Our inclination is to support a President’s foreign policy when it’s in the national interest, no matter the party in the White House. But it’s getting harder to do when the current White House habit is to spin every issue for short-term political gain.
Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
We children of the sixties know things never change in Washington. When we were 18-year-old liberals, LBJ was betting our lives against a make-believe threat in Vietnam. Now that we’re 70-year-old conservatives, Biden is betting we worry more about “extraterrestrial aliens” than any of the real threats he’s enabled and ignored for two years – and that we’re too dumb to catch on.
Like his promise to “advance America’s vital interests” and claim that “our military remains unmatched” – or his promise that “nations around the world [will not] bet against the United States of America” and claim that he takes “classified information seriously.” What a bunch of malarkey!
Actual events beg to differ. He scuttled our gas and oil dominance, missed China’s surveillance balloon, and ignored the cartels on our southern border. On his watch, military enlistment is 25% below required levels, Russia’s army invaded Ukraine, China’s air force flew over Taiwan, and Mexican cartels spied on US borders agents with un-manned drones. No joke – and no wonder House Republicans are investigating his blunders and cover-ups.
Start with Russia. He called it a threat in 2019: “I believe Russia is an opponent, I really do.” Campaign aide T.J. Duckling added, “A Biden Administration will confront Russian aggression from a position of strength.” That’s called a campaign promise, which he didn’t keep. It’s also called showing one’s hand by poking the bear. Biden wanted to look tougher than Trump, but on whose watch did Russia start a war?
Biden knew Putin was a Russian expansionist (he said it) and Russia relied on petrodollars (his first act after the invasion was to promote global sanctions on Russian gas and oil). He admitted his mistake by blaming “Putin’s war” for record-high petrol prices at home. It was never possible to “confront Russian aggression from a position of strength” after cutting US gas and oil production – and a wise commander in chief would know this.
No joke – like what the world now thinks of US air defenses, after a single Chinese spy-balloon flew over Whiteman AFB (nuclear B-2 bomber fleet), Offutt AFB (SAC headquarters), Warren and Minot AFBs (USAF Minutemen III wings), and Malmstrom AFB (33% of our land-based ICBMS) before the president ordered it shot down. That’s bad, because almost every foreign newspaper noted (I read ’em) the locations were a lot of the US nuclear arsenal, but it gets worse.
The head of North American Aerospace Defense Command, Gen. Glen VanHerck, confessed, “It’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America. We did not detect those threats, and that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out.” In plain English, his radar wasn’t looking for giant balloons. It gets even worse, because Biden’s aides deflected and misdirected.
A Pentagon spokesman: “PRC surveillance balloons transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration.” NSC spokesguy John Kirby: “The president has directed an interagency team to study the broader policy implications for detection, analysis, and disposition of unidentified aerial objects.” White House spokesgal Karine Jean-Pierre: “There is no – again no indication – of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.” Really?
It’s screw-up-and-cover-up writ large. Don’t change Trump’s policies, but tacitly blame him for today’s failure. Inject “unidentified aerial objects” and “aliens” and “extraterrestrial activity” to muddle the news, despite everyone in America – even the loonies on The View – knowing a Chinese spy-balloon had spent days over the country. Mr. Biden’s Presidential Playbook is obvious (whatever Trump did was wrong) and it’s clearly not working.
Especially on the southern border. The Guardian reports, “Hours after being sworn in, Joe Biden reversed Trump immigration policies by executive action; such as his travel ban, deportation priorities, and emergency declaration to [fund] the wall on the US-Mexico border.” That was two years ago, and Biden’s orders have given the Mexican cartels the upper hand. To wit, US border agents recorded over 25,000 drone sightings and 10,000 drone incursions in the last 365 days.
That’s disastrous according to CBP’s Brandon Judd, because cartel drones “scout our positions” to locate US agents to “facilitate the drug trade,” which is smuggling Fentanyl and killing our country (deaths have spiked on Biden’s watch from 56,516 dead in 2020 to 72,009 last year). Congress just heard how over-matched US border agents are from CBP Sector Chief Gloria Chavez: “(the cartels) have 17 times the number of drones, twice the amount of flight hours and unlimited funding to grow their operations.”
She said her sector is “identified as a major corridor by cartels and transnational criminal organizations – exploited daily for human smuggling, narcotics trafficking and other illicit activities.” Biden gave the reverse-Trump order on day one, and his staff has been dissembling ever since. Psaki in 2021: “The president does not feel our border is a crisis.” Jean-Pierre in 2023: “It would be wrong to think the border is open. It is not open.”
Candidate Biden said, “Ask yourself – do I look to you like a radical socialist with a soft spot?” Yes! Because 4.9 million illegal aliens – plus mas terrorists and mucho fentanyl – have crossed the border since he became president. In July 2022 alone, border guards arrested 10 aliens on the FBI’s terror watch list and seized 469,000,000 lethal doses of Fentanyl. While Joe “No Soft Spot” Biden was apparently looking for “extraterrestrial activity” in the skies.
He talks like the Big Cheese (“As commander in chief, I firmly believe the best path to guard our security lies in tough, unforgiving, precise strategy”) and operates a Swiss Cheese defense. Last year, Iran drones killed his “allies” in Ukraine, China mined personal data from 87 million American TikTok users, and a record 2.76 million undocumented immigrants crossed the southwest border (source: NBC News). C’mon, man!
