Michael Rubin damns President Biden with faint praise in a Washington Examiner column.
As president, Donald Trump’s antics harmed America on the world stage. Yet President Joe Biden’s legacy will be worse.
From calling African countries “s***holes” to telling Middle Eastern countries he wanted to steal their oil to his blowhard bromance with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, Trump was a disaster. Even relative successes (getting NATO members to contribute more toward collective defense, killing Iran’s Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani, and the Abraham Accords) do not offset Trump’s gratuitous damage.
Across the world stage and among the American foreign policy establishment, there was a collective sigh of relief when Biden won the presidential election. In just two years, though, Biden has done more damage to America’s reputation than Trump ever did. Trump’s antics were the equivalent of a sunburn, an irritant that passes. Biden’s decisions, however, have led to a third-degree burn that permanently disfigures America’s reputation.
Trump’s trust in the Taliban was naive, but it was fully embraced by Biden. The order to abandon to a terrorist regime the same Afghans who helped Americans fight is a shame that the world will not forget. America’s humiliation catalyzed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and encouraged China to tighten its noose on Taiwan. Rather than recognize his error, his own State Department now fetes the co-founder of al Shabaab at taxpayer expense.
To fund an opposition movement in Israel, the region’s only true democracy, out of pique at a prime minister whose chief sin was raising concern about a naive nuclear deal is as stupid. Biden may play politics as if he were a junior senator, but Iran’s sharp increase in nuclear enrichment coincides not with Trump’s exit from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, but from Biden’s reversal of maximum pressure. Rather than acknowledge its appeasement policy failed, Biden’s told the media and Congress that they had stopped negotiating a nuclear deal. Now, it emerges they lied: