President-elect Biden revealed his national security team in his on-going efforts to cobble together a professional, well-prepared assembly of competent advisors. Biden’s team will once again rejoin our allies in a show of solidarity on the world stage, and end the four-year strategy of appeasing and praising our adversaries.
James Stavridis, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander and 4-Star Navy Admiral used words to describe Biden’s national security team as confident, collegial and qualified. He said that these men and women are the most experienced in decades, an internationalist group with a hawkish edge, tempered by the desire to reach out to the world, looking for coalitions.
To those who welcome this new administration, it’s with a sense of relief that they won’t have to worry about the deconstruction of international norms that have kept many up at night. Hopefully Trump supporters would also feel more secure.
Biden says his administration’s purpose is to unite America. But saying so doesn’t make it so. It’s doubtful that anyone is singing about happy days being here again. A sober assessment of our country and our planet would have us thinking otherwise. But looking back on the past four years, too many of our problems and woes came from unforced errors; in other words, they were manufactured from a non-issue into a crisis.
Here is just a short list of actions that Trump took that caused himself big headaches and caused Americans’ hearts to ache with the unnecessarily hurtful things he did.
-Separated migrant children from their parents
-Sprayed peaceful protesters with tear gas for a photo op
-Cut a pandemic early warning system in 2019
-Oversaw longest government shutdown in U.S. history
-Referred to some countries as sh—holes.
-Encouraged police to be rough with people they arrest
-Attacked former prisoner of war John McCain as being a loser for being captured
-Removed protections from 59,000 Haitians, forcing them to return to disaster-ridden Haiti
-Got himself impeached for threatening to withhold aid to Ukraine unless they investigated the Bidens.
This new administration will attempt to lower the temperature on feelings of heated outrage over others’ points of view. Even if they can only tamp it down a little, at least they won’t be further fanning the flames of divisiveness. Biden said that we should be fighting a virus, not each other.
Less drama from Washington – a soothing balm to a feverish nation.
Jill Chapin, Santa Monica
