All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 10, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
23:14
Who Trusts Joe Biden on Foreign Policy? | Ep. 1553
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
From Afghanistan to Ukraine, from the Middle East to China, the Biden administration's foreign policy failures are stacking up.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
Do you like your web history being seen and sold to advertisers?
No?
Me neither.
Get ExpressVPN right now at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
When reviewing the record of the Biden administration on foreign policy, Let's just review for one second where foreign policy was when Joe Biden took office.
So, there was no open war with Russia, for example.
There was no open conflict with China.
There was a crackdown on China that was happening.
There was a move towards strengthening sanctions against Russia that had been happening, and stronger movement on Russia's borders.
By the Trump administration in the Middle East, peace had broken out.
The simple fact of the matter is that foreign policy might have been the brightest spot of the Trump administration.
And Joe Biden has signally capitulated on a variety of issues, and he's created tremendous lack of clarity on others.
And that lack of clarity leads to further conflict.
One of the key tenets of foreign policy is that lack of clarity leads to miscommunication.
Miscommunication leads to people making bad assumptions.
Those bad assumptions lead to actual dead people.
This has been the history of foreign policy ranging well back before World War One.
And yet the Biden administration, where it's not wrong, it is unclear.
And that is a serious, serious problem.
And it's true country to country.
And so we've seen over the past few months an attempt by Joe Biden to prop up his foreign policy as sort of a key component of a successful administration.
And yet I failed to see the success.
So the most obvious example is that last week, Joe Biden was out there and he was championing the idea that he had done a wonderful job in Afghanistan based on the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Okay, so the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was the person in charge of Al Qaeda, this was a big win for Joe Biden.
According to the media, according to the press, it was going to revitalize his hopes at a 2024 run, revitalize democratic hopes in 2022.
There's only one problem, which is that Zawahiri was killed in the middle of Kabul.
Here was Joe Biden championing all of the killing of al-Zawahiri last week.
On Saturday, at my direction, the United States successfully concluded an airstrike in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed the emir of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Now, justice has been delivered, and this terrorist leader is no more.
People around the world no longer need to fear the vicious and determined killer.
The United States continues to demonstrate our resolve and our capacity to defend the American people against those who seek to do us harm.
Okay, well, all of that sounds very nice, except for the fact that he surrendered the entire country to people like Ayman al-Zawahiri, which is why Zawahiri was sitting, you know, in the middle of Kabul.
And to understand how badly Biden screwed up Afghanistan, you have to understand that he's been wrong about pretty much every foreign policy issue of our lifetime.
Joe Biden doesn't actually have any ideas of his own.
The ideas that he has are just incorrect.
Very often what Joe Biden does, he just follows the center of the Democratic Party.
And so if the center of the Democratic Party is pro-Afghan war, he's very pro-Afghan war.
If it becomes anti-Afghan war, he becomes very anti-Afghan war.
And then he becomes very set in his own bad ideas, and the result is disaster.
There's a reason why Joe Biden's approval rating tanked from like 50% down into the 30s during the Afghanistan debacle in 2021.
It has not picked up yet because it underscores the incompetence of this human being.
So to understand Joe Biden on Afghanistan, you really have to go all the way back to like the initiation of the war in Afghanistan in the aftermath of September 11th.
So Joe Biden was full scale on board with the war in Afghanistan.
So was pretty much everybody.
There was pretty much nobody in Congress who was not on board with the war in Afghanistan.
Here was Biden circa September 14th, 2001.
If it requires the use of ground forces, I have no doubt you'll get support to do it.
I'm not confirming this.
Let's assume it turns out to be Bin Laden and his organization.
Any cell, any group, anything it takes, including using ground forces.
Okay, so it's all about Bin Laden and his organization, whatever we have to do.
And then the next month, he says, we can't just go in there and then break a few things and leave.
We have to be there for the long haul.
Again, this was the typical Democratic Party position circa 2001.
The president has personally stated it to Senator Helms and to me, and I'm sure to others, that we have to be in this for the long haul.
We can't, quote, drain the swamp and let it fill up again.
Okay.
February 2002.
Same message, right?
History is going to judge us.
If we don't stay the course, we have to be there long haul.
