From Afghanistan to Ukraine, from the Middle East to China, the Biden administration's foreign policy failures are stacking up. In this episode, Ben Shapiro takes a deep dive into the failures of the Joe Biden administration on foreign policy, and explains why they are so bad, and why we should all be worried about what Joe Biden is actually up to in terms of foreign policy and what he thinks he's up to, and how he's actually doing it. Ben Shapiro's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Do you like your web browsing history being seen and sold to advertisers? Get ExpressVPN right now at ExpressVpn.me/BenShapiroShow and use the promo code: "ExpressVPN" to get 10% off your first month with discount code: ExpressVPN at checkout. You can also join the ExpressVPN membership program, which gives you access to all of ExpressVPN's features, including the VIP features, for as little as $99.99. If you don't already have an Express VPN membership plan, you can get 20% off the first month by becoming a member of the program, and get an ad-free trial when you become a patron! You'll get 7% off for the entire year, plus an additional 3 months free when you upgrade to a Vimeo membership plan when you sign up for Vimeo, Vimeo and Vimeo becomes available. Vimeo gets access to the show. The Vimeo video version of The Ben Shapiro Show. Thanks to Vimeo for sponsoring the show! The show is now has a new ad-only version of the show, "Ben Shapiro's Vimeo. . Subscribe to the full-length episode of the Ben Shapiro Podcast. Subscribe on Vimeo! Subscribe and review the show? Subscribe at Vimeo Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on Audible Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about Ben Shapiro on YouTube Subscribe on Podcharts Subscribe on YouTube Learn more on this podcast on Podcoin Connected by Ben Shapiro Learn more at Ben Shapiro s Podcasts Connect with Ben Shapiro: v=a_t=1_a& other? & other Podcasts on Leave a Review Thank you for listening to Ben Shapiro & more Ben Shapiro and other links on this episode Thanks Ben Shapiro is a big Ben Shapiro podcast and much more on the show on The FiveThirtyEight Podcast
00:00:21.000When reviewing the record of the Biden administration on foreign policy, Let's just review for one second where foreign policy was when Joe Biden took office.
00:00:29.000So, there was no open war with Russia, for example.
00:00:32.000There was no open conflict with China.
00:00:35.000There was a crackdown on China that was happening.
00:00:37.000There was a move towards strengthening sanctions against Russia that had been happening, and stronger movement on Russia's borders.
00:00:45.000By the Trump administration in the Middle East, peace had broken out.
00:00:49.000The simple fact of the matter is that foreign policy might have been the brightest spot of the Trump administration.
00:00:52.000And Joe Biden has signally capitulated on a variety of issues, and he's created tremendous lack of clarity on others.
00:00:58.000And that lack of clarity leads to further conflict.
00:01:01.000One of the key tenets of foreign policy is that lack of clarity leads to miscommunication.
00:01:05.000Miscommunication leads to people making bad assumptions.
00:01:07.000Those bad assumptions lead to actual dead people.
00:01:10.000This has been the history of foreign policy ranging well back before World War One.
00:01:14.000And yet the Biden administration, where it's not wrong, it is unclear.
00:01:17.000And that is a serious, serious problem.
00:01:21.000And so we've seen over the past few months an attempt by Joe Biden to prop up his foreign policy as sort of a key component of a successful administration.
00:01:30.000So the most obvious example is that last week, Joe Biden was out there and he was championing the idea that he had done a wonderful job in Afghanistan based on the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri.
00:01:40.000Okay, so the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was the person in charge of Al Qaeda, this was a big win for Joe Biden.
00:01:46.000According to the media, according to the press, it was going to revitalize his hopes at a 2024 run, revitalize democratic hopes in 2022.
00:01:53.000There's only one problem, which is that Zawahiri was killed in the middle of Kabul.
00:01:57.000Here was Joe Biden championing all of the killing of al-Zawahiri last week.
00:02:02.000On Saturday, at my direction, the United States successfully concluded an airstrike in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed the emir of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
00:02:15.000Now, justice has been delivered, and this terrorist leader is no more.
00:02:21.000People around the world no longer need to fear the vicious and determined killer.
00:02:26.000The United States continues to demonstrate our resolve and our capacity to defend the American people against those who seek to do us harm.
