Biden’s legacy is a world in flames
The reversion to Obama’s foreign policy and appeasement of Iran spawned an escalation of terrorism that endangers the West while killing Israelis.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Jul 22, 2024
Now that President Joe Biden has finally bent to the will of his party’s leaders and donors, the praise for his presidency is nearly universal on the left. The paeans to his personal greatness and acclaim for his time in the White House accelerated once his infirmity became clear in the June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump.
Liberal corporate media spent years covering up the president’s cognitive decline, including accusing any journalists who brought up the subject of spreading “misinformation.”
But once the lies were exposed, those who were mostly likely to know the truth about Biden—like former President Barack Obama, Vice President Kamala Harris, congressional leaders and Hollywood fundraisers such as actor George Clooney—turned on him, albeit while still improbably praising him as one of our greatest presidents. Like Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, they “came to bury” Biden, but thought to praise him first.
Trump’s iconic defiance after a failed assassination attempt, a Covid diagnosis and the closed purses of big Democratic donors were the final blows that appear to have forced Biden to drop out, thus rendering the process by which he had gained the nomination a sham. That Biden announced his withdrawal via a social-media post—and on Elon Musk’s X, which liberals have denounced for its free-speech policies, at that—rather than bothering to record a message telling the country himself, was perhaps a fittingly feeble end to this dispiriting drama.
This will now be followed by the extravagant and equally disingenuous choruses of praise for Harris, as she now likely becomes the focus of the Democrats’ last-ditch efforts to prevent a Trump victory. But before we begin the task of separating truth from partisan hyperbole with respect to the vice president, it is appropriate to take a moment to unpack the notion that the Biden presidency was as great as those slipping the knife between his shoulders have been telling us.
The Biden myths
The praise for Biden is tantamount to a eulogy, making it somehow in bad taste to criticize him. That’s just a smokescreen. He’s still very much alive, and with his vice president the person most likely to succeed him as the Democratic nominee, an honest evaluation of his record is vital.
Nor is spending a half-century in political office an indication of virtue. Like many other longtime members of the House and Senate, Biden never really held an honest job in his life; his positions as a senator and then as vice president did allow his family to peddle influence at home and abroad, making all of them wealthy.
Moreover, the notion that he is a wonderful person or a centrist who epitomizes the best aspects of public service is belied by his record of meanness and contempt for opponents. He assisted in the slandering of the likes of Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas and even the uber-moderate Mitt Romney, whom he memorably accused of being prepared to put African-Americans “back in chains.”
And that’s not even taking into account his record of plagiarism and fabulism, with his tall tales and outright lies about his own life and that of his opponents. Of course, once he became Obama’s running mate in 2008, he got a pass from a biased press corps that refused to tell the truth about him until they—and the rest of the liberal political establishment—discarded him as a liability in their quest to retain power.
But once it became imperative to push him out of the way, Democrats and false friends like Obama did lay it on thick with absurd claims about his having saved democracy and the economy. The accolades ignore his use of lawfare against political opponents; censorship of dissenters; open-border policies that led to an invasion of up to 7 million illegal immigrants and inflation that harmed working-class Americans; and the spread of the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that is linked to antisemitism throughout the government.
It’s important to remember that all of the above explained why he was already trailing Trump before the debate revealed his mental-acuity problems.
Foreign-policy disasters
They are also asserting that he restored America’s international standing. The truth, however, is that he inherited a relatively stable state of affairs abroad, which he overturned by demonstrating weakness, and is leaving behind a world in flames.
This literal and metaphorical situation was made painfully clear on Sunday, when Biden left the presidential race, just as Israel was forced to retaliate for the drone attack on Tel Aviv two days earlier by the Houthi terrorists of Yemen. Israel’s bombing of the port of Hudaydah, from which Iran is able to ship in supplies and munitions to the Houthis, was meant to send a signal to Tehran, its terrorist auxiliaries and the region as a whole that there would be a high price to pay for attacking the Jewish state and killing its citizens.
Let’s not forget that the only reason the Houthis have been able to attack international shipping in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa in the last nine months, as well as to attack Israel early Friday morning, is due to Biden’s horrible mistakes.
The mismanaging of the situation in Yemen is just one small part of a picture of American foreign-policy failure across the board since Biden took office. But it is based on a series of common misconceptions and delusional choices that are essentially a rerun of the Obama administration’s policies.
Biden’s most memorable mistake abroad was the hasty manner in which he withdrew American forces from Afghanistan. While Trump had negotiated about such a withdrawal, he never carried it out, since there was no way to do so without handing the country over to the Taliban. But Biden was so intent to claim that there were no American troops in Afghanistan on the 20th anniversary of the failed war that he ordered a precipitate retreat. This undercut the government in Kabul, which soon collapsed.
