VICTOR JOECKS: Biden’s foreign policy incompetence could kill millions

It’s terrifying to think about, but President Joe Biden may be worse at foreign policy than he is at domestic policy.

Start with Afghanistan. There are likely still hundreds of Americans and up to 14,000 green-card holders stuck there. That’s to say nothing of the presumably thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. military that Biden left behind.

Biden surrendered the country to the Taliban, the group that provided a safe haven for al-Qaida while it was planning the 9/11 terror attacks.

The threat of terror attacks isn’t a relic of the past. In October, Pentagon officials told Congress that the Islamic State in Afghanistan could be capable of launching a terror attack with six months. Al-Qaida could be ready within a year.

Colin Kahl, undersecretary of defense for policy, said it’s likely both groups of terrorists “have the intention to” attack.

Things aren’t any better for most Afghans. The U.N. Refugee Agency estimates that 23 million people — more than half the country — could experience extreme levels of hunger this winter. Of those, almost 9 million people face the possibility of famine. One million children could die without assistance.

Biden’s foreign policy in Afghanistan has led to trapped Americans, plotting terrorists and potential starvation for millions.

Unfortunately, other world leaders noticed Biden’s ineptitude. Russia, China and Iran are on the move. The tyrants leading those regimes have no qualms about filling the power vacuum Biden created.

Russia is assembling troops near Ukraine and appears to be preparing an invasion. The United States is going to tell Ukraine to “formally cede a measure of autonomy to eastern Ukrainian lands now controlled by Russia-backed separatists who rose up against Kyiv in 2014,” The Associated Press reported Thursday.

Capitulating to Vladmir Putin doesn’t seem like a great long-term strategy. But this isn’t Biden’s first time doing so. In May, he waived sanctions on a company working on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany. So Biden killed the Keystone pipeline but helped Russia complete its pipeline. And to think the left convinced itself that Donald Trump was a Russian asset.

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan appears to be a matter of when, not if. The country is looking to invest billions into Afghanistan, which has a treasure trove of rare earth minerals that could be worth almost $1 trillion. In August, China launched a hypersonic missile that could carry a nuclear weapon and has a better chance of evading U.S. defenses. Oh, and China wants to build a naval base off the Atlantic coast in Africa.

China clearly wants to be a peer-competitor with the United States on the world stage. In 2019, Biden scoffed at the idea that China is “competition for us.” The top priority of our military leaders seems to be avoiding accountability for Afghanistan and pushing woke dogma.

Iran continues to pursue a nuclear weapon. Biden thought the best way forward was through negotiations. Things are so bleak on that front, however, that Biden told his administration recently to be prepared for talks to fail.

Biden’s numerous failures shouldn’t come as a surprise. He opposed the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f--- things up,” Barack Obama once told a fellow Democrat, per Politico in 2020.

In his 2014 memoir, Robert Gates, who served as defense secretary during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, wrote that Joe Biden was “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

At this point, make it the past five decades.

Let’s hope it won’t take that long to dig the country out of the hole Biden has put us in.

Contact him at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on Twitter.