‘Walkaway’ Joe Biden has just put the whole world in danger
A shambling speech about Afghanistan, delivered five hours late, raises serious questions about the US president’s ability to do the job, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
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Joe Biden has a new nickname: Walkaway Joe.
It’s not meant as a compliment.
Because whenever the Joe Biden presidency ends, the defining image of his presidency will be this: The bleary-eyed, self-justifying President of the United States turning his back on reporters and walking away from questions demanding to know if he will rescue every American trapped in Afghanistan before the Taliban’s August 31 deadline.
As if the defeat in Afghanistan or the scenes of chaos at Kabul airport complete with desperate Afghans falling from C-17 Globemaster military transports were not bad enough, on Tuesday afternoon Washington time and after an unexplained five-hour delay, Joe Biden managed to bring the country lower.
And in the process Australia and the world realised just how much the man currently occupying the Oval Office was putting them at risk.
Amazingly, Biden started out his address not by talking about the Taliban’s final conquest of Afghanistan or the thousands of Americans trapped in the country.
Rather, Biden muttered his way through pre-prepared remarks with an update on his inflationary, big government “Build Back Better” stimulus agenda.
But as one commentator quipped, the only people building back better under Biden are the Taliban.
Then, to make it all the more surreal, Biden went on to talk about “voting rights” and the “climate crisis” before launching into a round of gaslighting so large it had its own carbon footprint.
G7 leaders, he said, were supportive of the way he’d handled the withdrawal from Afghanistan – despite very public comments from the British and others to the contrary.
Biden also claimed that America can get all its people out before the Taliban’s deadline of August 31 – despite not knowing how many Americans remain and the Taliban stopping Afghans from getting to Kabul airport.
The consequences for this will be profound and felt far beyond Afghanistan’s borders.
The Taliban, not Joe Biden, is in control of the evacuation now, and in an instant they could create a hostage crisis 100 times worse than what befell Jimmy Carter after the Iranian Revolution.
Taiwan, and indeed the entire Western Pacific, is now that much closer to domination by the Chinese Communist Party.
The US, too, is now suddenly at far greater risk of terrorism.
While the administration claims no unvetted Afghan refugees will be allowed into the country, Homeland Security officials have also flagged the danger of Afghan terrorists sneaking in through the Biden administration’s porous southern border with Mexico.
To be sure, every president from George W. Bush on bears responsibility for the way America got into, and then stayed, in Afghanistan. But the current debacle is on Biden.
His decision-making processes are why the US is in this mess, and his appearances increasingly raise serious questions about whether he is capable of getting out of it.
Recall that during last year’s election campaign, the American media did everything they could to cover for Biden’s stumbling, shambolic, forgetful ways because they were determined to show Trump the door.
Hypocritically, they also analysed every step taken and word uttered by his predecessor for signs of senility, with every newspaper from the New York Times to the USA Today entertaining variations on the question, “Does Donald Trump have dementia?”
But since Biden’s inauguration, the press have continued to look the other way — even as, a few months ago, the president became the first man in history to stumble up the stairs to Air Force One.
As thanks, they get a president who won’t even respond to them.
Eventually, journalists who did so much to get Biden elected and now get so little in return will surely have to start once again asking questions.
But whatever the truth of his mental condition, Biden has never been a great foreign policy brain.
Robert Gates, who served as Barack Obama’s Secretary of Defence, wrote in his memoirs of Biden, “I think he’s been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
In an absolutely devastating profile of Biden published by the normally Democrat-aligned New Republic magazine just a month after 9/11, the man who would 20 years later become president was revealed as a stumbling fool who didn’t understand the most basic facts about the Middle East.
Recounting a meeting of staffers of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee which he chaired at the time, the article related how Biden bumbled around for a while before he “(hit) on an idea: America needs to show the Arab world that we’re not bent on its destruction.”
“Seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran,” Biden told the group, before “(surveying) the table with raised eyebrows, a ‘How do ya like that?’ look on his face.”
According to the profile, his staffers sat dumbfounded, trying to digest the fact that the Democratic Party’s most prominent spokesman on the newly-launched War on Terror did not even grasp that the split between Persian Iran and the Arab world was one of the biggest divides in the region.
This is the man America, Australia, and the world, is stuck with for perhaps the next three years, if his faculties and handlers permit.
It’s hard to imagine how things can get any worse with this guy in the White House and yet it is almost certain they will.
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