The first real test of post 9-11 engagement is whether or not we're going to stay the course in Afghanistan.
If Chairman Carr's eyes to govern effectively, the first thing he needs is security.
The second is a plan which is underway to rebuild a military and a police force and an infusion of economic assistance just to do the basic things, like put in fax machines, telephones, desk, paper, the things that are the necessary tools of governance in the most basic of ways.
History is going to judge us very harshly, I believe, if we allow the hope of a liberated Afghanistan to evaporate Because we are fearful of the phrase nation building or we do not stay the course.
I mean, that's an amazing statement by Joe Biden circa February 2002.
History is going to judge us harshly if we go against nation building.
OK, well, as we will see, that opinion has changed rather radically over time.
So you fast forward about six years.
And now the pitch from the Democratic Party is that the bad war is the war in Iraq and the good war is the war in Afghanistan, right? This is what is being pitched by, for example, the presidential candidate, Barack Obama. Joe Biden has followed along in those footsteps.
And so he makes that point in debate in October 2008, we're bogged down in Iraq.
We need to do more in Afghanistan. It's not a surprise at all that we have been significantly limited in our ability to deal with worldwide terror because we are tied down, bogged down in Iraq.
Afghanistan is slipping toward failure because there's never been a priority and it has to become one.
We spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spent on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan building that country.
Okay, so that was the good war, right?
Iraq was the bad war.
Afghanistan was the good war.
Then Obama takes office and he continues with this line, right?
Joe Biden starts talking about what exactly is our goal in Afghanistan?
What are we doing there?
After my trip, President Obama ordered a comprehensive review of the policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And we want to make sure that our goals are clear and achievable because I would respectfully suggest none of you, nor us, could say precisely what our goal is in Afghanistan.
What is the goal?
Right.
So now we shifted from nation building is worthwhile and we should actually make sure this is not a terrorist safe haven.
We should liberalize Afghanistan too.
We don't know our goal.
In February 2011, moving forward a couple of years, Joe Biden says, we're definitely not going to leave.
I mean, we're not going to leave them in the lurch.
We wouldn't do that sort of thing.
Let me say it plainly, Mr. President.
It is not our intention to govern or to nation-build, but we are not leaving if you don't want us to leave.
We're not leaving, but we're not here for the nation-building.
That's a pretty significant shift.
And then by 2012, he's like, yeah, we're leaving.
Sorry, we're out.
Again, Joe Biden, nothing if not dull-witted.
Here he is in 2012.
With 49 of our allies in Afghanistan, we've agreed on a gradual drawdown, so we're out of there by the year 2014.
My friend and the governor say it's based on conditions, which means it depends.
It does not depend for us.
It is the responsibility of the Afghans to take care of their own security.
But we are leaving.
We are leaving in 2014.
Period.
Okay, so we did, in fact, pull out virtually all of our ground troops in 2014, and we were experiencing very few casualties.
The Afghans were experiencing enormous casualties.
We were experiencing very few casualties.
And this maintained Joe Biden's line up until basically the pullout from Afghanistan.
We are going to leave.
It doesn't matter what the consequences are.
We're going to leave.
So, April 14th, 2021, fast forward to Joe Biden's actual presidency.
He says, we went there to root out Al Qaeda, and we accomplished that, and now it's time to come home.
We went to Afghanistan in 2001 to root out al Qaeda, to prevent future terrorist attacks against the United States planned from Afghanistan.
Our objective was clear.
The cause was just.
Our NATO allies and partners rallied beside us.
And I supported that military action along with overwhelming majority of the members of Congress.
Okay, so again, we have now shifted all the way from we have to stay there, stay the course.
If we have to nation-build, we have to nation-build too.
We need to get the hell out, even though there are no American troops dying there right now.
It's time to come home, and we rooted out Al-Qaeda.
And he continued to maintain this in July of 2021, July 8th.
He said Al-Qaeda had been routed from Afghanistan.
He said the Afghanistan military would not collapse.
There would not be helicopters taking off from roofs of U.S.
embassies.
None of that was true.
We went for two reasons.
One, to bring Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell, as I said at the time.
The second reason was to eliminate al Qaeda's capacity to deal with more attacks in the United States from that territory.