Even worse, the disgraceful rout led to the deaths of 13 Americans, and left behind many others. It also abandoned Afghan allies and billions of dollars in sophisticated U.S. military equipment for the Taliban to seize and then peddle to other Islamist terrorist groups.
That abject demonstration of weakness was the signal to rogue actors around the world to step up their provocations. It can be seen, along with Biden’s characteristic confusing and often contradictory statements, as leading Russian authoritarian leader Vladimir Putin to conclude that he could get away with the invasion of Ukraine.
While Biden did rally to Ukraine’s defense, his obsessive focus on that war came at the expense of more pressing priorities and encouraged its continuation, rather than a settlement that might guarantee Ukraine’s independence.
Appeasing Iran
More than that, at the heart of Biden’s decision to roll the clock back to Obama’s presidency was a stance toward the world that places undeserved trust in multilateral institutions like the United Nations and seeks to downgrade alliances with traditional allies in the Middle East, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia. The main thrust of this approach was a resumption of the Obama-era quest for appeasement of Iran, while treating any efforts to follow up on Trump’s historic success in brokering peace between Israel and Arab states via the Abraham Accords as a secondary issue.
Based on Obama’s misguided belief that Iran’s Islamist regime wanted a chance to “get right with the world,” the United States entered into a dangerously weak nuclear deal with Tehran in 2015. Though postponing Iran’s obtaining nuclear weapons, the deal essentially guaranteed that Islamic Republic would have a bomb by 2030. Trump withdrew from the deal and reimposed sanctions on the regime in order to force it to give up its nuclear program. But once in office, Biden lifted sanctions, periodically handed frozen Iranian assets over to the Islamist government and sought vainly to get it to agree to an even weaker pact.
The financial windfall this gave Iran helped it reinvigorate its support for international terrorism, and through its “axis of resistance,” it created a web of groups that encircled Sunni Arab nations and Israel.
With respect to the latter, Biden sought to intervene to topple the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that was elected in November 2022. The administration did so not so much because anyone in Washington truly believed efforts to rein in Israel’s out-of-control Supreme Court were anti-democratic (Democrats would actually love to hamstring the far less powerful U.S. Supreme Court), but because it wanted a government in Jerusalem that would be more pliant with respect to Iran and would make concessions to Palestinians who had no interest in peace.
This set in motion the train of events that led to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and efforts of Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah to make the Israeli communities along the northern border uninhabitable.
Blundering in Yemen
But among Biden’s other colossal blunders was his intervention in Yemen. Previous to 2021, the United States had supported Saudi Arabia’s efforts to resist the Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists in Yemen. But Biden entered office convinced that the Saudis and not the Iranians were the problem in the region, and he lifted the designation of the Houthis as a terrorist group. In 2022, he forced the Saudis to conclude a ceasefire and stop helping Yemeni forces that opposed the Houthis.
This is why the Houthis were free after Oct. 7 to aid the Hamas war on Israel by firing on international shipping in the region. Though the United States and its allies responded with minimal attacks on the Houthis, like other adversaries, they had taken Biden’s measure and understood he was unprepared to defend American interests or allies. That is the context for the Houthi drone attack on Tel Aviv, which was only the most successful of hundreds of attempts on the group’s part to kill Jews, albeit from a great distance from Israel.
In that sense, the fireballs that rose to the sky from the fuel supplies Israel set on fire were a proper coda to nearly four years of nearly uninterrupted Biden foreign-policy failure. From Ukraine to Yemen to Gaza to Israel’s northern border, there are conflicts now raging that are the direct result of his misjudgments and weakness, matched only by his failure to defend America’s own border with calamitous results for communities throughout the United States.
Democrats have helped worsen the polarization of American political culture by adopting the dangerously hyperbolic claims that Trump is Hitler and Republicans want to end democracy. They’ve come to believe that any tactics to prevent him from winning in 2024—up to and including anti-democratic measures like lawfare against political opponents—are acceptable. Along the same lines, they’re equally prepared to claim that Biden’s presidency was a raging success, even if it’s a point of view that much of the country finds baffling.
The problem here is not just the way partisans in both major parties will always spin their failures as successes. It’s that the inside-the-beltway elites and foreign-policy establishment are determined to refuse to admit when they’ve been so badly wrong on so many important issues.
They want us to ignore the glaring evidence of their catastrophes in much the same way they did about Biden’s incapacity until a few weeks ago. But the flames burning in Yemen, Gaza, Israel and Ukraine are proof that so much of the blood of innocents that has been shed in the last four years is largely the result of Joe Biden’s feckless leadership.
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