Biden’s interconnected foreign policy disasters show his weak leadership puts Americans at risk
As the presidential election approaches, one of the most disturbing characteristics of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy proposals is the way in which her proposals would put America at risk.
First, she would turn our NATO allies into an army of global hegemons, demanding that they meet her strategic objectives. Second, she would turn the United States into a superpower in a world dominated by China. Third, she wants a U.S. military presence in the Middle East, including regime change in Iran. And fourth, she would take us into what she calls “the world of democracies,” including, most alarmingly, Ukraine.
In this, she is running very close to Vladimir Putin, who would, in some form, welcome her presidency. Clinton, who has been campaigning as a centrist Democrat, is so far behind that there is little difference between her and Donald Trump. But Clinton has made mistakes even more profound than the ones Trump has made. Her foreign policy team, including national security adviser, John Podesta, was not vetted for conflicts of interest. She’s spent much of this campaign defending an imaginary Obama foreign policy legacy, which, as with Obama, turned out to be a disastrous one.
In retrospect, Clinton probably made a better argument for keeping the U.S. presence in Iraq in place than what she would have done in her first term. The Obama administration blundered and it was not just the Iraq War that blundered. It was the “Afghanistan strategy” and the drone programs that blundered, blundered, blundered, for the U.S. in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, blundering into more than one calamity that has made the world less safe. The administration’s foreign policy failures are so profound that they make up a body of foreign policy history, including the failures of the Obama administration in Syria.
But those failures led Clinton to make a mistake that will not be made by President Donald Trump, to do two things at once, to take the U.S. into what the New York Times called “a world of democracies.” And she did it in Ukraine, a place where she had an opportunity to be successful, even the best of them may fail.
Clinton’s mistake in Ukraine