00:02:35.000Okay, well, all of that sounds very nice, except for the fact that he surrendered the entire country to people like Ayman al-Zawahiri, which is why Zawahiri was sitting, you know, in the middle of Kabul.
00:02:43.000And to understand how badly Biden screwed up Afghanistan, you have to understand that he's been wrong about pretty much every foreign policy issue of our lifetime.
00:02:51.000Joe Biden doesn't actually have any ideas of his own.
00:02:53.000The ideas that he has are just incorrect.
00:02:55.000Very often what Joe Biden does, he just follows the center of the Democratic Party.
00:02:58.000And so if the center of the Democratic Party is pro-Afghan war, he's very pro-Afghan war.
00:03:02.000If it becomes anti-Afghan war, he becomes very anti-Afghan war.
00:03:05.000And then he becomes very set in his own bad ideas, and the result is disaster.
00:03:09.000There's a reason why Joe Biden's approval rating tanked from like 50% down into the 30s during the Afghanistan debacle in 2021.
00:03:16.000It has not picked up yet because it underscores the incompetence of this human being.
00:03:19.000So to understand Joe Biden on Afghanistan, you really have to go all the way back to like the initiation of the war in Afghanistan in the aftermath of September 11th.
00:03:27.000So Joe Biden was full scale on board with the war in Afghanistan.
00:04:17.000If we don't stay the course, we have to be there long haul.
00:04:20.000The first real test of post 9-11 engagement is whether or not we're going to stay the course in Afghanistan.
00:04:27.000If Chairman Carr's eyes to govern effectively, the first thing he needs is security.
00:04:32.000The second is a plan which is underway to rebuild a military and a police force and an infusion of economic assistance just to do the basic things, like put in fax machines, telephones, desk, paper, the things that are the necessary tools of governance in the most basic of ways.
00:04:51.000History is going to judge us very harshly, I believe, if we allow the hope of a liberated Afghanistan to evaporate Because we are fearful of the phrase nation building or we do not stay the course.
00:05:05.000I mean, that's an amazing statement by Joe Biden circa February 2002.
00:05:08.000History is going to judge us harshly if we go against nation building.
00:05:11.000OK, well, as we will see, that opinion has changed rather radically over time.
00:05:15.000And now the pitch from the Democratic Party is that the bad war is the war in Iraq and the good war is the war in Afghanistan, right? This is what is being pitched by, for example, the presidential candidate, Barack Obama. Joe Biden has followed along in those footsteps.
00:05:27.000And so he makes that point in debate in October 2008, we're bogged down in Iraq.
00:05:30.000We need to do more in Afghanistan. It's not a surprise at all that we have been significantly limited in our ability to deal with worldwide terror because we are tied down, bogged down in Iraq.
00:05:43.000Afghanistan is slipping toward failure because there's never been a priority and it has to become one.
00:05:51.000We spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spent on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan building that country.
00:06:04.000Okay, so that was the good war, right?
00:06:16.000After my trip, President Obama ordered a comprehensive review of the policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan.
00:06:23.000And we want to make sure that our goals are clear and achievable because I would respectfully suggest none of you, nor us, could say precisely what our goal is in Afghanistan.
00:08:07.000So, April 14th, 2021, fast forward to Joe Biden's actual presidency.
00:08:10.000He says, we went there to root out Al Qaeda, and we accomplished that, and now it's time to come home.
00:08:15.000We went to Afghanistan in 2001 to root out al Qaeda, to prevent future terrorist attacks against the United States planned from Afghanistan.
00:09:53.000Okay, and then by August, of course, there'd been a massive terror attack against American troops.
00:09:56.000The entire country had collapsed to the Palabam, and Joe Biden was forced to stagger to the microphone, announcing a terrorist attack, killing 13 American service people, led by ISIS-K, possibly with the cooperation of the very people that Joe Biden was basically handing over Kabul to.
00:10:15.000This evening in Kabul, as you all know, Terrorists attacked that we've been talking about, worried about, that the intelligence community has assessed, has undertaken an attack by a group known as ISIS-K.
00:10:37.000Took the lives of American service members, standing guard at the airport, This is what a failed foreign policy looks like.
