As for the critically important statement by the town hall questioner that "Our troops are coming home," Biden claimed that there are more troops in Afghanistan now than when he and Obama left office. That appears to be incorrect, since there were 11,000 troops there in December 2016 and 8,600 U.S. troops as of September 22nd, despite the lack of confirmation from the Pentagon on further reductions that Trump had promised.
However, Biden could have simply compared the number of troops brought home by Obama and Trump, which would have been an impressive comparison. Obama reduced U.S. troop levels abroad from 483,670 in December 2008, just before he took office, to 275,850 by December 2016. If the latest figures from the Trump administration are correct, there are still over 238,000 U.S. military personnel overseas.
So Obama reduced the U.S.'s overseas military presence by 43%, while Trump has reduced it by no more than another 14%. With Trump claiming he is "bringing our troops home" in every stump speech, why on Earth is Biden not trumpeting the fact that he and Obama brought home five times more troops than Trump has? Why is Biden running from that record? Is he planning to reverse that trend if elected? Millions of American voters would like to know.
A disappointing aspect of Biden's response was his habitual readiness to take the low road, smearing China's President Xi Jinping, criticizing Trump for even trying to make peace with North Korea, and repeating an unsubstantiated story about Russia paying "bounties" to the Taliban for killing U.S. troops. A better response from Biden would have been to fault Trump for not following through on the peace initiative with North Korea and for stirring up new Cold Wars with Russia and China, when the American people want their leaders to focus on existing threats like the pandemic, our devastated economy and the climate crisis.
But perhaps the most revealing moment of the evening was Biden's Freudian slip about the imperial character of America's relations with its allies and the rest of the world:
"You know, we've always ruled - (corrects himself) we've been most effective as a world leader, in my humble opinion - not just by the exercise of our power - we're the most powerful nation in the world - but the power of our example. That's what's led the rest of the world to follow us, on almost anything."
The U.S. did indeed rule an empire in the twentieth century, albeit a neocolonial empire in an anti-colonial and post-colonial world that had to be sustained by awhole web of myths and lies. But now we are standing at a crossroads in American and world history. America's history of war, militarism and international coercion has reached its final stage in the terminal decline of an increasingly corrupt and decadent American empire. Yet most of our leaders are still hell-bent on preserving America's imperial power at any cost: endless wars, climate catastrophe, mass extinctions, and the terrifying risk of a final, apocalyptic mass-casualty war - most likely a nuclear war.
But there is another path leading away from this crossroads, one that Joe Biden should embrace, which involves redirecting our country's resources and energies away from unsustainable imperial power through a peaceful transition to a sustainable, prosperous post-imperial future.
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