Biden’s Lame Duck Presidency and Deep State Ascendancy

Top commander of the US Armed Forces Gen. Charles Q. Brown in his swashbuckling Air Force uniform appeared before Ukraine Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Joe Wilson at a hearing in April. In response to a polite query, Gen. Brown majestically replied: “As we bring on the F-16s, it’s not only the airplanes, but the training of the pilots, the training of the maintainers — but also making sure we have the weapons to go with it. That is the dialogue we’re having, not only to get the airplanes but to get them to full capability.”

On August 15, The Politico Magazine reported the Biden admin was “open to sending long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine.” The Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) has a range of over 230 miles and would become the longest-range weapon the US sends Ukraine, “if it goes ahead with the delivery,” which is a needless caveat as it is already a done deal.

On August 12, The New York Times revealed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in a recent phone call with Israeli counterpart Yoav Gallant, had ordered the deployment of a nuclear submarine to the Middle East, following the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31 and consequent imminent threat of Iranian reprisal attack against Israel.

Early this month, on August 2, Lloyd Austin, in his capacity as the Secretary of Defense and the liaison between civilian administration and the US military brass, revoked plea deals agreed to the week before with the men accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two accomplices, who are held at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The prosecutor had earlier agreed to plea deals that the men would plead guilty in exchange for receiving a life sentence rather than the death penalty. In addition, Austin relieved Susan Escallier, who oversees the Pentagon's Guantanamo war court, of her authority to enter into pre-trial agreements in the case and took on the responsibility himself. "Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pre-trial agreements," Austin wrote in a tersely worded memo.

Joe Biden’s ignominious fall from grace was unanticipated and abrupt. It all happened in early June after Russian President Putin made a surprise announcement that a Russian naval fleet would make a port call to Cuba amidst Ukraine’s proxy war as a show of force.

Putin’s hawkish maneuver precipitated a rift between the Biden admin and the deep state. The Pentagon’s military brass favored a forceful response to Russia’s provocation but Biden got cold feet because brinkmanship could have led to nuclear standoff with Russia in the election year.

Consequently, the Biden presidency has been reduced to the “lame duck” status and the rogue super power is being ruled directly by the deep state, at least in the domain of formulation of national security and defense policies, until the inauguration of the next president, as is evident from the foregoing instances of security establishment’s encroachment on the civilian administration’s domain.

Two weeks following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, a visibly anxious and panicked Biden tweeted on March 11, 2022: “I want to be clear: We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO. But we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.”

The string of rambling tweets betrayed the apprehensive mental state of a raving executive who was under tremendous pressure from “certain quarters” to significantly escalate the conflict with the arch-foe and wanted to console himself and the listeners that by not committing American ground and air forces to Ukraine, specifically for enforcing the no-fly zone, he was making the right decision.

Despite Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal, several Pentagon officials, full of hubris and evidently suffering from misplaced superiority complex, have recently made their misconceived institutional logic public that they no longer regard Russia as an equal military power, instead they contemptuously dubbed it “a second-rate regional power,” and if given an opportunity, they wouldn’t hesitate to take Russia head-on, even if the risk is as perilous as the conflict spiraling into a catastrophic nuclear war.

The Intercept reported in March 2022 that despite staging a massive military buildup along Russia’s border with Ukraine for nearly a year, “Russian President Vladimir Putin did not make a final decision to invade until just before he launched the attack on February 24,” senior current and former US intelligence officials told the Intercept. “It wasn’t until February that the agency and the rest of the US intelligence community became convinced that Putin would invade,” the senior official added.

In April 2021, US intelligence first detected that “the Russian military was beginning to move large numbers of troops and equipment to the Ukrainian border.” Most of the Russian soldiers deployed to the border at that time were later “moved back to their bases,” but US intelligence determined that “some of the troops and materiel remained near the border.”

In June 2021, against the backdrop of rising tensions over Ukraine, Biden and Putin met at a summit in Geneva. The summer troop withdrawal brought a brief period of calm, but “the crisis began to build again in October and November,” when US intelligence watched as Russia once again “moved large numbers of troops back to its border with Ukraine.”

Extending the hand of friendship, Russia significantly drawdown its forces along the western border before the summit in June 2021. Instead of returning the favor, however, the conceited leadership of supposedly world’s sole surviving super power turned down the hand of friendship and haughtily refused to concede reasonable security guarantees demanded by Russia at the summit that would certainly have averted the likelihood of the war.

Days before Biden’s inauguration as president on January 20, 2021, instigating Russian dissident and Putin’s deceased foe Alexei Navalny to return to Russia on January 17 from his sojourn in Germany for no apparent political advantage after being allegedly poisoned in August 2020 was clearly the job of the US deep state that plotted to sabotage newly inaugurated Biden admin’s relations with Russia and forestall the likelihood of rapprochement between the arch-rivals.

As previously mentioned that as a goodwill gesture before the Biden-Putin summit at Geneva in June 2021, Russia significantly drawdown its troop build-up along Ukraine’s border. Ironically, reciprocating “the courtesy,” however, the ambience and body language of the summit, clearly choreographed by the US national security establishment, were kept as austere and unfriendly as possible.

No joint press conferences were held, as is customary after such momentous summits. The organizers of the farcical show strictly ordered “no breaking the bread” or refreshments during hours-long strenuous discussions. All blame games and tough talk. Even Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was held in a more cordial atmosphere than the bitter encounter between the leaders of the two global powers.

The civilian administrations of the United States, whether Republican or Democratic, are always inclined to have cordial relations with other major powers, including Russia and China, and prefer instead to focus on national economy to provide much-needed financial relief to the electorate. But the mindset and institutional logic of the US deep state has been frozen in the Cold War era, and it perceives any threat to its global military domination agenda with utmost suspicion and hostility.