Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
“President Joe Biden summoned the world’s nations to forcefully address the festering global issues of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and human rights abuses in his first address before the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday. He decried military conflict and insisted the U.S. is not seeking ‘a new Cold War’ with China…
“Biden said the U.S., under his watch, had reached a turning point with the end of military operations in Afghanistan last month, closing out America’s longest war. That set the table, he said, for his administration to shift its attention to intensive diplomacy at a moment with no shortage of crises facing the globe.” AP News
Watch Biden’s speech here. YouTube
Many on all sides are critical of Biden’s claim that the US is no longer at war:
“‘I stand here today for the first time in 20 years with the U.S. not at war,’ [Biden] said to applause. ‘We have turned the page.’ But have we really? That’s not what Biden himself said in a letter that he sent on June 8 to the leaders of the House and Senate in accordance with the War Powers Act… Biden’s letter noted the presence of U.S. troops on counterterrorism missions in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, East Africa, Lake Chad and the Sahel region of Africa, and the Philippines…
“The Islamic State lost its ‘caliphate’ — which once controlled much of eastern Syria and northern and western Iraq — in 2019, but it still has thousands of fighters in Iraq and Syria carrying out terrorist attacks. The Islamic State also has at least nine affiliates around the world, including in North Africa, West Africa, the Philippines and Bangladesh… The battle is much reduced from its peak, when the United States had tens of thousands of combat troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it hasn’t ended.”
Max Boot, Washington Post
“We still have thousands of troops in Iraq and are currently planning to keep them there indefinitely. The plan is that these troops will serve as logistics and advisory help for Iraq's government, but they will most definitely still be involved in fights against the Islamic State. We may have pulled troops out of Somalia, but we're still performing airstrikes there against Al Qaida affiliate al-Shabab. In June, the Pentagon announced that it is considering putting troops right back in there…
“Biden might not see all of this piecemeal military intervention as ‘war,’ but let's be clear here: We're talking about thousands of U.S. troops overseas involved in potentially killing armed combatants… Don't mistake the U.S. pulling out of Afghanistan as an end of 20 years of military interventions. U.S. military interventions are still going on right now.”
Scott Shackford, Reason
“[Biden] is patting himself on the back for something he hasn’t accomplished yet. In the world of foreign policy, it’s vitally important to start with an accurate baseline. And if we are going to be accurate, the truth is that American forces are still very much fighting the war on terrorism, declared 20 years ago this week. Washington is conducting some form of counterterrorism and train-and-advise operations in as many as 79 countries stretching from Mauritania to Indonesia…
“None of these missions have been debated — let alone authorized — by Congress. Yet the US presence there goes on, virtually unquestioned by the foreign policy establishment… In Biden’s assessment, ‘the world of today is not the world of 2001’. True enough. The US, however, is still very much fighting the wars of the past.”
Daniel DePetris, Spectator World
Other opinions below.
“There wasn’t much beneath the feel-good veneer. Biden offered little clarity as to his foreign policy priorities; some greater transparency might have been appropriate given his administration’s actions over the past six weeks. It’s still not clear why the Biden administration failed to consult with NATO allies on the Afghanistan withdrawal, for instance…
“The French submarine issue is sillier—and, it should be noted, is also being exploited by French president Emmanuel Macron for domestic political reasons (he has a tough election coming up)—but the failure to communicate with an ally over the matter is a head-scratcher… [and] he has yet to articulate how he will end the most disastrous war of the last twenty years: the nebulous War on Terror.”
Alex Shephard, New Republic
“Biden’s vision reflects that of the United Nations… But that rhetoric has not always matched Biden’s foreign policy reality to date. For example, though Biden is raising the US refugee cap to 125,000 as of this fiscal year, in Afghanistan, tens of thousands of allies were likely still left behind, and the administration is deporting Haitians at the southern border and returning them to uncertain futures…
“On Covid-19, Biden reiterated his administration’s commitment to a pandemic response, saying the administration has sent more than 160 million vaccine doses abroad. This week, Biden is hosting a Covid-19 summit, which will draw more commitments from allies and partners to achieve what Biden said are three goals: ‘saving lives now, vaccinating the world, and building back better.’…
“At the same time, the US is debating whether to give out booster shots, which the World Health Organization has said should not be a priority because of unequal vaccine access around the world.”
Jen Kirby, Vox
“There were other dissonances in Biden’s U.N. speech. He said, ‘We’re not seeking a new cold war or a world divided into rigid blocs,’ though his new alliances—the Quad (with India, Japan, and Australia) and AUKUS (with Australia and Britain), as well as the submarine deal that’s upsetting France—are clearly instruments of something that looks a lot like a cold war against China…
“Many in the audience must also have sighed when Biden said he is ‘prepared to return to full compliance’ with the Iran nuclear deal ‘if Iran does the same’—sidestepping the fact that the United States pulled out of the deal, and while it was Trump who committed that strategic misstep, Biden did nothing in his first few months, when he had an opportunity, to step back in line…
“But look: Speeches to the General Assembly are bromidic by nature. Few have spurred breakthroughs in peace or diplomacy. They are devices for world leaders to take a stance—to outline their goals and priorities—in broad terms. And Biden’s speech did a good job at doing that.”
Fred Kaplan, Slate
“Nowhere was Mr. Biden’s rhetoric more divorced from reality than on women and Afghanistan. In his speech he highlighted ‘the expectations to which we will hold the Taliban when it comes to respecting universal human rights. We all must advocate for women—the rights of women and girls to use their full talents to contribute economically, politically, and socially.’…
“[Meanwhile] This weekend the Taliban announced that girls would not be allowed to return to school. All signs so far in Kabul are that the Islamist group is reverting to the same medieval approach to girls and women it enforced the last time it controlled the country. Perhaps the Administration thinks its well-meaning gender appeals can’t hurt. But the dissonance between the Administration’s words and its actions in abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban discredits its liberal humanitarian project.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Joe Biden promised the world that this period of ‘relentless war’ was giving way to ‘a new era of relentless diplomacy.’… [But] Effective diplomacy requires the threat of force lurking in the background…
“Biden’s unwillingness to keep a few thousand U.S. forces in Afghanistan, which had prevented the Taliban from taking over the country, undermines American diplomacy there… Until the Taliban surrounded Kabul, the State Department had planned a robust diplomatic mission for Afghanistan after most U.S. forces had left. Now Biden is reduced to touting his administration’s efforts to secure a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding that the Taliban respect human rights.”
Eli Lake, Bloomberg
Regarding the UN generally, “Chinese nationals currently lead three United Nations bodies—the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO)—and China is vigorously advancing candidates to head others…
“This influence has already had consequences. When China’s Fang Liu became Secretary General of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), one of her first acts was to exclude Taiwan from the body, shutting out Taipei from global discussions of aviation safety and other important matters…
“U.N. votes select leaders for one or more key international organizations each year. In recent years, Washington has paid attention to these elections only when it is too late to propose strong candidates. In one such case, in 2019, a Chinese candidate beat out a U.S.-backed candidate to head the FAO. To avoid these outcomes, the Secretary of State should systematically work with U.S. allies and partners around the world to identify and support qualified consensus candidates for top posts in key international institutions.”
Paula Dobriansky and Daniel Runde, Fox News
