by Richard Schulman
Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden’s foreign policy and national security policy will be a continuation of that of his former boss, President Obama, combined with a strong tilt to the preferences of Bernie Sanders. Biden will continue his longstanding opposition to missile defense, an opposition he shared with his boozing and womanizing mentor Edward Kennedy, as well as President Obama and Senator Sanders. A Biden administration would therefore leave the US vulnerable to destruction or forced capitulation to Russia, China, or one of its proxies during our lifetime or that of our children.
It’s questionable whether the US would even have a credible counter-force (retaliatory threat), because both Biden and Sanders want to cut defense spending — just as Obama did — despite the fact that the US nuclear counter-force capability has deteriorated over the years and is badly in need of renewal.
Paris Climate Accord
These foreign threats pale in significance, Biden and Sanders believe, in comparison with the threat to the planet of CO2, the by-product of human breath and life-giving source of plant existence.
Biden is committed to not only rejoining the Paris Climate Accord to suppress fossil-fuel combustion. He also wants to lock in enforceable commitments such as limiting fossil fuel use by global shipping and aviation. Although both industries are already at death’s door as a result of the collapse of shipping and travel in the wake of the Wuhan virus epidemic, Biden’s plan would help finish the job.
The Paris Climate Accord is based on contested science and a huge price tag to achieve minimal results. Unsurprisingly its Democratic supporters have never had the votes or courage to submit the Accord to the Senate for a treaty vote as required by the Constitution.
Iran deal
Biden is also committed to reinstating former President Obama’s Iran deal (the JCPOA), the released funds from which Iran used to fund the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran’s proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Latin America. The JCPOA, like the Paris Climate Accord, was also never submitted to the Senate as a treaty.
As Israel has demonstrated, Iran continued its nuclear weapon and missile programs covertly during the JCPOA, violating the agreement’s terms. Iran’s only change in behavior since the US left the agreement is that it is now openly violating the treaty’s terms rather than covertly.
Like Sanders, Biden strongly favors restrictions on aid to Israel, the US’s closest ally in the Mideast and Iran’s frequently stated target for annihilation.
Mum’s the word on China
Biden wants to reduce nuclear weapons and negotiate a new START, according to his official campaign web site until its recent purge of foreign policy and national security information. That would threaten to lock in present Russian superiority in some of these weapons. Worse, the Biden web site made no mention of bringing China into the negotiations, without which any START would be a strategic disaster, given that China is now an even more threatening strategic rival than Russia and has an unknown quantity of nuclear weapons aimed at the US.
Indeed, the Biden website had no mention of China as a hostile power, just a complaint about its burning too much coal.
Biden’s campaign statements on China
Biden’s amiable attitude toward the Chinese Communist dictatorship should cause concern. In an op ed in The Hill, Katie Pavlich observes that
In the past, Biden has said China isn’t a threat and has downplayed their ongoing campaigns to undermine the U.S. geopolitically, militarily and economically.
“China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,” Biden said during an Iowa campaign stop last summer “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.”
“Joe Biden’s China Problem,” https://thehill.com/opinion/katie-pavlich/495156-pavlich-joe-bidens-china-problem
Biden traveled to China in 2013 with his son Hunter Biden. As with the unqualified Hunter using his father’s foreign policy portfolio to obtain a board seat on the scandal-tainted Ukrainian energy company Burisma, Hunter also obtained the quick granting of a business license from China to form a private equity fund there. The elder Biden’s indifference to these conflicts of interest in two countries where the US has major national security concerns is jaw-dropping.
Obama administration foreign policy
Vice-presidents are expected to support the foreign policy of their boss, the president. That said, Biden has made no effort since 2016 to put distance between himself and President Obama’s 2009-2016 foreign policy. That policy was arguably the most disastrous in US history. We provide a partial summary below.
China
The Obama-Biden administration did nothing as China built artificial islands in the South China Sea, fortified them, and then declared its sovereignty over this strategic body of international water. This was the greatest strategic setback to the US of the 21st century. It placed all of Southeast Asia at China’s mercy and repudiated centuries of international maritime law, including rights of navigation on the high seas that the US has been fighting for since its 1776 founding.
Russia
- Obama withdrew US missile defenses from Eastern Europe and promised Putin via his number two man, Medvedev — secretly, he thought, not realizing a microphone had been left open — that after he was re-elected he would be able to suppress the US missile defenses that Russia disliked.
- After Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine and began waging ill-disguised proxy war in eastern Ukraine against Ukraine’s pro-western government, Obama refused to send weapons to Ukraine — despite the fact that by a 1994 treaty the US had guaranteed Ukraine’s independence in return for it giving up its nuclear weapons.
