Biden’s Bluster on Foreign Policy
Obama’s left-hand man takes on the presumptive GOP nominee.
On Tuesday, Joe Biden delivered a speech to the Center for New American Security, a defense establishment think tank located in Washington DC. Instead of talking about Barack Obama’s foreign policy — feckless and failed as it is — Biden took the occasion to bash the foreign policy of the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump.
Biden never mentioned Trump by name, nor did he mention Hillary Clinton by name when he offered support for her foreign policy vision. (Perhaps that’s because he’s still waiting in the wings, just in case.) The implications he made, however, were quite obvious — he loathes Trump’s foreign policy while he dreams of carrying on Obama’s abysmal record.
Biden went into attack mode, singling out several of Trump’s more drastic positions such as implementing a temporary ban on foreign Muslims entering the U.S., attacking the families of terrorist suspects and using new forms of torture for interrogation methods.
The Veep lectured, “Adopting the tactics of our enemies” would be “deeply, deeply damaging to our security.” He added, “There are 1.4 billion Muslims in the world. … Some of the rhetoric I’m hearing sounds designed to radicalize all 1.4 billion.”
Biden also remarked that American leadership stems from “our ability to lead by example and draw partners to our side. That’s what’s always made America great,” he said, “not empty bluster. Not a sense of entitlement that fundamentally disrespects our partners. Not the attitude and insecurity of a bully.”
He also went after Trump’s famous promise to build a wall on the Mexican border, arguing that doing so will bring “a return of anti-Americanism and a corrosive rift throughout our hemisphere.” Not only that, he railed, “Wielding the politics of fear and intolerance — like proposals to ban Muslims from entering the United States or slandering entire religious communities as complicit in terrorism — calls into question America’s status as the greatest democracy in the history of the world.”
For Biden to go after Trump’s foreign policy position so vehemently is quite rich. He accused Trump of having “extreme” positions on foreign policy, yet never once mentioned the extreme positions of his own boss. Biden, Obama and their administration’s political correctness on terrorism is extreme.
Redacting Mateen’s 911 call because it revealed that he was indeed a radical Islamist is extreme.
Refusing to call Islamic terrorists for who they are is extreme.
Accusing Christians, conservatives and Republicans of fueling hatred and violence toward the LGBT community is extreme.
Partnering with a country such as Iran that hates America and vows to annihilate both our own nation and Israel is extreme.
Accepting hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees — infiltrated by who knows how many Islamic State jihadis — is extreme.
Throwing support behind Clinton, who is without a doubt unfit for office, and who stated back in November that Muslims “have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism,” is extreme.
The list of extremes from Obama, Biden and Clinton could fill a book.
Recall also in 2010, Biden boasted that abandoning Iraq “could be one of the great achievements of this administration.” And on the 2012 campaign trail, he promised, “You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”
Perhaps Biden should have taken a look at his past erroneous statements on foreign policy matters before hammering away at Trump. Or maybe Biden could have explained why he, Obama, Clinton and the entire Democrat Party are practically sympathetic toward radical Islamists.
As National Review’s Andrew McCarthy explains, “Obama is not really pro-jihadist; he is anti-anti-terrorist. As long as they don’t appear to be blowing up buildings, sharia supremacists are not only shielded from scrutiny; our president welcomes the [Muslim] Brotherhood into our national-security apparatus in order to reverse what progressives see as the dangerous excesses of real counterterrorism.”
And so is everyone he has appointed to surround him. Very few in Obama’s administration will use the term “Islam” in any statement about terrorism. Why not?
Maybe it’s because Obama’s worldview includes such statements as the one he made to the UN just after the Benghazi attack in 2012: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” We imagine that the perpetrators of the several Islamist terrorist attacks on U.S. soil under his watch would heartily agree.
Instead of focusing on national security for America, Obama has tried to appease Muslims all over the world. He does nothing to go after the perpetrators of Islamic jihad, and instead blames everything but their ideology.
Despite the reality that the world is a far more dangerous place under this commander in chief, his VP still had the audacity to go after Trump simply because Trump’s foreign policy would be a 180 degree turn from the past seven and a half years. The response to Biden’s speech can be summed up in three words: What a joke.