There are two men in American public life who evoke a sense of jeopardy about how their every sentence might end, and they happen to be the current and former presidents.
We have become accustomed to enduring the simultaneous nail-biting and toe-curling when Donald Trump speaks. Now Joe Biden has made a return to the political fray, however, in the form of an interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day, the world was reminded of why Americans elected Trump in the first place.
All the doddering and signs of mental infirmity were there. Every time he answered a question, you never felt confident he was going to reach the end of it at all, let alone in a way that made sense. “Imagine there being no Nato. Do you think Putin would have stopped at Ukraine?” he asked, as if the Russians had already occupied Poland.
“Putin said when he talked about going from Kyiv to Ukraine and why, he can’t stand the fact that the Russian dictatorship that he runs, that the Soviet Union, has collapsed,” he added. You kind of knew what he meant, but only by blurring your eyes and looking at it from a distance.
But the lack of self-awareness that such an interview constituted – with the BBC rather than an American broadcaster – paled into insignificance when it came to his attacks on Trump for appeasement over Ukraine. It’s not that one disagreed with the man; but given his own track record on the Middle East, was he really the best person to make that argument?
The interview came shortly after the release of a new Pentagon report revealing that Biden’s Gaza pier project – remember that? – had injured more than 60 American troops. It had cost the US taxpayer $230 million and was announced with great fanfare at Biden’s state of the union address in March last year.
By July, however, it had been mothballed, after a piece of it broke off in inclement weather and washed up among the sunbathers on Tel Aviv’s Frishman Beach. In the first week of its operations, three-quarters of the aid it had delivered had been stolen by Palestinians unknown on the way to a UN storage facility. Now we learn that more than a platoon of American servicemen were wounded in the debacle.
That summed it up, didn’t it? An out-of-touch leader, more concerned with virtue signalling to his own restive Left wing than making a meaningful contribution towards victory over jihadism, presides over a policy that would embarrass a tinpot dictator let alone the world’s biggest superpower.
That was only the beginning. It is important to recognise Biden’s early support for Israel – sending those two aircraft carrier strike groups in the wake of October 7 may have been instrumental in deterring Hezbollah, and defending its skies from Iranian missiles was crucial – but as time wore on, his approach boiled down to three things: public criticism of his ally, repetition of Hamas talking points about the suffering of civilians (which they were trying to cause in the first place), and a cloth-eared demand for de-escalation, no matter what situation arose.
Remember his administration insisting that Israel did not invade Rafah? Remember how Kamala Harris said she had “studied the maps” and there was “nowhere” for civilians to go? Remember how Israel ignored those ultimatums, evacuated a million civilians in ten days and proceeded to conquer the city with very few innocent lives lost?
If Biden’s appeasement – let us name it – had been heeded, Yahya Sinwar would still be alive. Rafah, with all its smuggling tunnels from Egypt through which it could rearm, would remain in the hands of Hamas. Iran’s air defences would be intact (Biden advised Israel to “take the win” rather than retaliate after Tehran rained 300 missiles into its territory in April last year).
Hezbollah, the largest and most lethal threat on Israel’s borders, would still be enjoying lobbing rockets into the Jewish state and finalising plans for its own version of October 7 on a larger scale. Who knows whether any further hostages would have been released. And does anybody believe that the Houthis would have thrown up their arms, as they did yesterday, with Biden still in the White House?
This is before we have even considered his cack-handed policy towards Iran, which involved telegraphing his desperation for a nuclear deal before even entering the Oval office, then allowing his negotiators to be strung along for months while quietly lifting as many sanctions as he could and watching as Tehran quietly made advances towards an atomic bomb. The man was all carrot, no stick.
So please, Joe Biden, do not lecture us about appeasement. Trump’s repulsive betrayal of Ukraine and Nato is indefensible, but you are hardly the man to make that argument. After all, if it wasn’t for your out-of-touch, self-satisfied, spineless administration, which placed appeasement at the heart of its foreign policy and was content on the domestic front to be ideologically captured by contemptible progressive radicals, Trump might never have been elected in the first place.
