Former Vice President and 2020 presidential hopeful Joe Biden slandered President Donald Trump on Thursday during his foreign policy speech at the City University of New York Graduate Center, calling Trump an “extreme” threat to his country.
In a moment of pure hypocrisy, Biden slammed Trump’s foreign policy agenda, accusing the president of supporting authoritarian regimes and cozying up to some of the world’s most brutal dictators. Yet, the lifelong Democrat is forgetting his own role in the tyrant-friendly Obama administration, which time and again abandoned democratic uprisings and U.S. allies and found common cause with rogue authoritarians.
Hypocrite hopeful
Breitbart contributor Joel B. Pollack took Biden to task in a Friday op-ed aimed at exposing the former vice president’s foreign policy record. “Everything former vice president Joe Biden said about President Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech on Thursday actually applies to the policy that Biden carried out together with former President Barack Obama — and not Trump,” he wrote.
Biden described Trump’s foreign agenda in the most alarmist of terms, strangely invoking the domestic 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally to explain why he makes a poor leader on the world stage. He quoted Trump, who said there were “very fine people” on both sides of the racial conflict that left one dead and 35 injured.
Biden accused the president of drawing a “moral equivalence between those who promoted hate and those who opposed it,” making a fragile connection between this statement and Trump’s ability to stand up to autocratic world leaders. As Pollack points out, however, the president went out of his way to condemn neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville.
Biden went on to blame Trump for the retrenchment of authoritarian regimes worldwide. He referenced the president’s flattering words toward for Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
The former vice president told supporters that Trump undermined U.S. relations with friendly Western-style democracies, choosing instead to praise foreign dictators. But surely Biden recalls the eight years that preceded Trump’s term in office, when his running mate allowed some of the most vile and underhanded despots run fast and loose with U.S. interests.
Not so fast!
Pollack, however, responded in his opinion piece by reminding the presidential hopeful of Obama’s foreign policy history.
Apparently Biden forgot that Obama literally bowed to the Saudi king; that he abandoned the pro-democracy protests during the Green Revolution in Iran; that he pushed for a “reset” with Russia and abandoned our Czech and Polish allies on missile defense; that he promised the Russian president that he would have more “flexibility” after he won re-election; that he tried to normalize relations with the Cuban dictatorship without securing any democratic reforms there; that he gave the store away to the communist dictatorship in China; and that he abandoned Israel, a betrayal in which Biden himself played a direct and shameful role, condemning Israel for building apartments in a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem.
Pollock further explained that Trump would flatter foreign leaders as part of a negotiating tactic. Obama, conversely, thought America was the problem and would capitulate to international bullies. One of the few times that the 44th president showed an actual interest in supporting the forces of democracy was during the Arab Spring, when the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood was on the rise throughout the Middle East.
The best they have to offer?
Biden was introduced as Obama’s older, wiser running mate in 2008, the foreign policy guru who would make up for the Chicago community organizer’s lack of practical experience in that arena. Except the pair succeeded in bungling nearly every matter related to international strategy.
Although Obama famously referred to the Islamic State as the terrorist “JV team,” Biden brazenly took credit for Trump’s military victories over the jihadist group. He told his audience that he worked with Obama “to craft the military and diplomatic campaign that ultimately defeated ISIS.”
Biden is the best that Democrats have to offer when it comes to foreign policy experience, Pollack notes in conclusion. The consequences of this incompetence are frightening.
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