January 15, 2025

A Delusional Foreign Policy Legacy

Joe Biden leaves Donald Trump a far more dangerous world than the one he inherited.

Years from now, when leftist historians write about the cognitively disabled Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office, they’ll note with straight faces that he was working furiously right up until the end.

As proof, they’ll argue that he brokered a Gaza ceasefire and hostage agreement between Israel and Hamas just before leaving office.

Somehow, though, they’ll forget to mention that his successor, Donald Trump, had laid the groundwork for that deal by issuing a threat on December 2 that the hostages be released by his January 20 inauguration date, lest there be “all hell to pay in the Middle East, and for those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against Humanity.”

As it turns out, even murderous cutthroats can suddenly become downright reasonable when faced with imminent annihilation. Of course Hamas is willing to deal with Joe Biden because they know he’s a pushover compared to Donald Trump.

As Fox News reports: “The possible agreement will reportedly take place in three phases, the first of which would kick off a 42-day cease-fire. During that time, 33 hostages, including children, women, female soldiers, men over the age of 50 and humanitarian cases would be released. In exchange, Hamas would receive hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, including high-profile detainees.”

According to an Israeli official, “most” of the 33 hostages snatched by Hamas during its barbaric October 7, 2023, attack on Israel are still alive.

Of course, that attack should never have happened. But after four years of relative peace in the Middle East during Trump’s presidency, Iran and its Hamas proxies saw weakness and irresolution under Biden and, with it, an opportunity to attack. The human cost — both for the 240 hostages who were taken and for the more than 1,200 men, women, and children who were butchered that day — has been excruciating.

If there’s one truism about human nature that the Biden administration has repeatedly reinforced on the world stage, it’s that weakness is provocative. We’ve seen this play out in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and China.

As for Afghanistan, honest historians — work with me here — will likely mark the Biden administration’s disastrous surrender and retreat there, just seven months into his term, as the beginning of the end of his presidency. And rightly so, as the families of 13 slain American warriors will attest.

Still, Biden’s handlers are working feverishly to put their elbows on the scale of history, as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan did Sunday. As Just the News reports: “Appearing on CNN’s ‘State of the Union,’ host Jake Tapper asked Sullivan if he feels ‘personally responsible for the failures in the withdrawal’ from Afghanistan. Sullivan dodged the question, saying ‘I think the entire team, the entire national security team has responsibility for everything in our national security, and that includes me as the national security adviser.’”

Trump, of course, also wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan — but not on a date certain, September 11, 2021, as Biden did, and not from a position of weakness, as Biden also did. Not surprisingly, Tapper failed to ask Sullivan about “the abandonment of Bagram Air Base and the billions of dollars of military hardware left behind, or the 13 Americans killed by a terrorist attack during the withdrawal.” To do so would’ve required an act of journalism.

Then there’s our incredibly expensive proxy war in Ukraine. Remember: Russia’s Vladimir Putin took back Soviet land under George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. But he never dared to invade Ukraine or any other former Soviet satellite on Donald Trump’s watch.

This isn’t a coincidence. It’s deterrence. It’s what you get when you give a guy an alpha handshake at the G20 Summit, or when you grease a bunch of his mercs in Syria.

I made this point about deterrence some 15 months ago, but it bears repeating. And Biden, despite his 50 years of foreign policy experience, simply never understood it. Or, if he did, he never had the guts to properly pursue it.

Here, we’re reminded of Winston Churchill’s devastating assessment of then-British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.”

Time and again on the world stage, Joe Biden exhibited weakness. And time and again, the result was war. Regardless of what we remember about the Biden presidency, let us never forget that.

Finally, there’s Beijing, which, more than any other geopolitical foe, has kicked sand in Biden’s face. The Communist Chinese, though, didn’t do so by violating the sovereignty of some far-off foreign land; they did so by violating American sovereignty while Biden dithered.

Among this president’s many foreign-policy failures, perhaps the worst of all was his unspoken invitation to the ChiComs to fly a spy balloon over the entirety of the United States — including some of our most strategic military sites — with absolute impunity. It was, as former Trump CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called it, “a disastrous projection of weakness.”

By now, Biden has probably forgotten all these abject foreign-policy failures. This would explain the laughable comment he made on Monday: “My administration is leaving the next administration with a very strong hand to play.”

Nonsense. On his way out the door, Joe Biden has dealt Donald Trump a two-seven, off-suited. Somehow, though, we expect Trump will find a way to win with it.

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