RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Biden-Harris duo have embarked on their first foreign journeys as president and vice president of the United States. Vice President Kamala Harris’s two-day visit to Guatemala and Mexico to work on the “root causes” of the migration invasion into the United States was a complete disaster. She managed to garner sharp criticism of her performance from both sides of the aisle. President Joe Biden flew off to Europe to sign a new “Atlantic Charter” with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, attend both this year’s Group of 7 (G7) and NATO summit meetings, and meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva. Biden is demonstrating his eagerness to bury the America First priorities and be welcomed as a full-fledged member of the globalist “club.”

After Biden’s arrival in the United Kingdom and meeting with Prime Minister Johnson, the two leaders signed what they branded as “The New Atlantic Charter.”  It’s supposed to be an updating of the original Atlantic Charter signed 80 year ago by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, which looked ahead at a world freed of “the Nazi tyranny.” The new charter steers clear of naming the leading tyrannies of today that threaten international peace and security – China and Russia. It mentioned terrorists only once, again declining to name the enemy – Islamist jihadists. The new charter declared that tackling the climate crisis, protecting biodiversity, and sustaining nature would be prioritized “in all our international action.”

FDR and Winston Churchill had valid reasons in the midst of World War II for laying out their broad vision of a future world freed of Nazi tyranny. The new Atlantic Charter is a publicity stunt meant to highlight Biden’s and Johnson’s commitment to a globalist philosophy.

During the G7 summit, Biden tried to enlist Western nations and Japan to counter China’s growing global influence. Biden wants to lavish developing nations with hundreds of billions of dollars in financing as an alternative to China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative. Spending boatloads of American taxpayers’ money is Biden’s way of solving every problem.

“Officials emerging from the session said there was a clear division of opinion about how to take on China,” the New York Times reported. Europe and Japan want to foster good relations with China for economic reasons. They are not on board with Biden’s professed confrontational approach to China, which Biden has yet to back up with strong concrete actions.

Biden made headway with his initiative for the G7 to back an agreement on a global minimum tax rate of at least 15 percent on multinational companies. But that may only end up hurting American businesses if other major countries outside of the G7, especially China and Russia, do not go along. Don’t hold your breath waiting for China to join in. “The days when global decisions were dictated by a small group of countries are long gone,” a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in London said in a statement.

China and other countries not part of a 15 percent minimum tax agreement can reduce their tax levels below 15 percent and attract global corporations to base their headquarters there. This would hurt U.S.’s competitiveness with China in global markets and enable China to strengthen its control over critical supply chains – hardly a way to challenge China’s growing economic power.

The G7 leaders issued a joint communique at the conclusion of their summit meeting. The communique specified the leaders’ concerns with Chinese and Russian behaviors on a number of fronts. However, the communique lacked any sense of urgency or a consensus on concrete actions such as targeted sanctions to address the multiple threats to the free world posed by China and Russia. Indeed, these threats got lost in the shuffle of the communique’s lengthy checklist of unrelated issues. Climate change and biodiversity loss got far more attention. Only climate change and biodiversity loss posed an “existential threat to people, prosperity, security, and nature,” according to the communique. Pandemics like the one originating in China that has killed millions of people, cyberattacks that take down critical infrastructure, and nuclear proliferation? Not so much.

President Biden’s friends in the mainstream media are characterizing the G7 summit as a welcome departure from former President Donald Trump’s America First policies and as a return to international diplomacy. French President Emmanuel Macron was effusive in his praise of Biden. “It is great to have a U.S. president who’s part of the club and very willing to cooperate,” Macron said after meeting Biden. That’s the problem. Americans deserve a president who puts their interests first rather than subordinate America’s interests in order to be part of the globalist “club.”

President Biden will be meeting with President Putin in Geneva on Wednesday. Before he departed for Europe, Biden said that he would let Putin “know what I want him to know.” Putin has already seen enough of Biden as president to know that Biden is all talk and no action. For example, Biden gave away important leverage, with nothing to show in return, when he waived sanctions on the company building Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany and on its chief executive Matthias Warnig, a Putin ally. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted his reaction: “American pipeline and jobs? No. Russian pipeline and jobs? Yes. President Biden, if you’re can’t put America First, can you at least not put Russia first?”

