With Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, subject to increasing Russian bombardment, and Moscow subject to new drone attacks, the hostility now reflects direct provocation of central government and leadership.  Whether you rightly find Russia’s aggression in Ukraine unacceptable, or like University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer, you also see, pragmatically, a long trail of U.S. and EU provocation and mismanagement in foreign affairs, one thing is fairly obvious: the United States is not interested in pursuing, or trying to broker, a peace deal.  Current U.S. foreign policy toward Russia is following a narrow path of strict escalation toward superpower confrontation.  Russia is not going to lead a peace effort, nor will Ukraine.

Former Undersecretary of State and arms negotiator Eugene V. Rostow, in his Toward Managed Peace, correctly argued that the United States cannot avoid its leadership role in global affairs, and moreover, its highest national security interest involves deploying its government system as a mechanism of peace.  Instead, the Biden administration is following precisely the opposite strategy, and has through its own incompetence and incapacity, also left leadership open to other countries. It is a strategy that creates economic and industrial disruption, perhaps even deliberate destruction, including of American government itself.

Why would this be?

I suggest that there are six reasons that directly serve the “Biden” administration by this foreign policy of war escalation:

1. The current administration’s domestic social policies are so radical that they cannot be implemented (or disclosed) within a normal spectrum of law and government.  Its plans require extra-constitutional authority.  War provides that authority.
2. A formalized war footing with Russia is presumed an essential path to oil and gas supply disruption, both physical (exploration, production, and refinement, including Arctic claims) and price stability disruption, which presumably will accelerate green energy switching behavior (problem: there is nothing to switch to). In reality, war merely enriches oil and gas, and further consolidates its central energy role.
3. Financial flows, commercial/central banking, and U.S. dollar stability would all be subject to war-time emergency manipulation. The U.S. is not able to absorb over $30 Trillion in national debt obligations under normal economic arrangements and methods. 
4. War is also an ideal platform to fully effect political persecution, and the marginalization or complete removal of competitive political parties.  The U.S. is already well on its way to a single-party consolidation. A civil or world war “seals the deal” just as it did in wartime Germany, the Soviet Union, North Korea, and eventually in Cuba and China.  The Biden administration has numerous “blueprints” it can follow from other countries, as the administration is saturated with inexperienced ideologues who both naively admire “revolutionaries” and at the same time are intellectually incapable of imagining and carrying out actual economic development policy.
5. A fifth reason involves traditional Pentagon motivations in defense spending.  Most of the public (and even political class) doesn’t acknowledge that the GWOT (Global War on Terror) is still fully operational, but more, its legal infrastructure, formed after 2001 through the Patriot Act, among other legislation and executive orders (hundreds that remain undisclosed or unexamined) can be activated at-will under emergency pretext.  Moreover, the GWOT has been turned inward toward America’s own citizens.  All that was required was a structured program of terror accusations against a manufactured target: Trump provided that, and now Russia does in a war context.
6. Finally, war unleashes massive disruptions in population, demographics and health risk.  The current administration and its supporters, above all else, are ideologues devoted to population control because it is the “root cause” of global warming.  And global warming is the fundamental organizing policy of the Left, even though it has nothing to do with climate, but rather with absolute social control.

An unsettling aspect of the Biden administration’s foreign policy is that, while it seeks war, it isn’t prepared to fight one (especially with a putative civilian commander qualified for 25th Amendment removal): it invites a confrontation with Russia (and to some extent with China) not to win, but in an unprecedented perversion of U.S. national security interests, to lose: it has declared America, Americanism, and a majority of Americans, as its enemy.  It will use Russia as a tool for its own domestic “transformation” which means the attempted dismantling of U.S. constitutional law. The White House wants war, but an effective internal civil war that results in a reconstructed government, legal system, and political order.  Biden was installed not just as an Obama proxy, but as a signal of weakness.  To appreciate the risk, imagine Israel’s security interests headed by such a figure, rather than a Netanyahu.

Matthew G. Andersson is a law and policy author, former executive advisor in the Aerospace and Defense practice of Booz Allen Hamilton, and worked in Russia and the Former Soviet Union. He studied with White House National Security Advisor W.W. Rostow at the Johnson School of Public Affairs.

Image: Ministry of Defense of Ukraine