Leer en Español
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN came to the White House with the promise that he would reinsert the United States back into the international community. According to Biden, the Trump administration embarrassed America before the world, and he would arrive to reverse that.
Although the premise is false, since Trump stood out for his pragmatic and efficient foreign policy, Biden’s will ended up being diluted in the face of what has been a string of international disasters. We are probably facing one of the American presidents with the worst foreign policy in history, and here are some examples of that:
Betrayal of Colombia
In November of last year, the State Department revoked the designation of the criminal organization Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) as a terrorist group.
Echoing the agreements signed in Havana between the Colombian government and the FARC, the Biden White House decided to favor the FARC.
This decision, which aims to whitewash a terrorist organization, responsible for hundreds of attacks, thousands of deaths, and a bloody conflict over several decades, constitutes a direct betrayal of the majority of Colombians, since, in a referendum in 2016, 50.21% of Colombians expressed their rejection of the Havana agreements.
The White House decision was highly questioned by GOP congressmen representing part of the Hispanic community. Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott called Biden’s decision “a step backwards for stability and security in Colombia.”
“[The decision] will only provide these terrorists and their political sympathizers with greater capacity, financial resources, and purported international legitimacy to destabilize our closest ally in the region,” Rubio and Scott said in an open letter.
Image of the armed conflict in Colombia in 2010. (EFE)
Cuban-born Florida Representative María Elvira Salazar said the decision to remove the FARC from the list of terrorist organizations “is a slap in the face to Colombians.”
“They have been destroying, killing, kidnapping, raping, being drug traffickers and terrorists for more than 60 years. They are going to take them off the list. This is giving a medal of honor to these bandits,” Salazar said on her social networks.
Socialism’s advancement on the continent and Petro’s triumph
With Biden in the White House, Honduras, Peru, Chile and, finally, Colombia, became governed by extremist leftist politicians, allies of the Chavist and Castro regimes.
Attempts have been made to market this rollback of freedoms in the region as not being the responsibility of the White House, but this would be a mistake. Since Latin America is the closest region to the United States, it should be a priority for the government of the day.
Especially, considering that when the United States loses an ally in the continent, its enemies (meaning China, Iran, or Russia) take advantage to fill the vacuum quickly. This implies a direct threat to the integrity of the United States and the stability of the hemisphere.
Perhaps the biggest failure is Colombia. Since the end of the last century, Colombia has been the largest strategic and military ally of the United States in the hemisphere, especially in the war against drug trafficking. With the deterioration of Venezuela, which was gradually taken over by criminal groups such as the Colombian guerrilla or Iranian Islamic terrorism, Colombia became more important.
With the triumph of Gustavo Petro, the United States not only loses a key ally in the continent, but could gain another adversary, as it seems it will. Likewise, Maduro, Castro, and Daniel Ortega, the three dictators of the continent, gain a partner that will probably allow them to expand their criminal and destabilization operations in the continent.
The little importance that the Biden administration has given to Latin America is one of its biggest mistakes, mainly because of the consequences that this will have in the future. In addition, the advance of socialism in the region will also translate into an increase in migrants arriving at the southern border of the United States.
Putin emboldened
There are those who say that Vladimir Putin would never have dared to invade Ukraine if, instead of Biden, Donald Trump had been in the White House. That is likely. Although Putin has always had a hankering for Ukraine, during the Trump administration he did not attempt any hostile takeover of the territory, as he did when Obama was president (in 2014, Putin invaded Crimea).
What is certain is that Putin acts when he sees a fragile and unwilling international community. No power expands in the certainty that its aggressions will be answered with equal forcefulness.
Images of the destruction in Kharkiv, Ukraine, after the Russian invasion (EFE).
Although Trump is accused of having been a Putin-friendly president (something that was dismantled when it became known that the whole Russian was bs and fake news), the reality is that the former Republican president was one of the main voices denouncing the danger of European dependence on Russian energy. Now, because of that dependence, Putin is blackmailing Europe, which today has its hands tied and cannot respond to Putin’s aggressions as it would like to.
