Biden’s Follies Abroad His European trip adds to his long record of foreign policy failure. by George Neumayr
https://spectator.org/biden-europe-trip-foreign-policy/
As Joe Biden stumbled on the world stage, spouting utter nonsense, a remark of Robert Gates, the former defense secretary under Obama, came to mind: “I think he [Biden] has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Biden’s losing streak continues as president. If anything, his judgment is getting worse. To American troops stationed in the United Kingdom, he babbled about “global warming” as the greatest threat facing the United States. “This is not a joke,” he told the troops. But it is. Indeed, much of his trip seemed like a joke. His “rallying of democracies abroad” consisted of encouraging them to adopt his flaky ideas.
Biden went abroad not to vindicate America’s national interest but to promote an empty and deluded internationalism. Out of his talks with G7 leaders came a “build back better world” partnership, which will “demonstrate our shared values.” Those, of course, include spreading abortion and transgenderism under the guise of “gender equity and equality.”
It is hard to see how anything Biden discussed with these leaders could possibly strengthen democracies, let alone serve the interests of the United States. Capturing the frivolous character of the discussions, Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, spoke of the importance of a “gender-neutral” post-pandemic world.
Biden should save his lectures on democracy for his own side, which now celebrates suppressions of free speech and the persecution of dissidents.
It is comic that global leaders who indulge in these nihilistic fads would set themselves up as great experts on what constitutes a civilized democracy. Far from safeguarding democracy, they are destroying its moral and religious underpinnings, abandoning the Judeo-Christian culture from which Europe and America came in favor of a relativistic one that holds nothing sacred save the cult of climate change, socialism, and sexual revolution.
Biden says that Western democracies are in a “contest with autocrats.” This ignores that the liberals in those democracies are increasingly autocratic themselves. They, too, prefer a one-party state and endeavor to eliminate their political opponents undemocratically. Biden should save his lectures on democracy for his own side, which now celebrates suppressions of free speech and the persecution of dissidents.
In their hysterical descriptions of political opponents as “domestic enemies,” the Democrats sound like the very dictators they decry. What drives the Democrats these days is not a defense of democracy but a fear of its robust exercise. They goad the media and Silicon Valley into narrowing, not expanding, debates and propagandizing the public as much as possible.
We are told that Putin poses a threat to our “elections” and “energy” by the very Democrats who push voter fraud and cancel pipelines. We are told that Trump “cozied up to a Russian dictator” by Democrats who cozied up to the Soviet Union.
Biden is now given to complaining about the danger of Russia, but when it actually was a full-blown one during the Cold War he tended to downplay it. He criticized Ronald Reagan’s stance toward the Soviet Union. Biden was the first senator to support Jimmy Carter against Reagan and endorsed Carter’s policies of détente. After Carter lost, Biden became a loud critic of Reagan’s expansion of the defense budget and mocked Reagan’s support for a nuclear shield as “one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft.”
Biden favored a nuclear freeze and stood against all the peace-through-strength policies that Reagan used to win the Cold War. Back then Biden wasn’t fretting over the spread of Soviet “autocracy.” He opposed Reagan’s support for the Contras in Nicaragua and treated concerns about Soviet expansionism as evidence of alarmism.
During the Cold War, Democrats often expressed dismay at Reagan’s “moralistic” rhetoric toward the Russians. How dare he call them an “evil empire,” they said. One suspects that if Putin was as atheistic and socialist as his forbears, he too would enjoy the sympathies of the Democrats. They can make excuses for Fidel Castro. They can vote for Soviet stooges like Gus Hall (as John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, famously did). They can rationalize the population control policies of the Chinese communists (Biden once said that “I fully understand” them). But they can’t abide Putin. What they dislike in him is not authoritarianism but the conservative purposes to which he puts it.
The threat to Western democracy comes not from Putin but from its own internal sickness. The “democratic values” to which Biden frequently referred on his trip mean less and less as they justify the tyranny of modern liberalism. The self-proclaimed defenders of democracy are its greatest opponents, peddling a woke globalism that empowers the elite at the expense of the people. Biden’s trip was less an illustration of democracy’s strength than its dysfunction.
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