The Moral and Material Collapse of U.S. Foreign Policy Under Biden

By Victor Davis Hanson, AM GREATNESS

The American post-Cold War order from the Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush administration is over.

Barack Obama began its erosion with his tired lectures about the past sins of the United States.

Obama empowered radical Islamists. He invited Russia back into the Middle East after a forty-year hiatus. He snored while Vladimir Putin swallowed large areas of Ukraine. He nonchalantly allowed ISIS almost to take over Iraq. And he authored the Libyan misadventure.

Joe Biden has greatly amplified what Obama inaugurated. He accentuates the Obama-authored foreign policy disasters by his own family corruption.

If the U.S. had an honest media, a disinterested Department of Justice, and a professional FBI, the Biden family would likely be facing felony bribery charges and an impeachment vote for leveraging the interests of the U.S. for a few millions of Ukrainian and Chinese cash.

Biden has forfeited any moral credibility America once had in sermonizing to the world about the advantages of transparent democracy.

Instead, Washington under Biden went full Third-world. His family got rich from his offices, and Joe Biden warped government agencies in efforts to take out his next possible presidential rival.

Antony Blinken, Biden’s current Secretary of State, is known mostly for meekly accepting a dressing down from Chinese diplomats in 2021 and subsequent ritual humiliations.

Blinken was also the author of the 2020 election shenanigan of soliciting former intelligence authorities to publish a preposterous lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop had all the “hallmarks” of “Russian disinformation.” Blinken’s inspired farce was dreamed up to aid a then struggling candidate Biden in his last presidential debate.

The net result of the Obama-Biden continuum has been the moral and material collapse of U.S. foreign policy.

Americans are bewildered that China is now buzzing our jets. It plays chicken with American warships.

It mocks our homeland defenses by sending a spy balloon with impunity across the continental United States.

It is defiantly mum about its creation of a gain-of-function virus under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army, despite the ensuing Covid epidemic that killed over 1 million Americans.<

The weird reaction of the Biden administration to these affronts is either to contextualize Beijing’s aggression or to ignore them entirely.

Under the earlier Obama-Biden “reset” of Russia, we also paid little attention to the past aggressions of Vladimir Putin, appeased his provocations, and earned the 2014 Russian take-over of the Ukrainian border and Crimea.

Then the resetters flipped during the Trump administration.

They now preposterously claimed that Donald Trump—who had neutered Putin by flooding the world with cheap oil, pulled out of an asymmetrical missile deal with Moscow, killed attacking Russian mercenaries in Syria, and greenlighted offensive weapons to Ukraine—was a Putin “puppet.”

After sleeping when Putin invaded Ukraine twice under Obama, and once under Biden (but not at all under Trump), the Left abruptly adopted Ukrainian resistance as their last chance to prove that Russians should have been guilty of “Russian collusion” and “disinformation.”

Their new legacy is a Chinese-Russian-Iranian anti-American axis.

U.S. arms stockpiles are drained so that a beleaguered Ukraine might have the third largest military budget in the world—and a Verdun-like deathscape of static warfare on the borders of Europe.<

Biden desperately sought to revive the failed Obama Iran deal. His subtext was to return to the bankrupt notion that by empowering Iran and its henchmen in Lebanon and Syria, and Hezbollah and Hamas, America could leverage allies like Israel and distance itself from friends such as the oil-exporting Gulf monarchies.

China and Russia loved the Obama-Biden resets. Now both are the guardians of Middle East oil and money, while the U.S. alienated our friends and drove allies away.

The Biden administration abandoned billions of dollars in military hardware as it fled in ignominy from Afghanistan.

It sent billions more in arms to Ukraine, while ending U.S. self-sufficiency in oil and gas, inflating the currency, exploding the debt, and ignoring replacing the arms we have sent abroad or abandoned.

Instead of restocking our depleted arms arsenals, Biden started tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for cheap political advantage on the eve of the midterm elections.<

A frail and disorientated Biden may be considered useful by his controllers to implement a hard-left agenda. But otherwise, an enfeebled Biden personified the decline in American stature that he had wrought.

He was recently helped to steady himself by a Mexican President.

He was shuffled into place for a photo-op by a Japanese Prime Minister.

In a conversation with the British Prime Minister, he forgot the name of Winston Churchill, a British icon.

And he entered the G-7 summit by falling down the steps of Air Force One.

It would be hard for a Chinese or Russian strategist to come up with a record better than Biden’s to emasculate America’s military and radically reduce its global stature.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the recently released The Dying Citizen.