By Mark Anderson
They’re back—the infamous Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)—offering “advice” (read “marching orders”) to Joe Biden now that he’s in the Oval Office, something that the Park Avenue, N.Y. elite cabal didn’t even bother doing with President Donald Trump. The CFR, since its 1921 inception, has saturated the U.S. State Department and other key offices and agencies with its world-government acolytes. Now it is giving Biden its treasured guidance in the major areas of “ending the war on terror” and “stopping vaccine nationalism,” though there are other sundry “to-do” items on the list.
In so doing, the CFR assigned its fellows, other members, and allies to publish articles and editorials in various newspapers and journals, often without a direct mention of the writers’ CFR affiliation. This serves to make CFR ideas appear more decentralized and “organic.” All told, this input amounts to a near-total—if not absolute—reversal of the more Jacksonian foreign policy of Mr. Trump, who, notably, practically stopped the military interventionism meted out by several of his predecessors, both Republican and Democrat.
Apart from episodically lobbing some ordnance into Syria, apparently for geo-political “optics,” along with taking out a top Iranian general and providing military support to Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen—which, to be sure, is a brutal exception to the former president’s comparatively peaceful foreign policy legacy—“the Donald” bordered on being an outright non-interventionist.
That makes the CFR’s “advice” appear all the more absurd. The CFR is severely downplaying the “Trumpian triumphs” that run contrary to the post-9/11 war on terror. First he engineered an unprecedented Middle East peace deal between volatile Israel and some of its often-hostile Arab neighbors. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for that deal. And, most recently, he received Morocco’s highest award for helping improve relations between that nation and Israel.
Yet the CFR is sounding off as if Trump notched up the “war on terror,” which Biden now must unwind. Senior Fellow Elizabeth Shackelford wrote just before Jan. 20 for the American Prospect that she hopes Biden “will wind down the global war on terror,” while hoping that “Congress passes new authorizations for military action for each specific country where it wishes the United States to continue its military engagements.” That last item may have some merit, but it most likely represents a “reshuffling of the deck” for renewed interventionism.
As for “vaccine nationalism,” Biden has already caved to the CFR and re-attached the United States to the notoriously corrupt World Health Organization (WHO)—thereby overturning Trump’s decision to depart the WHO. Biden has also agreed to join the WHO’s COVAX initiative. The idea is to internationalize Covid vaccination policy and make it more “equitable” by making vaccinations more accessible, and offered more quickly, throughout the world.
However, the CFR (like the mass media) is tone-deaf about the issue, or is willfully neglecting to mention that the CDC’s own VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) database, created to receive voluntary patient and physician reports about serious vaccine side effects and deaths, had listed, by mid-January, 181 cases where recipients died allegedly after receiving “the jab.” This has also been reported by the National Vaccine Information Center. But, by Feb. 1, VAERS listed 329 suspected vaccine deaths and about 9,500 suspected vaccine injuries (as also reported by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense organization).
The bottom line is that the CFR is recklessly advising Biden to “go global” on the assumption that the vaccination agenda of Big Pharma and major governmental health agencies like the WHO and the CDC is wholly safe when, in fact, there is enough preliminary data to carefully reassess the need for mass vaccinations. Certainly, that would preclude a stepped-up global vaccination “equity” scheme.
We hope that Mr. Biden listens to more voices than just those of that Manhattan globalist gaggle that has, for far too long, held sway over U.S. foreign policy. Don’t hold your breath.
Mark Anderson is AFP’s roving editor. Email him at [email protected].
