President Biden acknowledged it was “a God-awful thing to say,” but he said it anyway. “If Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interest,” the longtime senator from Delaware said in a 1994 TV interview. He was justifying why he seemed so much more engaged in the turmoil afflicting the Balkans than the troubles facing this small country in America’s backyard, which the United States and its allies had just invaded to restore democratically elected leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power after a 1991 military coup. In Biden’s view, the war in Bosnia carried geopolitical relevance that Haiti — no matter its proximity to the United States or the suffering of its people — never could.

Source: Washington Post July 09, 2021 00:56 UTC