00:10:48.000And then to sort of backfill the failure, on October 7th, Biden announced that the drawdown was complete.
00:10:54.000There were hundreds of American citizens who were left behind enemy lines at a minimum.
00:14:13.000And then, of course, Russia helped us with Syria by basically taking Syria off the hands of President Obama to the wild cheers of people like Joe Biden.
00:14:23.000Now, in 2014, Russia invades Crimea, and Joe Biden has some words for Russia.
00:14:27.000That's pretty much all he has for Russia.
00:14:29.000So he was vice president when that administration did nothing over the invasion of Crimea.
00:15:09.000It turns out that the steps that the White House pursued under Vice President Biden were extraordinarily weak.
00:15:14.000Basically, they announced a visa ban on a couple of Russian and Ukrainian officials, and they canceled a couple of talks on trades and commercial ties.
00:15:21.000That was pretty much all of the things.
00:15:24.000And by the way, they then proceeded to deny lethal aid to Ukraine.
00:15:28.000As Mark Thiessen points out at the Washington Post, In 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea and began arming separatists in eastern Ukraine with tanks, armored vehicles, and rocket launchers, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko came to Washington to plead for weapons to defend his country.
00:15:41.000In an impassioned address to a joint session of Congress, with Biden sitting directly behind him, Poroshenko said his country appreciated the non-lethal assistance he was getting, but declared, quote, The Obama administration was unmoved.
00:15:53.000The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that President Obama stuck to his refusal to provide weapons or other lethal military gear to Ukraine, despite a passionate appeal Thursday for help in fighting pro-Russian rebels by Ukraine's president.
00:16:10.000One frustrated Pentagon official said, quote, What kind of message does that send anyway?
00:16:14.000We're sending MREs while they're being invaded by an aggressor.
00:16:17.000So why exactly would Vladimir Putin have believed that an invasion of Ukraine full scale under Joe Biden as president would have done anything?
00:16:26.000Especially because Joe Biden doubled down on that in June of 2021.
00:16:30.000According to politico.com, this is dated June 18th, 2021, the Biden White House has temporarily halted a military aid package to Ukraine that would include lethal weapons, a plan originally made in response to aggressive Russian troop movement along Ukraine's border this spring.
00:16:43.000That aid package was worth up to $100 million, according to four people familiar with internal deliberations.
00:16:47.000The National Security Council directed officials to put the package together as Washington grew increasingly concerned over a massive Russian military buildup near the border with Ukraine and in the Crimean Peninsula.
00:16:58.000But officials at the NSC put the proposal on hold after Russia announced it would draw down troops stationed near Ukraine and in the lead-up to Joe Biden's high-stakes summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
00:17:09.000So they froze the package, right, of lethal aid to Ukraine, like last year.
00:17:14.000So this notion that Joe Biden had somehow a role in dissuading Vladimir Putin, it was Joe Biden's weakness that led Vladimir Putin to invade in the first place.
00:17:22.000And in December 2021, Joe Biden was openly warning that there would be a strong response to Ukraine invasion.
00:17:30.000Apparently, Biden held a video call between Vladimir Putin and himself in which he voiced worries over the troop buildups and suggested that there would be strong measures amid the Ukrainian invasion.
00:17:42.000And so, Vladimir Putin made a rational, if wrong, calculation, which is that there would be no actual effect if, in fact, there was an invasion of Ukraine.
00:17:50.000And it turns out that the United States was then forced to pour tens of billions of dollars into Ukraine.
00:17:56.000Europe was deprived of its oil supply and all the rest.
00:17:59.000And meanwhile, the United States, by the way, is not ratcheting up its energy supply to make up for the deficit.
00:18:03.000So, Joe Biden said, we're pulling out of Afghanistan to deal with Russia.
00:18:07.000And this actually prompted Russia to invade Ukraine.
00:18:10.000Meanwhile, the situation with China is becoming more and more fraud because the Biden administration is not taking the measures necessary to strengthen the American economy at home.
00:18:18.000Now, Biden has done better on China than he has done with, for example, Russia or Afghanistan, for sure.