We accomplished both of those objectives.
Period.
Your own intelligence community has assessed that the Afghan government will likely collapse.
That is not true.
Can you please clarify what they have told you about whether that will happen or not?
That is not true.
They did not, they did not reach that conclusion.
This is unbelievable.
Okay, and then by August, of course, there'd been a massive terror attack against American troops.
The entire country had collapsed to the Palabam, and Joe Biden was forced to stagger to the microphone, announcing a terrorist attack, killing 13 American service people, led by ISIS-K, possibly with the cooperation of the very people that Joe Biden was basically handing over Kabul to.
A tough day.
This evening in Kabul, as you all know, Terrorists attacked that we've been talking about, worried about, that the intelligence community has assessed, has undertaken an attack by a group known as ISIS-K.
Took the lives of American service members, standing guard at the airport, This is what a failed foreign policy looks like.
And then to sort of backfill the failure, on October 7th, Biden announced that the drawdown was complete.
There were hundreds of American citizens who were left behind enemy lines at a minimum.
Tens of thousands of U.S.
green card holders, people who had worked with the American military, those people were left to the predations of the Taliban.
And he said, don't worry, we're redirecting our competition to Russia and China.
Well, as it turns out, his policy with regard to Russia and China hasn't been a whole hell of a lot better than it was in Afghanistan.
Here was Joe Biden signifying the end of American operations in Afghanistan.
My fellow Americans, the war in Afghanistan is now over.
The world is changing.
We're engaged in a serious competition with China.
We're dealing with the challenges on multiple fronts with Russia.
We're confronted with cyber attacks.
So the idea was, we now have to refocus.
It was, we have to focus on Afghanistan.
Then Afghanistan was being distracted by Iraq.
Now Afghanistan was the distraction, so we have to surrender the entire country.
The predictable result of this is that people thought that America was a weak tiger under, it was a paper tiger under President Biden.
We'll get to that in just a second with regard to Russia.
First, let's talk about the fact that you need a will, okay?
So, simple fact, fun fact for you, 100% of people who eat broccoli are going to die.
In fact, every person who is currently living will die.
Well, this means that you need a will.
It's just that simple.
A will is one of the most important legal documents you will ever need.
It's not about you, it's about your loved ones and the really hard decisions they'll face if something happens to you.
Decisions like whether to keep you on life support or not, or whether to bury you or cremate you.
If you're a parent, you don't want a judge deciding who should step in to raise your kids.
Do yourself a favor.
Do your family a favor.
Make these decisions right now, so they don't have to face them later without you.
Go to epicwill.com.
Use promo code SHAPIRO.
Save 10% on Epic Will's Complete Will Package.
Epic Will can set you up with a will in as little as 5 minutes.
It's really easy.
It's well worth the 119 bucks to secure your family's future.
Without a will?
You may as well wrap up all your money and assets and hand them over to the state to figure out what to do with them.
Very, very bad idea.
Instead, head on over to epicwill.com.
Use my code SHAPIRO today.
Again, no matter where you are in life, you need to have a will in place.
Go to epicwill.com.
Use my code SHAPIRO right now.
That's epicwill.com.
Use promo code SHAPIRO.
Okay, so Joe Biden suggested.
That we were pulling out of Afghanistan.
This is going to free up our hands to deal with Russia.
There's only one problem.
The pullout from Afghanistan actually incentivized the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Because, after all, where Joe Biden has been clear, he has been wrong.
And where he has been unclear, he has provoked conflict.
So no wonder Russia thought that Joe Biden was a weak horse.
After all, Joe Biden had basically been a Russia defender in the 2012 election.
You'll recall that he was ripping on Mitt Romney for suggesting that Russia was a geopolitical threat.
Here's Joe Biden circa 2012.
Governor Romney's answer, I thought, was incredibly revealing.
He acts like he thinks the Cold War is still on.
Russia is still our major adversary.
I don't know where he's been.
I mean, we have disagreements with Russia, but they're united with us on Iran.
The only way we're getting, one of only two ways we're getting material into Afghanistan to our troops is through Russia.
They are working closely with us.
They've just said to Europe, if there is an oil shutdown in any way in the Gulf, they'll consider increasing oil supplies to Europe.
