Why Can’t Americans Have an Honest Foreign Policy Discussion?
President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump had a lot to say about America’s place in the world at the debate last night. And very little of it was honest. Neither man wants to level with the public about the serious tradeoffs this country faces on the global stage.
Biden insisted that the United States can still dominate the entire world, fighting slow-burn proxy wars forever without any real cost to Americans. Trump offered the flip side of that vision, promising to end the wars on favorable terms without taking any risks or making any compromises with rival countries. Their attacks on each other were often incoherent and contradictory because neither one could offer a straightforward vision of foreign policy.
And when it came to a real achievement that both presidents had a hand in—pulling U.S. troops out of the Afghan war—neither one seemed to want the credit. Trump, who negotiated the agreement to withdraw, called the withdrawal “the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country.” Biden, who had forcefully defended the case for withdrawing two years ago, shied away from Trump’s attack, quickly noting that “we got over 100,000 Americans and others out of Afghanistan” and then moving on.
Instead, Biden staked his reputation on the war in Ukraine. He claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to take Kyiv in five days, but has lost “thousands and thousands of troops,” thanks to U.S. military aid for Ukraine. “All that money we give,” Biden bragged, goes right back to American weapons manufacturers.
“And by the way, I got fifty other nations around the world to support Ukraine, including Japan and South Korea, because they understand that this kind of dislocation is a serious threat to the whole world peace,” Biden said. “No major war in Europe has ever been able to be contained just to Europe.”
The Japanese and South Korean support was more a sign of desperation than success. The war in Ukraine has burned through American and European munitions stocks, and despite huge influxes of taxpayer money, weapons manufacturers have not been able to keep up with demand. Desperate for ammunition, the Biden administration began borrowing antiaircraft missiles from Japan and artillery shells from South Korea.
Trump, on the other hand, could not give a coherent answer on the war. He said that Putin’s terms for peace are “not acceptable, but look, this is a war that never should have started,” and promised to “get it settled” before even taking office. Trump claimed that, because he had convinced European countries to contribute more to NATO in a “very secret meeting,” he could similarly get European funding for the war in Ukraine.
Although Trump is right that European countries should be spending more on their own defense, and are moving in that direction, he did not make it happen simply by waving his hands. Europe’s defense spending began to increase in 2014, after the first Russian incursions into Ukraine, before Trump took office. And Trump himself w
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