With a Biden Win, The War Party Will Be Back in Full Force

From Mises.org (Nov. 17):

If Democratic candidate Joe Biden is elected America’s forty-sixth president, what happens to the mandate to end the endless wars? It doesn’t go away, but rather falls on the Democrat-controlled House and (presumably, for now) Republican-controlled Senate.

President Donald Trump was elected partly due to his promise to rein in the US government’s military intervention abroad. He managed to not start any new wars, but he hasn’t ended any either. That may be changing in Afghanistan now. Only time will tell, but it’ll have to be be sooner rather than later.

However dissatisfying Trump’s contributions to peace and a nonintervention foreign policy have been, his policies have also enraged the War Party, which went all in for Biden.

The late antiwar writer Justin Raimondo once described the War Party this way: “that complex of social, political, and economic forces that constitute a permanent and powerful lobby on behalf of imperialism and militarism.”

With a long list of war hawks as his backers and Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, there is no hope that Biden will embrace Trump’s foreign policy agenda, let alone be a more antiwar version of President Barack Obama.

Neoconservatives Back Biden

In June 2020, nearly three hundred former Bush officials announced they were backing Biden as president by launching a PAC.

Hoping to mobilize disaffected hawkish Republicans who felt marginalized due to Trump’s win, the group added dozens of former senator Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign staffers as well as more than a hundred former staff members of deceased senator John McCain’s congressional offices.

The alliance was so effective in bringing neoconservatives together with the sole purpose of beating Trump’s foreign policy that more than seventy former US national security officials joined the effort. [read more]