The Biden Doctrine: Beg
Joe Biden is begging the Taliban to spare the U.S. embassy when they knock down the Afghan capital of Kabul and overrun the country. And with the fall of Kandahar, Herat, and all the other big Afghan cities, that could be any day now.
Here's the lovely story from the New York Times:
WASHINGTON — American negotiators are trying to extract assurances from the Taliban that they will not attack the U.S. Embassy in Kabul if the extremist group takes over the country's government and ever wants to receive foreign aid, three American officials said.
The effort, led by Zalmay Khalilzad, the chief American envoy in talks with the Taliban, seeks to stave off a full evacuation of the embassy as they rapidly seize cities across Afghanistan. On Thursday, the State Department announced it was sending home an unspecified number of the 1,400 Americans stationed at the embassy and drawing down to what the agency's spokesman, Ned Price, described as a "core diplomatic presence" in Kabul.
So after 20 years of warfare, the United States of America is reduced to begging the Taliban to spare our humble embassy so as to save America the humiliation of having a desperate, Saigon 1975–style rooftop evacuation as the communists close in.
The Taliban is out doing victory dances like this. They're hanging collaborators like this. They've fired up the kidnap/sex-slave rackets and are hunting down local journalists. They've already been issued stern warnings from the U.S. embassy in Kabul about this to no effect, and $2 trillion's worth of warfare from the U.S. over 20 years has had no effect, either.
Think they'll take to Joe Biden's call to spare our embassy to ensure no hurt feelings and public relations problems?
Even Biden's implicit bribery offer sounds weak. The Taliban already know how to deal drugs and ship illegals. And they've already gotten hold of billions of dollars' worth of U.S. weapons. Once they take Kabul, they'll have access to $9.5 billion in central bank reserves. Bribes? To people whose raison d'être is looting, pillaging, raping, marauding, trafficking, destroying, and dancing on the graves of their enemies? It's kind of pathetic.
But it does fit in with what appears to be the emerging Biden Doctrine of U.S. foreign policy. Many presidents have historically had them — James Monroe's was an order to Europe to keep its grubby paws off the nascent democracies of Latin America so they could develop properly. Ronald Reagan's was peace through strength. George W. Bush's was shock and awe. Barack Obama's was apologize and coddle.
Biden's is to make a mess and beg our enemies and adversaries to clean it up.
How else do we explain the pattern of events in Biden's short, miserable presidency?
After kneecapping the U.S. oil industry, as the New York Post put it, shutting down a major U.S. and Canadian energy pipeline project, which had been years in the making, and canceling drilling on public lands, Biden officials were begging OPEC to pump more oil to bring energy prices down.
"OPEC+ must do more to support the recovery," national security adviser Jake Sullivan declared Wednesday, and his boss backed him up. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies cut 10 million barrels a day тБа— 10 percent of global demand тБа— at the pandemic's start as demand dried up. It's since raised output by about 4.2 million barrels a day and promises to add another 400,000 barrels a day until it's back to pre-COVID levels.
"Simply not enough," says Sullivan, as Biden "has made clear that he wants Americans to have access to affordable and reliable energy, including at the pump."
That's news to us. On his very first day in office, Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have brought 830,000 barrels of Canadian oil a day down south — and thousands of good-paying jobs with it. In March, he put a moratorium on oil leasing on federal land, which a judge later found to be illegal. Later, he canceled Trump-era oil leases in Alaska.
Who made the mess? Biden. Who is being begged for a bailout? Middle Eastern dictatorships and assorted petro-tyrants who've had it in for America for a long time. His officials claim that OPEC states have lots of room for expanding production. Guess what: So do we.
It gets worse. Biden also begged Vladimir Putin to not cyber-attack or ransomware-attack certain infrastructure locations, sixteen in all, while implicitly leaving open the possibility that everything else was open season. The list itself told the Russians what our strategic priorities were, while the open-season invitation to everything else assured the Russian cyber-attackers, whoever they are, that all else would be met with no consequences. Biden made a mess by telling all, then made a request to Putin to be nice to us and not ransomware us, or else. Think it'll scare Putin straight?
Here's another mess: Biden halted construction of President Trump's border wall and allowed $1 billion's worth of building equipment to rot or get stolen on the ground rather than finish the wall that was started. Then he invited illegals in, assuring families traveling together and children traveling alone that they wouldn't be sent back. They're not only not being sent back; they're being flown or bused to their destinations of choice at taxpayer expense. Biden's also got amnesty on the table for them in the Bernie Sanders–crafted budget reconciliation coming up, and he's attempted to expand DACA. Yet he, and his worthless border czar, Kamala Harris, have both taken note of the historic border surge that has come of this dinner triangle to illegals and begged the migrants...not to come. "Do not come, do not come," Harris said in Guatemala. "I can say quite clearly: Don't come," Biden told ABC in an interview. "We're in the process of getting set up, don't leave your town or city or community." To keep the candle flickering for the illegal migrants, there was also this: "There's help on the way, but now is not the time to make the journey," an unnamed Biden official said, NBC News reported.
He made the mess, and now he's begging the migrants not to come.
There's a second dimension to this in the state-to-state relations on surging migration.
Not only had Biden halted the wall construction to facilitate illegal travel, he also scrapped treaties with Mexico and Central American countries about first countries of refuge to end mass abuse of the asylum system. The presidents of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras have all cited this treaty abrogation as reason for the border surge. And Joe Biden's response to Mexico? Clean up after me. Biden's been pressuring Mexico to use its military and police enforce its southern border and halt smuggling rackets, which are the source of the surge, instead of do it himself. He made the mess, but he wants Mexico to do the job he won't do.
It's very much a sorry pattern — create a problem and then beg our enemies, opponents, or injured parties to pull his chestnuts out of the fire. It's a pattern, and it's why Biden is such an unfit president. There's a reason Robert Gates famously quipped that Biden has been "wrong on nearly every foreign policy question," despite claiming he's some kind of master at foreign policy matters. He's the master of one thing: the Biden Doctrine, and it's embarrassing.
Image: Twitter screen shot.
To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.