Dan McLaughlin: Biden’s long rap sheet of foreign policy disasters

Three days after Hamas terrorists opened fire on Israel, and an hour and a half after he’d been expected to address the nation, President Biden emerged on Tuesday. Certainly, he mouthed the right words.

That America stands with Israel. That he condemns anti-Semitism and the ‘pure, unadulterated evil’ of Hamas – the butchered parents, the beheaded babies. And that he has ordered Congress to consider ‘urgent action’ and financial support for our beleaguered ally in the Middle East. But still, there are so many questions. Not least: Why did Hamas feel bold enough to invade Israeli territory with such unashamed brutality in the first place? And why was Israel – and seemingly all of the Western world – caught napping?

Of course, every life lost is the fault of the Hamas savages – along with their backers, including Iran and Russia. Hamas chose the time – the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah and the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War – as well as the targets, and the sickening methods of murder, sexual assault, torture, and terror used against women, children, the elderly, and defenseless civilians at a music festival. Hamas has also given Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu no choice but to fight back.

But – as the most powerful nation on Earth, the self-appointed Peacekeeper-in- Chief – we cannot shy away from our own role in all this, too. Here’s a hard truth: If you want to understand why the past two years have seen Ukraine and now Israel fighting for their very survival – with Taiwan wondering if it’s next – you must look to Joe Biden. Who’s afraid of old Joe? Our 80-year-old President can barely walk across a stage or complete a sentence, let alone project strength on the global stage.

He’s invisible before 10 am, after 4 pm, or on weekends. And don’t dare ask him to get up from his beach lounger during an international crisis. Biden has a long rap sheet of foreign-policy weakness. In early 1975, he was a leading voice in the Senate for abandoning South Vietnam. ‘I’m getting sick and tired of hearing about morality, our moral obligation [to send aid]’, he said. Weeks later Saigon was overrun, and Cambodia descended into genocide. In 1987 – the year Biden first ran for president – he attacked ‘the Reagan Doctrine’ for being too confrontational with Soviet Russia two weeks before the then president’s famous speech calling on Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. We all know who won that one.

In 1991, Biden voted against the Gulf War to force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait after Iraq invaded. Then in 2010, as vice president, he oversaw and fiercely championed America’s drawdown of troops in Iraq – which directly led to the handover of the country to ISIS. In 2011, he opposed the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, telling Barack Obama it was too risky. And during the 2012 campaign, Biden mocked Mitt Romney’s ‘Cold War mindset’ when the Republican presidential candidate tried to warn about the threat posed by Vladimir Putin, who had by then already hosted the leaders of Hamas at the Kremlin. Once in the Oval Office, Biden’s judgement got no better – instead our Commander-in-Chief has emboldened America’s enemies at every turn. Worst of all: Afghanistan.

Biden didn’t just insist on our withdrawal in 2021, he made false promises that the Afghan army would be fine on its own. He then rushed the timetable to meet a symbolically bizarre September 11 deadline, left over $7 billion of weapons behind for the free taking by terrorists, abandoned brave Afghanis who had fought shoulder-to-shoulder with America, allowed 13 of our own troops to die and let the country fall to the Taliban in a matter of hours. On Saturday, the Taliban and Islamist extremists alike celebrated Hamas’ murderous attacks. Yet when war loomed in Ukraine early last year, it was again Biden who questioned whether NATO might not take action if Putin committed only a ‘minor incursion.’

If the bloodthirsty Russian despot had been waiting for a ringing endorsement of his planned invasion, there it was. During his presidency, Donald Trump tried to isolate Iran, while building ties between Israel and its neighboring Arab states. Biden came into office determined to do the opposite. He set about reviving Obama’s ‘Iran Deal’, which involved the U.S. sending cash to Iranian mullahs in exchange for promises to not develop nuclear weapons. In August, Biden unfroze $6 billion in Iranian oil money to ensure the return of five American hostages. Or put it this way: He’s bankrolling the government that has long been the main source of funding for Hamas. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei spent his weekend bragging on Twitter.

Despite pledging to punish Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman for the murder of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, Biden skipped along cap-in-hand to meet the tyrant last year, begging for help amid spiraling gas prices at home. And then there’s China. In recent months all of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and climate envoy John Kerry have travelled to Beijing in a bid to thaw Sino-American tensions. Meanwhile, when Biden met three weeks ago with Prime Minister Netanyahu, he lectured him about ‘democracy’ following Israel’s efforts to reduce the power of its unelected supreme court over its elected parliament. When news of Saturday’s invasion broke, the U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs published a tweet urging ‘all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks’.

Secretary Blinken wrote in support of a ‘ceasefire’. Both tweets have since been deleted. But Blinken – Biden’s keen accomplice on both the Iran deal and the Afghanistan withdrawal – wasn’t done. He confidently told CNN on Sunday that ‘we have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack’.

Want more stories like this from the Daily Mail? Visit our profile page here and hit the follow button above for more of the news you need.