Media failed to cover Biden's foreign policy incompetency in 2020
American voters usually prioritize domestic issues over foreign policy during presidential elections. But several major blunders just in President Biden’s first year show the danger of not closely scrutinizing presidential candidates’ records on foreign policy.
During the 2020 election, foreign policy-related questions barely came up in any of the debates between President Donald Trump and Biden. The presidential debate commission in fact pulled foreign policy from their debate topics, perhaps to hide Biden’s weakness.
A YouGov survey in 2020 showed that 77 percent of Americans believed domestic issues were more important than foreign policy when choosing the next U.S. president. Additionally, people may have assumed foreign policy was Biden’s strong suit, since he was a U.S. senator for three decades and vice president under President Obama for eight.
Such an assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. Robert Gates, a defense secretary in the Obama administration, said Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
In contrast, foreign policy was one of the bright spots in the Trump presidency. He orchestrated the historical Abraham Peace Accords among Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. His pivot to the Indo-Pacific was far more successful than President Obama’s pivot to Asia initiative.
Under Trump, the United States took a hard line on China, improved its relationship with India (the only Asian power that could check China), and expanded cooperation with allies by establishing the Quad, an unofficial alliance with Australia, India, and Japan. However, since most corporate media were anti-Trump, few wanted to give him any credit for his foreign policy accomplishments.
Instead, major media criticized Trump for being “soft” on Russia for his entire presidency. After Trump left the office, Fareed Zakaria of CNN finally admitted, “the Trump administration was pretty tough on the Russians. They armed Ukraine. They armed the Poles. They extended NATO operations and exercises in ways that even the Obama administration had not done.”
The combination of low public interest in foreign policy and a media that was willing to do everything to get Biden elected resulted in little scrutiny of Biden’s extensive foreign policy failures.
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The media let their anti-Trump bias overrule their judgment. Biden has been a rolling disaster from day one on both foreign policy and domestic policies. Their animosity toward Trump made them open to one of the biggest goofball Presidents of all time.
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