President Biden’s foreign-policy failures have set the world on fire — and the conflagration is now the backdrop as Republicans present their very different vision.
Biden has invited multiple conflicts by his projection of American weakness, his open border welcoming drugs and terrorists, an energy policy that attacks American-made resources but promotes our enemies’ products and a defense-industrial base unprepared for war against China (let alone its wider axis).
In contrast, the GOP’s party platform reflects a traditionally conservative if not hawkish national security approach: secure borders, a doctrine of “peace through strength” and a “bigger, better, and stronger” military.
Republicans promise to unleash American energy, counter China, defeat terrorism, stand with Israel and embrace modern military objectives like missile defense, AI and space dominance.
They even pledge to deport foreign pro-Hamas radicals from college campuses.
The agenda is no surprise, of course, since it reflects the way Donald Trump largely governed for four years — often to the chagrin of his party’s neo-isolationists.
But it is policy outcomes where Trump and Biden most radically differ.
Where Trump worked to build a wall along the southern border and dramatically lowered illegal entries, Biden’s reversals of Trump policies led to millions of illegal crossings — including thousands from countries like China, Russia and Iran, and at least hundreds more linked to ISIS.
Trump worked with Congress to increase defense spending. Biden tried to cut it.
Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan was a double national-security nightmare — breathing new life into Al Qaeda and ISIS-K, while emboldening America’s top state adversaries to go on offense, starting with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Trump pushed NATO to increase its defense spending and unhook from Russian energy.
Biden lifted sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, embraced anti-American energy policies, gave Vladimir Putin a five-year extension on a flawed nuclear-weapons treaty and put Moscow in charge of brokering a new Iran deal.
Trump left the White House exerting maximum pressure on Iran and extending maximum support to Israel, a strategy that yielded historic peace agreements.
Biden’s record is one of maximum deference to Iran and pressure on Israel — a strategy that led to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, a seven-front war against Israel and nonstop attacks on Red Sea commerce.
The world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism is now on the one-yard line of the nuclear-weapons threshold.
Trump established China as his top national-security priority and withdrew from the China-aligned World Health Organization after it helped hide the origins of COVID-19.
Biden favored accommodation over confrontation with China in hopes of sealing an ineffectual climate-change deal, and our East Asian democratic allies are paying the price.
An already dangerous and unstable world will be far worse four years from now if we maintain open borders, focus on wokism over winning in our military, stifle American energy, expand our debt, degrade our defense industrial base and let Iran acquire nuclear weapons while disinvesting from our own.
Restoring deterrence, however, demands strong leadership.
Deterrence has two pillars: capability and will.
Every American president has capability, thanks to the US military.
The commander-in-chief’s will, however, gets tested.
Trump’s will was tested by Iran, with Qassam Soleimani losing his life as a result.
Biden’s will was tested by the Taliban — and Kabul fell, setting off a chain reaction that led to the invasion of Ukraine and an emboldened China-led axis.
When dictators today hear the American president say “Don’t,” they believe it means “Go.”
That must change quickly.
The old Chinese proverb “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey” may soon come into play — if elected, Trump will likely be tested again.
He will need to act swiftly to reverse any lingering perception of a United States unwilling to act forcefully in its own interests.
But with America’s enemies now staring at a photo of Trump lifting his fist in the air, blood dripping, moments after being shot, they ought not mistake populist rhetoric and political strategy for an unwillingness to fight.
Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is a former National Security Council official and senior US Senate aide.