In 2020, Joe Biden narrowly won after selling himself as a moderate, stable, seasoned veteran who would restore normalcy domestically and abroad.
Four years later, instability reigns.
Biden is no unfortunate, snakebitten victim of that chaos. He is the cause.
Just as Biden’s domestic policy of heavier regulation and bigger government have weakened our economy and punished working Americans, his persistent incompetence and recklessness have invited and fueled foreign crises that increasingly bedevil him.
Voters recognize the causal connection and have soured on him accordingly, even while Biden and his media chorus find that perplexing.
They can claim that four years of conflagration under Biden following four years of comparative calm under predecessor Donald Trump is merely some cosmic coincidence, but it’s not logically plausible.
Voters remember that before Trump, Barack Obama’s “red line” against use of Syrian chemical weapons was met with disregard by dictator Bashar al-Assad who proceeded to use them anyway. They recall that ISIS metastasized across the Middle East under Obama’s watch, after he initially dismissed them as a “junior varsity” team. They recall that Vladimir Putin responded to Obama’s embarrassing hot mic “flexibility” promise by invading Ukrainian territory. They recall how Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was forced to plead to a joint session of Congress that Obama’s accommodationism toward Iran was sowing future peril.
Obama’s weakness begat chaos.
Trump, in contrast, immediately assumed a much more muscular foreign policy approach by boldly relocating the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. The foreign policy establishment predicted chaos, but former Arab enemies gradually deepened diplomatic relations with Israel. Later, the same establishment predicted the same chaos after Trump executed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, after renouncing the Iranian nuclear accord crafted by Obama. Biden himself maintained his perfect record of misjudgment by claiming that Trump had just “tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox” that would trigger Middle East conflict. Meanwhile, whereas ISIS flourished under Obama, Trump began to snuff it out.
Americans also recall that, for all of the frivolous allegations of Russian “collusion,” Trump admonished European allies to increase defense spending, which obviously countered Putin’s interests. Those nations responded by boosting defense spending from 2017 through 2021. Trump also sanctioned the Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and in 2018 personally ordered American troops to respond to a Russian mercenary attack on our base in Syria that resulted in hundreds of Russians dead. Trump also delivered lethal weaponry to Ukraine for use against Russia, which Obama had steadfastly refused to provide.
American voters note that Russian aggression trended conspicuously mute during Trump’s four-year tenure, just as relative rapprochement characterized the Middle East during his presidency.
Enter Joe Biden.
Less than six short months into his tenure, Biden assured Americans of a smooth withdrawal from Afghanistan and that the Taliban would not return to power. It didn’t take even a full month for the Taliban to prove otherwise.
In the wake of that show of ineptitude and weakness, Russia fully invaded Ukraine just one year into Biden’s presidency. Notably, Biden had waived Trump’s Nord Stream 2 sanctions, virtually inviting aggression and then receiving an open Ukrainian rebuke for mumbling ambivalently about a “minor incursion.” The invasion followed days later. Since then, Biden has hesitated to send weaponry sufficient to defeat Russia while mouthing support, deepening the morass.
This is classic Biden incompetence.
In the Middle East, Biden openly alienated Saudi Arabia as both a candidate and president, while commencing a diplomatic shift in favor of Iran.
Whereas Trump had conduced a “maximum pressure” effort against Iran that slashed its incoming oil revenues from $53 billion in 2018 to just $12.7 billion in 2020, Biden relaxed those sanctions. During Biden’s presidency, Iran’s oil export revenues have reascended to $43 billion. Iran used those revenues to fund terrorist proxies like Hamas, and helped plan the October 7 attacks.
Since that attack, Biden has equivocated in his support for Israel, going so far as to withhold critical weaponry and intelligence in naked pursuit of electoral gain among anti-Israel voters in swing states Michigan and Minnesota.
Biden initially warned Israel’s adversaries against further aggression with the simplistic “Don’t.”
Well, they did anyway. A bunch of ragtag Houthi rebels in rickety trucks proceeded to shut down Red Sea shipping under his watch, and Iran proceeded to launch unprecedented attacks on Israel.
Collectively, these are crises of Biden’s own making. Biden and his insulated apologists may not connect those dots, but American voters have, and seem increasingly unwilling to tolerate more.
Timothy H. Lee is the Senior Vice President of legal and public affairs at The Center for Individual Freedom.
Reprinted with Permission from CFIF.org – By Timothy H. Lee
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.