There are two men in American public life who evoke a sense of jeopardy about how their every sentence might end, and they happen to be the current and former presidents.
We have become accustomed to enduring the simultaneous nail-biting and toe-curling when Donald Trump speaks. Now Joe Biden has made a return to the political fray, however, in the form of an interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day, the world was reminded of why Americans elected Trump in the first place.
All the doddering and signs of mental infirmity were there. Every time he answered a question, you never felt confident he was going to reach the end of it at all, let alone in a way that made sense. “Imagine there being no Nato. Do you think Putin would have stopped at Ukraine?” he asked, as if the Russians had already occupied Poland.
“Putin said when he talked about going from Kyiv to Ukraine and why, he can’t stand the fact that the Russian dictatorship that he runs, that the Soviet Union, has collapsed,” he added. You kind of knew what he meant, but only by blurring your eyes and looking at it from a distance.
But the lack of self-awareness that such an interview constituted – with the BBC rather than an American broadcaster – paled into insignificance when it came to his attacks on Trump for appeasement over Ukraine. It’s not that one disagreed with the man; but given his own track record on the Middle East, was he really the best person to make that argument?
The interview came shortly after the release of a new Pentagon report revealing that Biden’s Gaza pier project – remember that? – had injured more than 60 American troops. It had cost the US taxpayer $230 million and was announced with great fanfare at Biden’s state of the union address in March last year.
By July, however, it had been mothballed, after a piece of it broke off in inclement weather and washed up among the sunbathers on Tel Aviv’s Frishman Beach. In the first week of its operations, three-quarters of the aid it had delivered had been stolen by Palestinians unknown on the way to a UN storage facility. Now we learn that more than a platoon of American servicemen were wounded in the debacle.
That summed it up, didn’t it? An out-of-touch leader, more concerned with virtue signalling to his own restive Left wing than making a meaningful contribution towards victory over jihadism, presides over a policy that would embarrass a tinpot dictator let alone the world’s biggest superpower.
That was only the beginning. It is important to recognise Biden’s early support for Israel – sending those two aircraft carrier strike groups in the wake of October 7 may have been instrumental in deterring Hezbollah, and defending its skies from Iranian missiles was crucial – but as time wore on, his approach boiled down to three things: public criticism of his ally, repetition of Hamas talking points about the suffering of civilians (which they were trying to cause in the first place), and a cloth-eared demand for de-escalation, no matter what situation arose.
Remember his administration insisting that Israel did not invade Rafah? Remember how Kamala Harris said she had “studied the maps” and there was “nowhere” for civilians to go? Remember how Israel ignored those ultimatums, evacuated a million civilians in ten days and proceeded to conquer the city with very few innocent lives lost?
If Biden’s appeasement – let us name it – had been heeded, Yahya Sinwar would still be alive. Rafah, with all its smuggling tunnels from Egypt through which it could rearm, would remain in the hands of Hamas. Iran’s air defences would be intact (Biden advised Israel to “take the win” rather than retaliate after Tehran rained 300 missiles into its territory in April last year).
Hezbollah, the largest and most lethal threat on Israel’s borders, would still be enjoying lobbing rockets into the Jewish state and finalising plans for its own version of October 7 on a larger scale. Who knows whether any further hostages would have been released. And does anybody believe that the Houthis would have thrown up their arms, as they did yesterday, with Biden still in the White House?
This is before we have even considered his cack-handed policy towards Iran, which involved telegraphing his desperation for a nuclear deal before even entering the Oval office, then allowing his negotiators to be strung along for months while quietly lifting as many sanctions as he could and watching as Tehran quietly made advances towards an atomic bomb. The man was all carrot, no stick.
So please, Joe Biden, do not lecture us about appeasement. Trump’s repulsive betrayal of Ukraine and Nato is indefensible, but you are hardly the man to make that argument. After all, if it wasn’t for your out-of-touch, self-satisfied, spineless administration, which placed appeasement at the heart of its foreign policy and was content on the domestic front to be ideologically captured by contemptible progressive radicals, Trump might never have been elected in the first place.