Turning to Vice President Kamala Harris’ disastrous trip to Guatemala and Mexico, Harris continues to embarrass herself with incoherent attempts to explain why she still hasn’t visited the U.S-Mexico border. When NBC’s Lester Holt pressed Harris on why she had not yet visited the border as vice president, Harris responded that “I haven’t been to Europe…I don’t understand the point that you’re making.” In that one remark, accompanied as usual by Harris’s annoying laughter, Harris proved how entirely clueless she is.

Migrants continue to pour over the border into the United States in droves. In May 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered 180,034 persons attempting entry along the Southwest Border. This total surpassed the sky high April 2021 number.

An intelligent person who sincerely wants to understand the “root causes” for why Central Americans are risking their lives to come to the United States would want to speak with those who made the journey and are being detained on American soil. A true problem solver would want to delve into their specific reasons to see if there is a pattern and speak to CBP and other law enforcement officers to get first-hand insight into the smuggling rings who are exploiting the migrants for profit.

Harris is neither sincere nor is she an intelligent problem solver. She doesn’t want to hear over and over again why the migrants decided to risk their lives now and make the dangerous trek north. The reason was displayed on a shirt worn by one migrant: “Biden let us in.” Biden opened the door to the surge of migrants by reversing many of former President Trump’s deterrence policies. A border visit by Harris at this late point of time would be nothing more than a photo op designed to cut off more embarrassing questions from the press on this subject.

When Harris told potential migrants at a press conference with the president of Guatemala not to come to the United States or they would be turned back– angering immigration activists and other left-wingers –  she came across as a phony, tone-deaf politician.

Harris crowed about new task forces set up with Guatemala to boost anti-corruption efforts and end human trafficking during her joint press conference with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei. Harris’s public focus on corruption as a “root cause” of the migration surge turned out to be diplomatically embarrassing. Giammattei, while standing right next to Harris, pushed back on the notion that corruption was a serious problem in his country. “The social networks carry misinformation,” Giammattei said. “How many cases of corruption have I been accused [of]? Zero.”

As Daniel Greenfield pointed out in his June 11^th FrontPage article, “President Giammattei is a staunch law and order conservative, and if he appeared to be undermining Kamala, it was because she had spent months undermining him.”

During her stop-over in Mexico City, Harris met with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador as well as women entrepreneurs and labor leaders. Facing reporters, Harris again tried to squirm her way around questions on when she intended to visit the border.

“Listen, I’ve been to the border before. I will go again,” Harris told reporters. “But when I’m in Guatemala dealing with root causes, I think we should have a conversation about what’s going on in Guatemala.” That begs the question as to why, instead of Guatemala, Harris did not start her itinerary in Honduras where “more migrants have come from…relative to its population than from El Salvador or Guatemala since fiscal year (FY) 2018,” according to Reliefweb. Maybe Harris wanted to start out with an easier country first to get her sea legs. It didn’t work.

In any event, Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei knows why there has been an uptick of Guatemalans leaving their country once Biden became president. Giammattei told CBS shortly before Harris’s arrival that “[T]he message changed to, ‘We are going to reunite families and we are going to reunite children.’ The very next day the coyotes here were organizing groups of children to take them to the United States. We asked the United States government to send more of a clear message to prevent more people from leaving.”

After the face-to-face meeting between Giammattei and Harris, Giammattei reiterated his criticism of Biden’s “humanitarian” messages on immigration, which the smugglers have exploited. “So the coyotes came and took the children and the teenagers to the United States and the borders were full, not only with people from Guatemala, but with a lot of people from all over,” Giammattei told Fox News. “Which is why our proposal is that messages should be clear.” Giammattei tried to put a positive spin on Harris’s attempt while in Guatemala to deliver a toughly worded message to Guatemalans to stay home. But such words have no meaning when the Biden-Harris administration’s open border actions have sent precisely the opposite message and illegal immigrants keep pouring in.

Vice President Harris’s first foreign trip was a dismal failure, no matter how hard she might try to laugh it off. Meanwhile, her boss is busy polishing his credentials as a bona fide member of the globalist “club.”