- Obama gratuitously invited Russia back into the Mideast on the pretext of helping the US disarm Syria of poison gasses. Russia did nothing about the poison gasses but did avail itself of the opportunity of becoming the key power in Syria and ally of Assad and the Iranian mullahs.
- Obama turned Russia into an oil great power by thwarting the growth of the US shale oil industry and hindering US offshore and Alaskan oil production.
Islamic world
In Iraq, contrary to US military advice and with an eye on the 2012 elections rather than military strategy in the US interest, Obama failed to seriously negotiate a new US status-of-forces agreement with the Iraqi government and announced a fixed date for US withdrawal from the country. The rise of ISIS was the direct result of the Obama administration’s precipitous, pre-announced abandonment. Obama then allowed no more than token air attacks on the ISIS forces. That ineffectual support gave Iran a green light to enter Iraq and form the Iranian-controlled militia that have poisoned Iraqi politics to this day.
Syria
In Syria, after Assad gassed an urban population that opposed him, Obama declared a “red line” that Assad mustn’t cross by repeating such gassing, or face reprisals from the US. When Assad gassed once again, Obama did nothing. At that point, US foreign policy and defense credibility collapsed in Turkey and the Mideast. The leaders of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran also took note.
Turkey
Obama further alienated NATO ally Turkey by allying with and arming a Kurdish group in Syria that is an extension of an organization in Turkey that is regarded as an existential threat by Turkey’s government. The group is Turkey is also classified as a terrorist organization by the US State Department.
Libya
“Leading from behind,” Obama helped overthrow Muammur Khadaffi, who had actually become a de facto US ally by giving up his nuclear weapons program after Saddam Hussein was overthrown in Iraq. US support of Qaddafi’s enemies led to a civil war in Libya that is still ravaging that nation. It also led to the assassination in Benghazi of the American ambassador, whom the Obama administration refused adequate protection for and then, after the ambassador’s murder, sent a top official onto the Sunday talk shows to lie about what had happened.
North Korea’s despot, seeing what happened in Libya and Ukraine to rulers and countries that gave up their nuclear weapons — especially in return for worthless expectations of protection from the US — determined never to give up North Korea’s.
Iraq and Afghanistan
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama
“eased out” Iraq’s elected Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in hopes of finding a less sectarian, more inclusive substitute. At the same time, we worked against Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai, whom we had previously chosen. Our officials covered each maneuver with talk of democracy. Each produced puppets more pliable but, so far at least, hardly more functional. Each move lowered respect for America.
Angelo Codevilla, “While the Storm Clouds Gather,” https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/while-the-storm-clouds-gather/
Egypt
The Obama administration uncritically hailed the Arab spring and deserted its long time Egyptian ally Hosni Mubarak. The administration’s naivete was rewarded, as Israelis had warned the US, by the country’s takeover by the highly anti-US and anti-Israel Muslim Brotherhood.
Cuba and elsewhere south of the border
Continuing its policy of friendship to enemies (Russia, China, Iran) and enmity to friends, such as Israel, the Obama administration ended the US boycott of Cuba with not a single worthwhile concession wrested from that bankrupt country’s desperate Communist leaders. Despite the strong US bargaining position, no attempt was made to extract Cuban intelligence agents from Venezuela or free the political prisoners in Castro’s prisons.
The administration ran guns into Mexico, resulting in the assassination of a DEA agent by one of the guns and a stonewalling by Obama’s attorney general of any serious investigation of how this operation had so badly misfired.
Equally horrifying, the administration tried to restore a dictatorship-minded Honduran president who had been constitutionally removed from office by Honduras’ Congress. Honduras was treated as a banana republic.
Robert Gates on Biden’s foreign policy “expertise”
Biden himself, a senator from a small state otherwise inconsequential in the electoral college, was specifically brought aboard as vice-president by Obama for his supposed foreign policy expertise. Robert Gates, a moderate Republican and dedicated civil servant who occupied top posts in the CIA and both the second Bush and first Obama administrations, famously wrote in his 2014 memoir Duty — and reaffirmed on t.v. recently — that the vice president, had been wrong about “nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Who will administer a Biden foreign policy?
If Biden is elected the next US president, his top political appointees will be principally drawn from the Democrats who worked in top positions in the Obama-Biden administration and ran the policy disasters described above. More of the same can therefore be reliably predicted. And because of the strength of Sanders supporters in the Democratic Party, reinforced by commitments that Biden made publicly in securing Sanders’ support, Biden will also not likely be crossing any of Senator Sanders’ foreign policy preferences.
The one positive foreign policy achievement of the Obama administration — the Trans-Pacific Partnership — is not mentioned at all on the Biden web site, a telling omission. In fact, the opportunistic candidate now opposes the TPP that he once helped craft.
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