The View from Right Field

Pelosi, Biden, and Taiwan – Part 2

I wrote here about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.  Among other things I asked whether Secretary Pelosi planned her trip without talking to President Biden, or at least to his people, first? Well, apparently she did – or at least that is what one of the panelists in the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ “World Review with Ivo Daalder” said last Friday.¹  More specifically, they said that Speaker Pelosi (or her people) told President Biden (or his people) that she would not go to Taiwan if he asked her not to.  But here is the kicker: Speaker Pelosi also told the President that if she did not go to Taiwan at his request, she would have to publicly say why she wasn’t going. 

The panelists all sort of passed over this comment, but I think it is pretty big.  It seems to me that Speaker Pelosi was basically threatening the President: If you tell me not to go, you’re going to get all the blame and you are going to look weak to the American people.²

Nancy Pelosi’s Visit to Taiwan – and Joe Biden

So, was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan a good idea?  I don’t know,¹ though once the visit was leaked and China objected so vociferously, she had to go.  Still, the visit raises all kinds of questions.  Here is one I had: I find Joe Biden’s comments last month criticizing the trip and saying the Defense Department was worried about the trip, more than a little bizarre.  Speaker Pelosi and President Biden are both Democrats.  I am sure Speaker Pelosi knows how to reach President Biden when she wants to talk to him.  I am sure he picks up the phone when she calls.  Did this mean Secretary Pelosi planned her trip without talking to President Biden, or at least to his people, first?  That would truly be bizarre. 

The Great Georgia 2021 Senate “What If?”

November of 2020, there were 50 Republican senators and 48 Democrats.  But there were two races in Georgia where there had to be run-off elections because no candidate had gotten 50%+1 of the votes cast on election day (as required by Georgia law).  In both races, the Republican candidate got more votes than the Democratic candidate on election day, but the Republican had not gotten 50%+1.  So there were going to be two run-off elections on January 5, 2021.  The Democrats won run-offs, thus giving the Democrats a 50-50 “majority” in the Senate because of Vice President Kamala Harris.

But what if Donald Trump, instead of going down to Georgia in December of 2020 in a snit and complaining he had been cheated out of the election and saying there was no way any Republican would be allowed to win anywhere, even in Georgia¹; what if President Trump had gone to Georgia in December of 2020 and tried to rally Republicans to vote for the Republican Senate candidates, telling his supporters that they needed to get out and vote so we could keep the Democrats from controlling the Senate?²  And what if, therefore, even one of the Republicans had won?  The Republicans would have controlled the Senate.  But what more might have happened?

Gaffes, Red Lines, and Credibility

[This is a follow up and elaboration on my post of March 26, 2022.¹ ]

In the 2020 presidential election, I didn’t vote for Joe Biden even though I wanted Donald Trump to lose.  I couldn’t bring myself to vote for President Biden because, as Robert Gates said in 2014, “I think he's been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”^2,3  Fortunately, I live in Illinois, so my vote was not necessary for President Biden to win Illinois’s electoral votes. 

Which brings me to President Biden’s recent “gaffe tour” of Europe.  Michel Kinsley famously defined a gaffe as “when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say."  President Biden gave us two great examples of this on his trip.  First, he said, apparently unscripted, that Vladimir Putin was a “war criminal.”  That is probably true, but how is it helpful?  We need to get the war in Ukraine over.  How does making Vladimir Putin think he might be prosecuted as a war criminal help do that?⁴

President Biden: Just Because I Disagree With You Doesn’t Mean I Am on Jefferson Davis’s Side.

In a speech in Atlanta on Tuesday, Joe Biden said, in urging the passage of various election law bills in the Senate: “Do you want to be the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?" 

I have news for President Biden.  Just because I don’t agree with him on those bills, doesn’t mean I am on Jefferson Davis’s side.  When I was taking American history classes in high school in the mid-1960s, my heroes were Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.  When I toured Tennessee in 1977, I went to the Shiloh and Chattanooga battlefields.  In Virginia in 1997, I went to the Wilderness and Appomattox.  When I returned to Virginia in 2002, I was appalled that streets and roads were still named after Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.  When other people were telling me how noble Robert E. Lee was, I saw a man who had abandoned his country and committed treason.

Other Countries Can Get Competent Leaders. Why Can’t We?

You would think that a country as big as the United States, with as many people as we have, could have really good people at the top of its government.  But look at our current president and his predecessor.  They are both embarrassing.

Compare them, either of them, with Sir John Key, former Prime Minister of New Zealand (from 2008-2016), who spoke on “Walking the path to the next global financial crisis” in this panel discussion hosted by The New Zealand Initiative:

Biden Said No One Advised Him to Keep Troops in Afghanistan. Top Generals Say They Did.

Joe Biden said, back in August, that, as far as he could recall, his military advisers did not recommend to him that we should keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.  Yesterday, top generals, including Gen. Kenneth "Frank" McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command, testified before Congress that they recommended that exact thing to President Biden.¹ 

Obviously, I could see Donald Trump doing something like this.  That is one of the reasons he needed to lose last November.  But Joe Biden wasn’t supposed to do this kind of thing.  He was supposed to be better than former President Trump. 

Who’s Worse on Foreign Policy: Biden or Trump?

Donald Trump did a bad job on foreign policy.  I talked about that a lot, though, eventually, I got tired of saying it over and over, so I mostly stopped.¹  Even though I felt that way about former President Trump, I did not vote for Joe Biden because, in Illinois, I did not need to.  President Biden was going to win Illinois.  And I was very concerned about President Biden’s domestic policy – or, rather, the domestic policy of his supporters.  Still, when President Biden won, I was hopeful American foreign policy would be better than it had been under former President Trump.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t been.

On February 19, President Biden told the Munich Security Conference that “America is back.”  That was the hope: President Biden would restore, or at least start to restore, America’s credibility and reliability around the world.  But the way we left Afghanistan was a disaster.  Obviously, President Biden was handed a terrible mess in Afghanistan.  President Trump signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban on February 29, 2020, under which we were to leave on May 1, 2021.² 

After Afghanistan: What Next for American Foreign Policy?

After the collapse in Afghanistan, the questions for many are: Why did it happen so quickly¹ and why we weren’t prepared.  Which are good questions.  But I have a different question: What’s next for American foreign policy?  In that regard, I was surprised by the very negative reaction from Europe to our quick and unilateral pullout from Afghanistan.  One might have expected concern from Asia, but the comments from Europe were very interesting.  Here are excerpts from an article Wednesday’s Financial Times (behind the FT paywall):

“European allies had hoped Joe Biden’s election to the US presidency would bolster Nato’s relevance after Donald Trump’s acrimonious years.  Washington’s messy withdrawal from Afghanistan is prompting a rethink.

The Afghan People Deserve an Apology for What Joe Biden Said Yesterday

At some point in the future, I hope we have a president decent enough and honorable enough to apologize to the Afghan people and the Afghan armed forces, for comments made by Joe Biden yesterday.¹  In defending his decision to leave Afghanistan and the way we are doing it, President Biden said:

“American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves. …

We gave them every tool they could need. …  

We gave them every chance to determine their own future.  What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.”