Although President Joe Biden campaigned on a promise to bring competence to Washington, critics say that his administration has thus far done anything but.
Washington Examiner White House correspondent Rob Crilly said the new president has been using “often-plodding policy reviews” in order to create an “appearance of action.”
In a piece published Sunday, Crilly wrote that this approach is likely to please no one as “the result is concern among allies that he is dithering in his early weeks in office while critics see him pandering to the Left.”
American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Danielle Pletka explained that these sort of policy reviews can serve to get “your constituency off your back.”
“Appearance of action”
“It is an appearance of action without doing anything — and it takes the pressure off to be able to be either to go slow or ultimately to change things,” Pletka said.
One example Crilly referenced was a decade-old promise from former President Back Obama to close the detention center in Guantanamo Bay.
A statement from White House National Security Council spokeswoman Emily Horne on Friday revealed that the facility would be subjected to a review.
“We are undertaking an NSC process to assess the current state of play that the Biden administration has inherited from the previous administration, in line with our broader goal of closing Guantanamo,” Horne said.
Horne’s statement continued, “There will be a robust interagency process to move forward on this, but we need to have the right people seated to do this important work.”
“Nothing has been reversed”
James Carafano, a national security and foreign policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, explained that the problem of what to do with terrorists being held at Guantanamo Bay is one that Biden likely does not want to confront.
“Guantanamo is one of these issues where it sounds simple to be black-and-white, but as soon as you start to govern, the difficulties become readily apparent,” he said.
Biden also drew heat from journalist Fareed Zakaria for not moving fast enough on a variety of foreign policy issues. In an op-ed for The Washington Post, he wrote, “Nothing has been reversed. Again, it’s all under ‘review.'”
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