With Big Tech openly censoring the New York Post to shield Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden from public scrutiny, and with the media lining up to attack journalists who report stories that reflect poorly on Biden’s public service while Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) drones on dementedly about Russian election interference in reference to a hard drive Hunter Biden abandoned at a computer repair store before his father declared he was running for president, it is hard for voters to separate news from noise and fact from nonsense.
The purpose of the presidential debates used to be to help voters do just that. Debate moderators compelled presidential candidates to answer serious questions about the serious issues that beset the president of the United States.
Unfortunately, this presidential campaign season, the Commission on Presidential Debates has cast its lot with Big Tech and the media machine. Rather than provide the public with the means to distinguish between President Donald Trump and Biden on substantive issues, the Commission has chosen to gut its own forum.
After Fox News’ Chris Wallace behaved as Biden’s second-hand, rather than as an impartial moderator, during the first debate, and C-SPAN’s Steve Scully exposed his bias before the world and then lied about it, contributing to the cancellation of the second debate, many saw this Thursday’s debate as the final chance the public would have to see the candidates seriously defend their own positions and actions.
Traditionally, the final presidential debate has been devoted to foreign policy. And notably, in the Trump-Biden match-up, foreign policy is also the place where their positions are easiest to tell apart. And this is important. Biden can imitate Trump’s America First rhetoric on manufacturing, but he can’t gloss over the distinctions between his long record in foreign policy and Trump’s record. They are worlds apart.
It is because the distinctions between the two men’s foreign policies are so stark that Thursday’s debate had the potential to be an edifying moment in the campaign. Alas, it was not to be. Earlier this week, the Commission announced that the moderator, NBC News’ Kristen Welker, has decided to toss foreign policy off the agenda. Instead, although she will ask Trump and Biden about national security, Welker also intends to ask them about COVID-19, climate change, race relations in America and other issues that were already discussed in the first debate.
The Trump campaign rightly attacked Welker’s decision. Trump’s campaign claimed Welker was seeking to shelter Biden from a discussion of his son Hunter’s multimillion-dollar business deals with foreign firms—deals which were initiated while Biden was vice president.
But even if Hunter Biden hadn’t abandoned his hard drive at a repair shop and its contents weren’t being published now, and the possibility Biden used his position as vice president to run a pay-to-play influence operation was never raised, Trump would still be right to want to debate Biden on foreign policy. In his term in office, Trump has transformed U.S. foreign policy in a manner that hasn’t been undertaken since the outset of the Cold War—for the good. Biden, for his part, worked for decades in Congress, and as Barak Obama’s vice president, to transform U.S. foreign policy in a manner that helped America’s enemies and harmed its own interests and those of its allies.
Consider the events of this week. Tuesday, it was reported that the U.S. and Russia have reached a tentative deal to extend for an additional year the START nuclear warheads limitation treaty, set to expire in 2021. The Trump administration hopes to improve the deal from the U.S. perspective, as well as add China to the treaty. Biden, who played a key role in negotiating the deal, wishes to prolong it unconditionally.
Monday, Trump announced the U.S. is removing Sudan from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. Sudan has agreed to pay $335 million in restitution to U.S. victims of the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, which a-Qaeda carried out while Sudan’s previous regime was sponsoring the terror group. The move is seen as the first step toward an imminent normalization of relations between Sudan and Israel.
On Monday and Tuesday, Israel signed a host of bilateral agreements with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that not only officially normalize their diplomatic relations, but pave the way for the economic integration of Israel into the broader Middle East for the first time in its 72-year history. The Arab boycott of Israel is over. The chokehold that pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism once held on the region, which placed hatred of Israel before national interests, has been released. This transformation is the result of two things—the Obama-Biden Middle East policy and the Trump Middle East policy.
The Obama-Biden Middle East policy embraced pan-Islamism as an organizing principle. Dismissing the notion that Arab states might care about themselves more than they care about destroying Israel or forming a global Islamist empire under the banner of jihad, Obama and Biden curried favor and worked to empower and appease Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood and other pan-Islamist regimes and groups. The idea was that these groups represented authentic expressions of Islamic aspirations. All other forces were reactionary.
This principle informed the Obama-Biden administration’s gross hostility toward Israel. It also informed the administration’s support for the overthrow of a long-time U.S. ally, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and his replacement by a Muslim Brotherhood regime.
These policies alarmed not only Israel and Egypt, but Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and a host of other Arab states who were stunned by Washington’s betrayal. The shock caused Arab leaders and their publics to reassess their positions on pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism. By and large, they reached the conclusion that they were terrible ideologies that caused the nations of the region nothing but misery and instability. So they reached out to Israel, which was only too happy to cooperate with its Arab neighbors in confronting Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Then Trump came into office. Trump made clear that his doctrine of America First meant America would work with allies who shared its interests and goals. He emphasized that the U.S.’s goal was to defeat the forces of radical Islam and terror. When along with Israel, Arab state after state lined up to join him, Trump realized that the tectonic plates had shifted and true peace was possible for the first time. And he sent his team to achieve it.
The Palestinians, so used to being feted by U.S. administrations convinced that without the Palestine Liberation Organization’s permission, no peace could ever be reached between Israel and the Arab world, were left on the sidelines, screaming anti-Semitic curses at Trump, his family and his advisors.
As for Iran, to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and destabilize the regime that seeks to dominate the Middle East to the detriment of U.S. national security and the survival of U.S. allies, Trump vacated the U.S.’s signature on the Obama-Biden nuclear deal with Iran. He implemented a strategy of “maximum pressure” to economically and politically destabilize the regime, while supporting U.S. regional allies in their acts to defend themselves against Iranian aggression. The administration is now adding new sanctions to block weapons sales to Iran. News sales will be possible for the first time in 20 years because the Obama-Biden nuclear deal put a sunset clause on the UN weapons embargo, freeing Iran to purchase advanced weapons on the open market beginning this month.
Biden has pledged to reinstate the U.S.’s commitment to the nuclear deal and end economic sanctions on Iran, thus freeing the most prolific state sponsor of terrorism to develop a nuclear arsenal within a year. He has also pledged to restore the Palestinians and their opposition to Israel’s very existence to the center stage of a renewed U.S. policy of hostility toward Israel.
In Asia, Biden and Obama strengthened U.S. ties with Beijing, to Beijing’s advantage. Obama told U.S. workers that their manufacturing jobs would not come back. In the 1990s, Biden shepherded China to most-favored-nation trading status and World Trade Organization membership, setting the course for the outsourcing of the U.S manufacturing base to China.
But Trump revitalized manufacturing in the U.S. through his trade tariffs, his corporate tax cuts and his trade deals with Canada, Mexico and China. Trump has confronted China’s growing rivalry head-on, recognizing that the superpower competition between the U.S. and China will likely define international power politics in the coming decades.
These and other issues might have been discussed in a presidential debate centered on foreign policy. Unfortunately, thanks to Welker and the Commission on Presidential Debates, the public won’t have the opportunity to hear such a discussion. Instead, it will be subjected to brief regurgitations of talking points before Welker moves on to another topic.