Two years ago this week, President Donald Trump was in the White House Situation Room with his national security leadership team, monitoring developments in what became one of his many bold and successful moves in keeping the country safe, the nighttime raid by U.S. special operations forces on the world’s most wanted terrorist, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Eight and a half years earlier, then-Vice President Joe Biden found himself in the White House Situation Room with President Barack Obama and his national security leadership team, in their case monitoring developments in the nighttime raid on the world’s most wanted man at the time, al-Qaeda leader and mastermind of the 9-11 attacks, Osama bin Laden.
Both raids were bold, decisive and successful, and represented the best of American power projection supported by top-notch intelligence and flawless execution by the finest military on the planet. Both raids also represented political high-wire acts for Presidents Trump and Obama, as so much could go wrong in executing such complicated, over-the-horizon military operations, and the fallout from an aborted or unsuccessful raid – even due to random factors like bad weather – can quickly become a metaphor for presidential fecklessness. Just ask President Jimmy Carter, whose tragically unsuccessful Delta Force operation to rescue American hostages in Iran in April 1980 cemented an image of weakness and cost him a second term later that year against Ronald Reagan.
Clearly, both Trump and Obama made the right call in ordering the operations, and, in Obama’s case, the mainstream media coverage of the bin Laden raid by most accounts played a big factor in his re-election a year and a half later. Yet many forget that then-Vice President Joe Biden opposed Obama’s decision to go after the terrorist leader in 2011, and his opposition to that move became a real liability for the Delaware Democrat as he considered a run for President against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary. What’s more, as a candidate for president in 2019, Biden pointedly refused to give Trump credit for the successful al-Baghdadi raid, saying “I’m glad President Trump ordered the mission. But as more details of the raid emerge, it’s clear that this victory was not due to Donald Trump’s leadership. It happened despite his ineptitude as commander-in-chief.”
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Biden’s confusing positions on these two bold raids by Trump and Obama, is itself a metaphor for his own broader record of confusion and missteps on key national security issues in the first nine months of his presidency. On a number of our most pressing security challenges, Biden has projected weakness and undone many of his predecessors’ policies that kept America safe.
On Afghanistan, Trump had set the stage in 2020 for an orderly exit of U.S. forces by May 1 of this year, but Biden declared early on in his term that he would postpone that deadline until September 11. Biden’s defense team then directed the most chaotic exit imaginable from the country, failing to predict a rapid takeover of the country by the Taliban, and setting up a dangerous environment for our forces that ultimately cost the lives of 13 of our bravest men and women in a terrorist attack. An attempted drone strike against terrorists in response to that bombing itself killed at least 10 civilians, including children. All told, Biden’s botched exit from the country represents “one of the sorriest American failures in decades...[whose] consequences will play out for years, if not decades.” To date, Biden has held no one on his team accountable for this deadly debacle.
Biden’s failures extend to China, where Communist Party leaders lecture our national security team on human rights, and proceed to test them with hypersonic missile launches and dramatically increased incursions by fighter aircraft into airspace near Taiwan. On Russia, Biden early on announced a capitulation on energy policy, lifting Trump’s sanctions and clearing the way for the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline after blocking completion of our own Keystone pipeline on his first day in office. And, most recently, Biden allowed Putin to snub him publicly on the possibility of basing U.S. forces in two central Asian countries to provide us continued military options in that important region.
After nine short months of Biden in the White House, Americans are coming to understand why former Obama defense secretary Robert Gates noted in his 2014 memoir that Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Indeed, Biden’s opposition to the two boldest, successful counterterrorist raids ordered by his two predecessors in the last decade provides an important window on that record.
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