The brave Ukrainian resistance has held out against Putin’s invasion, but at a very high cost. By now it is clear that the Biden administration failed in its effort to draw the boundaries that Putin could not cross. Putin’s perception may not be far from reality: today he faces a weakened and unstable West.
Betrayal of Israel?
One of the American presidents who mistreated Israel the most was Barack Obama. And Joe Biden, who was his vice president, is determined to continue the legacy of his former boss.
During the Obama administration, the United States allowed Iran to grow, to the point of becoming a regional power. In 2018 a Senate investigation concluded that Obama’s Treasury Department “attempted to allow Iran access to the American financial system.” Thanks to this, and various licenses, Iran was able to launder some 5.7 billion Omani rials.
A couple of years earlier, Obama signed an executive order lifting atomic sanctions on Iran, which allowed the ayatollahs’ regime to have billions of dollars it had blocked. Likewise, a POLITICO investigation revealed that the Obama administration allowed the development of the terrorist group Hezbollah in Latin America in order to ingratiate itself with the Iranian regime and make the nuclear agreements prosper.
Iran, as we know, is Israel’s greatest enemy, and its entire foreign policy is designed to destroy the young Jewish state.
On the right, President Joe Biden. At left, former President Barack Obama. (EFE)
Biden’s insistence on resuming the Obama-era nuclear deals with Iran could constitute a deadly betrayal of the Israelis, who have advised against any negotiations with Iran.
A few days ago, several sources told Al Jazeera that the signing of a U.S.-Iran nuclear deal was imminent.
In late August, Israel’s former prime minister (and probably his country’s most influential politician), Benjamin Netanyahu, strongly criticized Biden for being close to signing “a very, very bad” deal with Iran. According to Netanyahu, Biden would be giving Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, “a highway paved with gold to a nuclear arsenal.”
According to critics of the nuclear deal, such as Netanyahu, the lifting of sanctions would allow Iran to enrich itself with billions of dollars that it would use to finance terrorism in the world. Also, there is no guarantee in the deal that Iran would effectively abandon its will to have nuclear weapons, since the conditions imposed by the theocratic regime absolve it from any international control.
“Can a country as important as the United States make such a big mistake? The answer is yes. Unfortunately, it has already happened in the past,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Al Arabiya last August 24.
Afghanistan
Perhaps the biggest foreign policy failure of the century, and the most tragic one since the 1970s, with the fall of Saigon. The images are identical: people fleeing from the rooftops of American embassies in helicopters.
The withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan between May and August 2021 is Joe Biden’s administration’s worst failure, and one of the most tragic episodes in modern history.
The reality clashed with the mediocrity of both the White House and the American intelligence services, which for months assured the American public opinion that the withdrawal from Afghanistan would be a success, as they were certain that the Afghan government would resist the Taliban threat.
After 20 years of invasion, in which the U.S. had supposedly neutralized all local threats and built a robust democratic government, all fell apart in a matter of weeks. The Afghan government never held out, and the Taliban took over Afghanistan before the last Americans had withdrawn.
Biden ordered one of the most disastrous withdrawals in world history, at an enormous cost. To the point where the last vestige of American presence in the country, Kabul airport, was being ravaged by Taliban terrorism as the last planes were taking off, with desperate people clinging to the wings.
As part of the withdrawal, the ISIS-K terrorist group committed a suicide bombing that killed more than 180 people, including 13 American soldiers.
The disaster got out of hand for the White House, and Biden never knew how to respond. Day after day we saw press conferences in which Biden shied away from reporters, and, finally, irresponsible mistreatment of the families of the slain soldiers, who demanded answers.
Today Afghanistan is a country subjected to draconian and cruel oppression. The dramatic setback remains a sign of American mistakes. Women who will no longer be able to attend classes and who will only be able to walk the streets of Kabul wearing a tunic that covers everything but their eyes. The burqa is back, oppression is back, and the Taliban terrorists won; a couple of weeks ago they celebrated the retaking of Afghanistan with marches after Americans had fled.
