Joe Biden would return to failed Obama foreign policy
by Washington Examiner, |
October 25, 2020 12:00 AM
If Joe Biden wins the presidency, he will return the United States to the failed foreign policies of his old boss, President Barack Obama.
Although President Trump's foreign policy is not perfect — consider, for example, his praise for Kim Jong Un and his reluctance to criticize Vladimir Putin — Trump has risen to the challenge on the largest foreign policy issues of the day. For example, his administration has finally engaged the full power of the U.S. in an effort to constrain and deter China's global imperialism, and China is feeling the pain. Thanks in large part to Trump's pressure on freeloading allies, Russia has been forced to stare down a dramatic increase in NATO defense expenditures. The expansion of fracking and natural gas exports has also undermined Putin's strategy of energy blackmail.
Trump has crippled ISIS, reducing its caliphate to a few villages. Iran is bankrupt, its ability to finance terror greatly reduced — and its leader now suffers from the loss of its terrorist mastermind, Qassem Soleimani. Israel has established peaceful relations with Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Sudan. The U.S. military has been rebuilt after years of neglect under the Obama administration and is more able to deter and defeat our enemies.
All of these successes would be at risk under a Biden administration. As the Washington Post observed this week, Biden has surrounded himself "with national security veterans of the Obama White House and State Department who are likely to have prominent roles in a Biden administration."
This is not good news. These are the same individuals who allowed ISIS to take over huge territory in the Middle East. They also dragged America into the Iran deal, which granted Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards more than $100 billion and, absurdly, a month's notice before any nuclear inspection. If Iran had fully complied with the deal, it would have given the country the ability to become a much more potent conventional threat and develop ballistic missiles. This would have kept Iran on track to obtain nuclear weapons in the long term. In return, Obama lost the confidence of Israel and the Sunni Arab nations, even as Iran continued its massive investment in exported terrorism from Baghdad to Beirut to Paris.
It was promised by Ben Rhodes and so many discredited former Obama advisers that Trump's Iran policy would provoke a cataclysmic war with Iran. They were, of course, wrong.
Obama entered office vowing to create "daylight" between the U.S. and Israel, the thesis being that reflexive U.S. support for the Jewish state had earned distrust from Arab states and made it harder to broker peace. What that translated into was two terms of belligerence against our staunch ally, punctuated with acquiescence to a United Nations condemnation of Jewish settlements. Obama repeatedly treated Israel and such settlements, not actually a huge issue in the grand scheme of things, as the world's greatest threat to peace. In reality, the administration managed to earn distrust of all sides and made peace further apart. Only when the Trump administration came in and offered unwavering support for Israel, combined with toughness on Iran, did he earn the trust necessary to help forge formal ties between Israel and other Arab nations. Israel also now has more informal ties with many others.
Biden's foreign policy, in contrast, is likely to fuel the risk of a great war in the Middle East.
As a prospective President Biden rushes to give Iran a lifeline to spread mayhem and continue its "satellite" (ahem, ballistic missile) program, he might also find that nations like Saudi Arabia start unveiling their own nuclear programs. On this point, we recognize the fallacy that Obama-Biden was the watchword for standing with allies. Ask those Middle Eastern allies if they believe that. Or ask the French, who were disgusted when Obama, at the last minute, canceled planned airstrikes on Bashar Assad in 2013. French fighter pilots were on the deck, ready to go. Then, they were abandoned.
There isn't much cause for aspirational optimism on other issues.
Biden's foreign policy team comprises the same individuals who, through their support for only the most timid displays of U.S. military power, tolerated China's seizure of the near entirety of the South China Sea. They also accepted China's industrial intellectual property theft with barely a blink. They acquiesced to Putin's seizure of Crimea and his downing of the MH-17 passenger airliner over eastern Ukraine. Oh, and they did nothing about assaults, some not reported but exceptionally serious, on U.S. officials in Russia and dealt with Russia's election interference only by warning of undefined consequences. Unsurprisingly, the former KGB colonel in the Kremlin did not take these warnings very seriously.
On the subject of flight MH-17, the Obama administration's weakness was particularly appalling. Obama refused to make the threats, even including military action, required to get access to the crash site. The Obama administration thus allowed our Dutch and Australian allies to watch as their citizens' bodies literally rotted on the ground for days as the Russian GRU intelligence service sought to clean the crash site of incriminating material.
Biden seems set to give our European allies a return to the good old days where America's defense of Europe was bought and paid for entirely by American taxpayers. If Biden wins, forget nations such as Belgium, Germany, and Italy keeping their NATO promises on military spending. Also, forget about Germany blocking Russia's Nord Stream II, another tool of Russia's energy blackmail strategy in Europe.
The Democratic Party has little appetite for the short-term economic pain and military risks that come with countering China, so we should also expect Biden to give Xi Jinping some much-needed breathing space. That greatest of threats to the post-war American order Biden claims to cherish so will rise on the back of his timidity. Instead, we expect Biden's quiet concessions to Beijing in return for Xi's laughably fake offer to reach carbon neutrality by 2060.
In sum, a Biden victory would bring back a foreign policy that failed miserably.
EM -> { Trump for 2020 }
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