into the establishment embrace when, they broke with Trump and issued furious denunciations of his “isolationist” America first rhetoric.

 

 

The second salve for their fortunes was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. All of their Cold War tropes were given new life: Putin was evil; if not stopped in Ukraine, he would move on to Poland or the Baltics; only military defeat could deter him. American responsibility for the events that led up to the war — the extension of NATO to Russia’s borders, the scornful dismissal of Russian warnings (across the political spectrum) against including Ukraine in the bloc, the meddling in Ukrainian politics (most notably by the egregious Nuland) — was immediately forgotten or dismissed as irrelevant.

Former Democratic Presidential nominee and Bernie Sanders endorsee, Tulsi Gabbard:

Biden’s out, Kamala is in. Don’t be fooled: policies won’t change. Just like Biden wasn’t the one calling the shots, Kamala Harris won’t be either. She is the new figurehead for the deep state and the maidservant of Hillary Clinton, queen of the cabal of warmongers. They will continue their efforts to engulf the world in war and taking away our liberty.

Gabbard, a veteran herself, also cautioned that her description of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “the queen of warmongers,” could also apply to Harris. Should Harris become the next president, it would further escalate wars across the globe and bring the world closer to nuclear war, according to Gabbard.