Especially on China and Latin America, Biden and Trump overlap quite a bit. However, the major difference lies in Iran policy: Trump supports economic war against Iran; Biden supports the nuclear deal. Trump has been more, not less, aggressive than Obama-Biden. Abby Martin joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. Please don't forget there's a donate button at the top of the webpage. So this is part two of my conversation with independent and fearless journalist Abby Martin. She's the host and co-creator, with her partner Mike Prysner, of the Empire Files, and she's also the co-creator of Media Roots Radio. And thanks for joining us again, Abby.

Abby Martin

Thanks for having me.

Paul Jay

So we're going to talk about foreign policy, Biden, Trump, Empire.

So what's your take? There's been a lot of conversation that the foreign policy traditionally of the Democrats and the Republicans, and specifically with Biden and Trump, haven't been really all that different. What's your take?

Abby Martin

Sure. We talked in the previous segment about, you know, the clear differences in domestic policy. When it comes to foreign policy, of course, it's a lot more murky, right? And in fact, there are few substantial differences between the two parties. They agree on a lot, especially when it comes to the Democrats kind of voting to support these out of control military budgets that continue to increase year after year.

I think that first, it's important to state that there are a lot more people outside of the United States than inside of the United States who are impacted by the decisions of the American president. Of course, those people can't vote in our elections. And I'm talking about the tens of millions that live subjugated by US finance capital, and also US militarism, imperialism. And this includes multiple levels of war, including information wars to delegitimize these countries democratic processes, sanctions, of course, that have increased catastrophically under Trump to the point where you look at that CEPR (Center for Economic and Policy Research) study that said tens of thousands of Venezuelans have died in the last couple of years under Trump because of his sanctions on the country.

Or you can look at, of course, just outright bombing special operations and drone strikes, and under Trump, they have increased dramatically as well. So, you know, the previous segment we were talking about kind of cutting through the con-artistry of Trump. One thing that he's been able to do is convince large swathes of his base that he's actually anti-war, maybe just randomly he'll tweet "end the endless wars," or he'll give some speech talking about how he's not liked by the military-industrial complex because they just want him to make money and he fights them because he's an independent thinker and all this, and people are like, "oh my God, Trump is anti-empire! Trump's fighting back against the MIC!" And it's like really? Because he picked the top three defense contractors to actually run the top three Pentagon policy positions. So I don't know how that plays out, but it seems like there's this, again, sect of the kind of alternative media who has not focused on actually Trump's actions, and kind of fall prey to his rhetoric, and use it to dig on the Democratic Party. And they're like, "oh my God, Trump's actually fighting you from the left on war ...