Only a liberal academic or loyal Democratic Party hack could characterize Joe Biden’s presidency as “extraordinarily successful and a blessing for our country.” Timothy Naftali, a scholar at Columbia University’s Institute of Global Politics and the author of a biography of George H. W. Bush, in an interview published on the Foreign Affairs website, told Foreign Affairs’ senior editor Hugh Eakin that Biden’s dropping out of the presidential election was “the most important thing that he can do at this point to Trump-proof the United States, in terms of our national security.” Trump Derangement Syndrome is alive and well in the halls of academia.
This is the same “presidential historian” who infamously concluded on the basis of one brief phone conversation about African leaders that Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon were “racists that enabled each other.” The same Timothy Naftali, in reviewing a biography of President Jimmy Carter, praised Carter’s “many achievements,” especially in foreign policy. I suppose that anyone who can find “many achievements” in the Carter presidency can also view the Biden presidency — which is coming to an end in a humiliating acknowledgment of his serious cognitive impairment — as “extraordinary successful” and a “blessing to our country.”
One of the successes noted by Naftali is the Ukraine war — a war that the Biden administration disastrously failed to deter and seems determined to expand, dangerously risking a conflict between NATO and a nuclear-armed Russia for no vital American national security interest. On Biden’s watch, Russia invaded Ukraine, Hamas attacked Israel, Iran is closer to obtaining nuclear weapons, China and Russia are closer than at anytime since the early 1950s, and China increasingly threatens the independence of Taiwan. And, of course, there was the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, which left Americans dead, millions of dollars of military hardware abandoned, and brought the Taliban back to power. If this is “extraordinary” success, what constitutes failure? Naftali concludes that Biden “restored America’s role in the world.” And in Naftali’s “world,” in which Jimmy Carter had “many achievements,” I guess that makes some sort of sense. Many of us can agree that Biden was as “successful” as Jimmy Carter.
Then, unmentioned by Naftali, is the crisis at our southern border, where as many as 10-15 million illegal immigrants have entered the United States during the Biden presidency. The lack of a southern border is not only a domestic crisis, but a national security crisis of the highest order, as many of the illegal entrants are young Chinese men and others are from terrorist havens in the Middle East.
Naftali writes that “Biden’s one-term presidency is destined to be viewed very positively.” Especially if academics like Naftali are the ones viewing it. Biden, he writes, “brought us out of Trumpian chaos.” But during that Trumpian chaos, Russia didn’t invade Ukraine or any other country. The Middle East was at peace. The Taliban remained out of power in Afghanistan. Trump shifted American foreign policy and its resources toward Asia, recognizing that China posed the greatest threat to our national security.
Naftali calls Trump and Republicans who support him “isolationists” as distinguished from Biden and the “internationalists.” But there was nothing “isolationist” about Trump’s foreign policy. He didn’t withdraw from NATO, but like some past presidents insisted that the NATO countries provide more for their own defense. He established good relations with Japan and India — allies that in the 21st century are more important to our security than the nations of Western Europe. He negotiated or renegotiated favorable (to America) trade deals. Trump certainly put “America First” in his foreign policy decisions, but so, too, did George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan. Perhaps, in Naftali’s world, Biden and Carter were better than those presidents, too.
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