00:18:26.000rhetoric in the past. He's been pretty conciliatory toward China, which is why China probably figures we better do something now before Biden is out of office because we wait for a Republican president might not go so well. As late as 2020, Joe Biden was out there saying China isn't going to eat our lunch. There's really nothing to worry about. China is going to eat our lunch. Come on, man.
00:18:45.000They can't even figure out how to deal with the fact that they have this great division between the China Sea and the mountains in the east, I mean in the west.
00:18:57.000They can't figure out how they're going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system.
00:19:02.000I mean, you know, they're not bad folks, folks, but guess what?
00:19:23.000China has an overall goal, and I don't criticize them for the goal, but they have an overall goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world.
00:19:36.000That's not going to happen on my watch.
00:19:38.000Well, I mean, I think that China probably thinks it was going to happen on his watch.
00:19:42.000As Miranda Devine wrote in the New York Post in July of this year, like a couple of weeks ago, it took a certain bloodless chutzpah for the president to place his scandal-ridden son front and center at a White House function last week.
00:19:53.000Hunter Biden popped up at Thursday's Medal of Freedom ceremony to glad hand a network from his front row perch, even as he awaits indictment by a grand jury in Delaware over his shady foreign business dealings, most lucratively in China.
00:20:05.000Just one day earlier, the FBI Director Christopher Wray and his British MI5 counterpart made a rare joint public appearance in London to sound the alarm over the growing serious and economic threat posed by China, which aims to steal our IP and corrupt our politics.
00:20:19.000counterintelligence officials issued a bulletin to state and local officials warning of an escalating campaign by China to manipulate and influence politicians to push Washington for China-friendly policies.
00:20:28.000Biden has gone soft on China since becoming president.
00:20:31.000He diverted at least a million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, according to Reuters, to the state-owned gas giant Senepec in China.
00:20:39.000He disbanded the China initiative, a national security program set up by the Trump administration to combat China's economic espionage at universities and research institutions.
00:20:46.000He revoked Trump-era restrictions against TikTok, instead promising a national security review, which has led to no action for over a year.
00:20:53.000In another unwinding of hardline Trump policies, the Biden administration granted the Chinese tech giant Huawei a license to purchase chips used in automobile manufacturing.
00:21:00.000He has not pressed China on the origins of COVID-19.
00:21:03.000He suspended tariffs on Chinese solar panels.
00:21:05.000He's reportedly contemplating lifting further Trump tariffs against Chinese imports.
00:21:12.000So, you know, the simple fact that Joe Biden is saying that he is strong on China while being increasingly weak on China is just another indicator that when it comes to Joe Biden's foreign policy, he's a mess.
00:21:23.000And the mess that is Joe Biden's foreign policy extends to nearly every area of the globe.
00:21:27.000I mean, Joe Biden continues to push an Iran deal that is completely unworkable.
00:21:31.000Iran continues to buck all demands from the International Atomic Energy Agency for any sort of verifiable commitment to denuclearize.
00:21:40.000Iran continues to foster terrorism around the region, develop ballistic missile technology, and yet Joe Biden is out there saying that he wants to get back to the Iran deal.
00:21:46.000Joe Biden has made such a mess of things in the Middle East that he's been forced to reverse himself repeatedly on, for example, Saudi Arabia.
00:21:52.000Because it turns out that the Obama-Biden backing of Iran created a Sunni alliance against Iran.
00:21:59.000Joe Biden is not particularly fond of that Sunni alliance against Iran, despite the fact that it has created the Abraham Accords.
00:22:05.000And yet he is now subject to fist-bumping MBS because he has cut off America's oil supply through both the war in Ukraine and also through failure to up domestic oil production.
00:22:15.000So when you look abroad and you see a world that is filled with increasing chaos, understand that that is because Joe Biden is really, really bad at this.
00:22:22.000He was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
00:22:23.000He has always been extraordinarily bad at foreign policy on nearly every score.
00:22:29.000Everything that he has touched, he has essentially been wrong on.
00:22:31.000It's very difficult to find an area of American foreign policy where Joe Biden has been consistently correct.
00:22:37.000So when we look in a more chaotic world under Joe Biden, understand that, again, that is because Joe Biden has never been good at this.
00:22:43.000All right, we've reached the end of today's show.
00:22:45.000We'll be back here tomorrow with more.
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