That's not, this is not 1956.
This is not 1956, says Joe Biden.
Don't worry, Russia will take care of the oil for the Europeans.
Russia will help us with Afghanistan.
And then, of course, Russia helped us with Syria by basically taking Syria off the hands of President Obama to the wild cheers of people like Joe Biden.
Now, in 2014, Russia invades Crimea, and Joe Biden has some words for Russia.
That's pretty much all he has for Russia.
So he was vice president when that administration did nothing over the invasion of Crimea.
Here was Joe Biden circa 2014.
I want to make it clear.
We stand resolutely with our Baltic allies in support of the Ukrainian people and against Russian aggression.
As long as Russia continues on this dark path, they will face increasing political and economic isolation.
There are those who say that this action shows the old rules still apply.
But Russia cannot escape the fact that the world is changing.
And rejecting outright their behavior.
Of course, that was a lie.
It turns out that the steps that the White House pursued under Vice President Biden were extraordinarily weak.
Basically, they announced a visa ban on a couple of Russian and Ukrainian officials, and they canceled a couple of talks on trades and commercial ties.
That was pretty much all of the things.
And by the way, they then proceeded to deny lethal aid to Ukraine.
As Mark Thiessen points out at the Washington Post, In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and began arming separatists in eastern Ukraine with tanks, armored vehicles, and rocket launchers, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko came to Washington to plead for weapons to defend his country.
In an impassioned address to a joint session of Congress, with Biden sitting directly behind him, Poroshenko said his country appreciated the non-lethal assistance he was getting, but declared, quote, The Obama administration was unmoved.
The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that President Obama stuck to his refusal to provide weapons or other lethal military gear to Ukraine, despite a passionate appeal Thursday for help in fighting pro-Russian rebels by Ukraine's president.
Why?
The administration feared the lethal aid would provoke Moscow.
So instead, they gave meals ready to eat.
Food rations.
One frustrated Pentagon official said, quote, What kind of message does that send anyway?
We're sending MREs while they're being invaded by an aggressor.
So why exactly would Vladimir Putin have believed that an invasion of Ukraine full scale under Joe Biden as president would have done anything?
Would have made any difference?
Especially because Joe Biden doubled down on that in June of 2021.
According to politico.com, this is dated June 18th, 2021, the Biden White House has temporarily halted a military aid package to Ukraine that would include lethal weapons, a plan originally made in response to aggressive Russian troop movement along Ukraine's border this spring.
That aid package was worth up to $100 million, according to four people familiar with internal deliberations.
The National Security Council directed officials to put the package together as Washington grew increasingly concerned over a massive Russian military buildup near the border with Ukraine and in the Crimean Peninsula.
But officials at the NSC put the proposal on hold after Russia announced it would draw down troops stationed near Ukraine and in the lead-up to Joe Biden's high-stakes summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
So they froze the package, right, of lethal aid to Ukraine, like last year.
So this notion that Joe Biden had somehow a role in dissuading Vladimir Putin, it was Joe Biden's weakness that led Vladimir Putin to invade in the first place.
And in December 2021, Joe Biden was openly warning that there would be a strong response to Ukraine invasion.
Apparently, Biden held a video call between Vladimir Putin and himself in which he voiced worries over the troop buildups and suggested that there would be strong measures amid the Ukrainian invasion.
But what credibility did he have?
The answer was none.
And so, Vladimir Putin made a rational, if wrong, calculation, which is that there would be no actual effect if, in fact, there was an invasion of Ukraine.
And it turns out that the United States was then forced to pour tens of billions of dollars into Ukraine.
Europe was deprived of its oil supply and all the rest.
And meanwhile, the United States, by the way, is not ratcheting up its energy supply to make up for the deficit.
So, Joe Biden said, we're pulling out of Afghanistan to deal with Russia.
And this actually prompted Russia to invade Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the situation with China is becoming more and more fraud because the Biden administration is not taking the measures necessary to strengthen the American economy at home.
Now, Biden has done better on China than he has done with, for example, Russia or Afghanistan, for sure.
