RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/joe-biden-foreign-policy-amateur/

Since Joe Biden was elected in part as a salve for Donald Trump’s perceived foreign policy blunders, it seems reasonable nine months in to go searching for the Biden Doctrine, to assess his initial foreign policy moves, to see what paths he has sketched out for the next three years.

…is that a tumbleweed?

Well, OK, there was Afghanistan, Biden’s most significant foreign policy action. Biden won election in November and took office in January. There was ample time for replanning and renegotiating anything that had been left behind by Trump, especially since Biden and his team had muddled in Afghanistan during the Obama era and knew well the mess they’d helped create.

The rush for the last plane out was a fully expected unexpected event. Yet the Biden administration did not quietly start the evacuation in February with high-value personnel, nor did it negotiate ahead of time the third country landing rights it knew would be needed. Mistakes made in Vietnam evacuating locals who worked with us were clear, yet Biden did not kick start processing SIV visas until literally the last flights were scheduled out of Afghanistan. The entire evacuation appeared as an unplanned free fall, just ‘land some planes and see if that works’.

Biden placed the fate of the evacuation, all those lives, in the hands of the Taliban, depending on them to uphold agreements, provide security, vet Americans en route to the airport, and generally play nice to save face as the door hit us in the ass on the way out. While the National Security Council spokeswoman called the Taliban ‘businesslike and professional’, Biden played like a rube. Even assuming good intentions (!), the Taliban are loosely organized, with plenty of local warlords and Isis spinoffs to ensure things can go wrong — like the terror bombing that killed 13 Americans and basically ended the evacuation.

Biden’s follow-up? Lie about the success of a revenge drone strike to make sure America’s final official act was to kill civilians. That capped the most amateurish foreign policy execution seen in a long time. Mistakes? How about assuming your enemies share your goals, negotiating after you have lost and hold no cards, failing to plan for anticipated events and then blaming your predecessor? For a foreign diplomat sitting in London, Tokyo, Beijing or Paris, the question had to have been ‘who if anyone is in charge in Washington?’

Biden’s other foreign policy gesture, the recent submarine agreement with Australia which alienated the French, raises the same question.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/09/22/how_russiagate_became_a_story_of_old_friends_indeed_795476.html

The indictment of Washington attorney Michael Sussman — accused of lying to the FBI in order to smear Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign — reveals the ace up the sleeve of high-powered Democrats. It’s a card they played time and again to advance the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory: friends in high places.

They used friends in law enforcement to launch secret investigations; they used friends in the federal government to broaden those investigations; and they used friends in the media to spread the word about Trump and his organization being under investigation.

Michael Sussmann: Securing a meeting with the FBI’s top lawyer can’t have been easy, but for him it was.

CSPAN

James Baker of the FBI: Sussmann came to him “based on a preexisting relationship.”

RCP

The Russia fiasco metastasized in large part because those involved in advancing the false allegations had important connections. They used friendships with powerful federal officials to encourage investigations against team Trump. Those targeted by Sussmann and others were unabashed outsiders, and as such lacked the sort of connections the insiders exploited so adroitly.

Sussmann was a partner at the Washington law firm Perkins Coie in 2016, which represented the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. But, according to the indictment handed down by Special Counsel John Durham last week, when he met with the FBI’s general counsel, James Baker, to allege that Trump was in cahoots with the Russians, Sussmann claimed he was representing another client. The indictment alleges this was false.

Securing a meeting with the FBI’s top lawyer can’t have been easy. But for Sussmann it was.

President Joe Biden’s address to the United Nations on Tuesday drew criticism from Republicans for failing to adequately address adversaries, including Russia and China. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) slammed Biden for failing to identify China as an enemy, and warned that the world sees the commander-in-chief as laughable.

“I think a lot of the world sees Joe Biden and just laughs at the statements he made yesterday. You just mentioned or played a clip there, he said we don’t seek a new Cold War. Well, of course we don’t seek a new Cold War. We would rather have peace with all nations. But when China is waging a Cold War against the United States, we don’t have a choice whether we’re in it or not. We only have a choice to win or to lose. But beyond that, he didn’t even mention China’s name,” Cotton said during an appearance on Fox News on Wednesday. “It’s like he was scared to mention China’s name. Now, I know the White House is doing damage control today, saying that was by design. Let me give you a contrast. In 2014, after Russia invaded Crimea, Barack Obama, who’s no one’s idea of a chest-beating American nationalist, used Russia’s name more than 10 times in his United Nations speech. So I think Xi Jinping and China’s communist leaders in Beijing are laughing today at Joe Biden. And that’s a dangerous thing for China not to take the American president seriously.”

Rather than confronting adversaries, Biden spent much of his speech addressing climate change.