A New Year’s Letter to President Biden

Dear Joe,

I would wish you a Happy New Year; but it seems trite and banal, given all the challenges and troubles you and our country face in 2024—some inherited from previous administrations, others of your own making.

Americans are 10 times more likely to be shot to death than people in other wealthy countries, with homicides, suicides, and mass shootings on the increase. For the past four years, mass murders have skyrocketed into the 600s per year, breaking all past records. Since 2020 more children and teens are killed by firearms than any other cause.

Don’t these sound like war statistics?

Yes, you have established the first White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. But it is rare to find anyone in your administration making the connection between our country’s record-breaking gun violence at home and our country’s record-breaking military weapons sales across the world, to democracies and autocracies alike, having grown dramatically over the past five years. To restate, isn’t it possible that the U.S. global culture of weapons and militarism, with nearly 100 military bases ringing the world, and our long and persistent history of war (nearly 40 in your and my lifetime) rebounds back to infect our violent culture here at home?

You are generous with weapons, but dismissive of dialogue where it is most needed.

The U.S. pledged $17.5 million to a loss and damage fund for poor countries vulnerable to extreme climate damage (for which the U.S. is more responsible than any other country) at the 2023 U.N. climate conference while doling out over $100 billion in weapons and military aid in the same year to feed and fuel wars in Gaza and Ukraine, wars that destroy and contaminate, likely irreparably, the homeland and ecosystems of those peoples who survive these wars and genocide in the case of Gaza. Crumbs for climate crisis and ruined ecosystems fall from the master’s table, while feasts of weapons abound.

Our habit of war “has yielded a host of perverse results here at home,” writes war veteran and noted historian of American military history, Andrew Bacevich. Neither have our wars brought about “peace [or democracy] by even the loosest definition of the word… the opposite in most case[s].” His wise counsel: Discard militarism in favor of “prudence and pragmatism.”

You often state proudly that we are the strongest military in the world, as if it is a crown of excellence, when in fact it is a crown of thorns on our country, which hangs on a cross of iron. As former president Dwight Eisenhower memorably said in 1953: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

What felonious theft our military budget is from the 140 million poor and low-income American people, 40% of U.S. citizens, for whom the crucial Poor People’s Campaign advocates. Forty-four million Americans “struggled with hunger” in 2022, according to USDA. Diseases of despair are rampant. Our life expectancy—a critical marker of people’s overall health—is lower than all comparable wealthy countries and many other countries including China and Cuba. Recall Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s warning: “If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell.”

I do wish that that you had read the other Catholic president John F Kennedy’s 1963 peace speech at American University before you met recently in San Francisco with Xi Jinping, president of the People’s Republic of China. At the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the Cuban Missile crisis, Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev opened a line of communication and held many secret talks, despite monumental political differences, for the sake of moving away from imminent nuclear war. In his 1963 address at American University, Kennedy, after stating his abhorrence of communism, praised Russia’s key role in saving Europe from Nazism while losing 20 million citizens, and he foregrounded the two countries’ shared humanity: “If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

In many diplomatic private talks and communications, also involving Pope John XXIII, Kennedy and Khrushchev laid the groundwork for ending above ground nuclear weapons testing with the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons and forging a more peaceful country-to-country relationship. Within six-and-a-half months President Kennedy was assassinated, with the CIA strongly implicated.

Xi’s remarks to a gathering of business leaders, following your more private meeting with him last November, manifests a kinship with JFK’s speech. He displayed respect for our country’s accomplishments (even if for self-serving reasons) and advocated the two countries accept political diversity in a multipolar world. Joe, if you had listened more deeply, you may have given a wiser response to a reporter’s question than your dismissive, “Yes, I think Xi is a dictator” —an off-the cuff remark that conveys little wisdom or will to work together to rescue the world from war and climate crisis and to live in a multipolar, diverse world. You are generous with weapons, but dismissive of dialogue where it is most needed.

My wish for you in 2024 is to imbibe this wisdom and act on it: What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the core of the Torah, the New Testament, the Quran, and other religious traditions. Make it your own, end the U.S. addiction to war, and save your country’s soul and your own.