Bob Gates Was Right About Joe Biden

Five decades of foreign policy failure

May 10, 2024

It’s been clear since day one that Joe Biden was more scared of the progressive left than anyone else. His White House was incredibly fearful of a challenge from Bernie Sanders or a Squad member within the 2024 primary and the damage it would do to the Democratic coalition and his own re-election hopes. So the White House swung left — not just on economic policy, where he threw everything behind massive expenditures that pleased leftist politicians, pundits and people who have shrines to FDR in their houses, but on social policy as well, where he embraced the culture war issues of abortion and the trans agenda and hung on tight.

While the decision angers some smart Democrats — James Carville and David Axelrod for instance — with the risk it creates for losing moderate voters, the truth is that Biden’s steps were satisfying his base and not offending upper-class suburbanites who swung away from Trump and Republicans in the 2020 and 2022 elections. Biden has largely held on to them in part because concerns about the economy, the border and crime are more concentrated in the middle and working class — which is why his problems are with black and Hispanic voters in those categories swinging back towards Trump.

Now, though, Biden seems to have created a trifecta of problems that hit every group. For the working and middle class, and particularly voters with young kids, the problems of inflation are felt the most. The price of a McDonald’s cheeseburger is up 215 percent since the end of 2019 — something that may not matter to someone who DoorDashes an everything bagel and a cortado every morning, but definitely matters to a family of four. Grocery prices are in some cases even worse. People want to feel like they are constantly upgrading — if they have to go backwards, getting generic food and heading to discount grocery stores, it’s not going to improve their mood.

For the suburban voters, especially those around blue cities, it’s crime that sticks out to them. What’s the point of living in a ring county where you’re spending a ludicrous amount on taxes for a city you’re scared to enter? Carjackings in Washington, DC nearly doubled in 2023 and cities like New York are bursting at the seams with illegal migrants — not all of them shipped there by Greg Abbott. The border chaos mostly drives Republican voters, but its effect on major cities run by Democratic mayors who promised sanctuary until they actually had to deliver on it offers Biden no help with Independents.

And then there’s foreign policy. This is the realm of more narrow concern, sure, but it hits the upper-class voters most directly. These are people who were definitely anti-Trump and anti-GOP in the past two elections, tuned into the news, fed up with the chaos and diametrically opposed to socially conservative policies. Now Biden’s White House has created something that offends them as well. These are people who had Ukraine flags, and after October 7, Israeli flags too. They are a lot more likely to have Jewish friends. And they are a lot more likely to have as an alma mater, or currently be paying for a son or daughter to attend, a university whose campus is currently being occupied by absolutely nutty protesters. Canceling classes and graduations, taking over buildings, draping George Washington in terrorist garb — this stuff doesn’t fly with the upper class. They are paying a lot for their kid to go to school there, and these protesters are robbing them of the basic pride associated with it.

Biden’s reluctance to say or do anything about this, to just let things burn out, is offensive enough. Now he’s gone a step further, defying Congress’s aid vote and directly undermining Israel. (As one side effect of this, he’s reneged on a deal with Speaker Johnson that effectively ends any ability for them to work together.) And he did it before giving a much-promoted Holocaust Remembrance speech in an effort to get lauded by the press before backstabbing an ally. For supporters of Israel, it reads like hypocrisy and betrayal — and endorsement of the petulant children shouting in megaphones as they act like living, walking, unthinking clichés with a constantly increasing list of demands.

Democrat hopes that Donald Trump will have any court decisions go against him before November (beyond the ludicrous Stormy Daniels trial) are rapidly decaying. His political negatives are baked in. Biden, his White House and his foreign policy team have created a situation where he is surrounded on all sides by obvious failures — and his successes (if you can call them that) appeal to the faction most likely to turn off moderate and Independent voters.

It’s a bold strategy, Cotton — let’s see if it pays off for them.

Biden’s Failure is Bob Gates’ Vindication

One of the most famous criticisms of Joe Biden over the years came from former Bush and Obama secretary of defense Robert Gates, who wrote in his 2014 memoir that “I think [Joe Biden] has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” The former SecDef has repeatedly been asked if he stands by the statement — and each time, he does. Of course, we’re a decade removed from that memoir — and in that time, Gates has openly criticized Biden over the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, his administration’s approach to Putin and Russia and the slow walking of military aid to Ukraine. So it seems it’s safe to say we’re at five decades now.

The problem is that for most of those five decades, Joe Biden and his team of advisors were confined to the role of senator, where there’s only so much damage you can do. Voting on the wrong side on every Reagan-era Cold War package is a touch less significant than directing foreign policy of the United States from the Oval Office, and Tony Blinken’s fecklessness is rather irrelevant if he’s limited to being a Senate staffer. Instead, now we have the likes of this:

“Our view is any kind of major Rafah ground operation would actually strengthen Hamas’s hands at the negotiating table, not Israel’s,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby said Thursday. He said more civilian deaths in Rafah from an Israeli offensive would give more ammunition to Hamas’s “twisted narrative” about Israel.

Ah, so Kirby’s now operating from the same position as that famed Norm Macdonald tweet.

This creates a greater fracture with Netanyahu and tosses the negotiations in Cairo into a cocked hat. There is no way Israel was going to stand by and accept the idea that they had to leave Rafah alone — as Kirby puts it, “any” major operation would be opposed by this administration. And of course, they’re doing this while continuing to deny the military aid Congress overwhelmingly endorsed. Whether you support their position or not, the inability of this administration to understand how leverage works is astounding.

Gates’s vindication may please Republicans on a partisan level. But there are real consequences for this level of hubris — and Biden’s continual insistence that his way is the right way, all else be damned. His irritation at the Gates comment and the rumors that Barack Obama is actually running his foreign policy show now seem a reflection of his earliest famed lie-filled outburst at suggestions he wasn’t sharp enough for the job of the presidency. Joe knows the critics are wrong. He can handle things. He’s smart, not like everybody says… he’s smart and wants respect.

Refer a friend

The end of the Tea Party era

FreedomWorks was once one of the most powerful activist think tanks in the country. It was at the center of the Tea Party movement, arguing for small government, against Obamacare, in favor of a kinder, gentler version of libertarian policy agenda on a host of issues and allied with the likes of Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and a host of new Tea Party-backed House members, they drove the conversation in Washington and across the country. Now, they’re shutting down, effective immediately. Here’s Dave Weigel’s analysis.

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