EDITORIAL: Biden foreign policy leaves a void on world stage

All politics is local, as they say, and it’s understandable that many voters will cast ballots in the presidential election based on pocketbook issues. But they also shouldn’t ignore the bigger picture.

For instance, the Harris-Biden record on foreign affairs has been abysmal. The world was a relatively stable place when Donald Trump left office in 2021. Since then, the Biden White House has signaled repeatedly to our enemies that there is little consequence for international misbehavior. The usual suspects have noticed.

Start with the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, in which President Joe Biden and his military advisers seemed wholly unaware that the country would quickly fall to the Taliban once the United States abandoned Kabul. The chaos that characterized the American departure — as did the president’s appeasement of Iran — sent a message of fecklessness and weakness.

Since then, China has been saber-rattling over Taiwan, Russia has invaded Ukraine and Iran has unleashed its terror proxies on Israel. In regard to the latter, it hasn’t been productive that the Biden team has emboldened Hamas killers by publicly hectoring our most reliable ally in the Middle East over its efforts to survive and defend itself.

It is against this backdrop that Vladimir Putin convened his 2024 BRICS summit last month in an effort to expand Russian influence and to undermine America’s global leadership. The summit, first held 15 years ago, originally included Brazil, India, China and South Africa but has expanded to include a dozen other nations, including Iran.

Many of these alliances present little challenge to the United States economically. Emerging states or those dominated by authoritarianism and central planning are no match for the most prosperous nation the world has ever known. Even fast-growing China has hit the wall. In addition, some of the participants — Brazil and India, for instance — have little interest in strained ties with the United States.

China and Russia have “essentially tried to shift the group from the sense of (BRICS) being emerging economies to potentially being some sort of an expression of angst with regard to Western dominance,” Manoj Kewalramani, an expert on Indo-Pacific studies, told CNN.

Yet this aggressive anti-American push coming from Putin and China’s Xi should be a source of concern when it comes to world stability and peace. With the exception of Ukraine, the Biden administration has done little to telegraph a message of American resolve.

“A vacuum of American leadership is ... filled by ruthless power politics, aimless allies, aggressive authoritarians, gathering threats and cruelty without consequence,” noted Michael Gerson of The Washington Post. Mr. Gerson was writing in 2018 about Donald Trump. But it’s precisely where the Harris-Biden team has gotten us today.