China is going to eat our lunch?
rhetoric in the past. He's been pretty conciliatory toward China, which is why China probably figures we better do something now before Biden is out of office because we wait for a Republican president might not go so well. As late as 2020, Joe Biden was out there saying China isn't going to eat our lunch. There's really nothing to worry about. China is going to eat our lunch. Come on, man.
They can't even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the east, I mean in the west.
They can't figure out how they're going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system.
I mean, you know, they're not bad folks, folks, but guess what?
They're not a competition for us.
They're just competition, right?
In 2021, Biden said they're not an opponent.
They're just competitors, right?
Is there really any reason to see them as anything else?
I see stiff competition with China.
China has an overall goal, and I don't criticize them for the goal, but they have an overall goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world.
That's not going to happen on my watch.
Well, I mean, I think that China probably thinks it was going to happen on his watch.
As Miranda Devine wrote in the New York Post in July of this year, like a couple of weeks ago, it took a certain bloodless chutzpah for the president to place his scandal-ridden son front and center at a White House function last week.
Hunter Biden popped up at Thursday's Medal of Freedom ceremony to glad hand a network from his front row perch, even as he awaits indictment by a grand jury in Delaware over his shady foreign business dealings, most lucratively in China.
Just one day earlier, the FBI Director Christopher Wray and his British MI5 counterpart made a rare joint public appearance in London to sound the alarm over the growing serious and economic threat posed by China, which aims to steal our IP and corrupt our politics.
Also on Wednesday, U.S.
counterintelligence officials issued a bulletin to state and local officials warning of an escalating campaign by China to manipulate and influence politicians to push Washington for China-friendly policies.
Biden has gone soft on China since becoming president.
Here are a few examples.
He diverted at least a million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, according to Reuters, to the state-owned gas giant Senepec in China.
He disbanded the China initiative, a national security program set up by the Trump administration to combat China's economic espionage at universities and research institutions.
He revoked Trump-era restrictions against TikTok, instead promising a national security review, which has led to no action for over a year.
In another unwinding of hardline Trump policies, the Biden administration granted the Chinese tech giant Huawei a license to purchase chips used in automobile manufacturing.
He has not pressed China on the origins of COVID-19.
He suspended tariffs on Chinese solar panels.
He's reportedly contemplating lifting further Trump tariffs against Chinese imports.
So, you know, the simple fact that Joe Biden is saying that he is strong on China while being increasingly weak on China is just another indicator that when it comes to Joe Biden's foreign policy, he's a mess.
And the mess that is Joe Biden's foreign policy extends to nearly every area of the globe.
I mean, Joe Biden continues to push an Iran deal that is completely unworkable.
Iran continues to buck all demands from the International Atomic Energy Agency for any sort of verifiable commitment to denuclearize.
Iran continues to foster terrorism around the region, develop ballistic missile technology, and yet Joe Biden is out there saying that he wants to get back to the Iran deal.
Joe Biden has made such a mess of things in the Middle East that he's been forced to reverse himself repeatedly on, for example, Saudi Arabia.
Because it turns out that the Obama-Biden backing of Iran created a Sunni alliance against Iran.
Joe Biden is not particularly fond of that Sunni alliance against Iran, despite the fact that it has created the Abraham Accords.
And yet he is now subject to fist-bumping MBS because he has cut off America's oil supply through both the war in Ukraine and also through failure to up domestic oil production.
He's a mess on foreign policy.
So when you look abroad and you see a world that is filled with increasing chaos, understand that that is because Joe Biden is really, really bad at this.
He was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
He has always been extraordinarily bad at foreign policy on nearly every score.
Everything that he has touched, he has essentially been wrong on.
It's very difficult to find an area of American foreign policy where Joe Biden has been consistently correct.
So when we look in a more chaotic world under Joe Biden, understand that, again, that is because Joe Biden has never been good at this.
All right, we've reached the end of today's show.
We'll be back here tomorrow with more.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
♪♪ The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Bradford Carrington, executive producer Jeremy Boren, supervising producer Mathis Glover, production manager Pavel Lydowsky, associate producer Savannah Dominguez-Morris, editor Adam Sajevitz, audio mixer Mike Coromina, hair and makeup artist and wardrobe Fabiola Christina, production coordinator Jessica Kranz.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
▲
Export Selection