The best lesson I learned in business school came the day Donald Trump was elected. Because my campus was in Dubai, among an international cohort of expats, reactions were split into two camps.
Those people who came from safe part of the world – Canada, Western Europe, Australia – they mocked us foolish Americans and clucked their tongues. But if the person came from a dangerous part of the world – Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Africa, well almost everywhere – they loved him.
My most memorable encounter was with a Syrian man I met in a coffee shop, who told me if he had an American passport he would have flown home just to vote for Trump because Obama was a liberal hypocrite who destroyed his country.
I was reminded of this lesson over the weekend when I caught a clip of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria “interviewing” President Joe Biden. The Mumbai-born author of The Post-American World gushed over Biden, lying about how much Americans love him, how he’s “brought the economy back,” and how he has – God save us – “restored America’s relations with the world.”
This isn’t the first time Democrats or media lapdogs like Zakaria have used this particular manipulative language. The prevarication that America needed a weak Democrat to restore its global “image” was first used about 20 years ago, to reinforce the unpopularity of the Iraq War with some of our key allies. It wasn’t a bad strategy at the time. But telling people that they needed John Kerry to undo the sin of invading Iraq didn’t land … because he voted for it.
Seems weird to resurrect that phrase now … because so did Biden. But why worry about Biden’s 20-year-old international blunders when he’s made so many in just the last two years?
Since President Trump left office, international stability has been in freefall. Biden literally surrendered to the Taliban, gifting them billions in military hardware and inviting a second 9/11. By sacrificing American energy to the false god of climate change, Biden put out the welcome mat for Russia’s gas-powered army.
If Trump were still president, Putin would not have invaded Ukraine.
With warships circling Taiwan and pro-Trump Hong Kongese protesters in jail, the question is not when China will surpass the US as the world superpower, it’s when. While the Administration’s disasters on Afghanistan and Ukraine have been terrible for people there, the consequences of him handing the world over to China presages misery for the entire human race.
Now those are just the big issues that everyone knows. But Biden also broke our relationship with Saudi Arabia over Khashoggi, and now Saudi is drifting toward Russia and China to undercut the petrodollar. Petrodollar is a term most of us weren’t even aware of until we started seeing headlines about the more than 20 countries (so far) have abandoned it. Oh, and Mexico and Canada – America’s top two trading partners – might become BRICS nations.
America’s relations with other countries haven’t been this weak since 1775.
Global realpolitik is not a popularity contest. What far-left Western European pundits think about America doesn’t matter if no one respects our military or craves our dollar.
Most humans come from dangerous parts of the world. The only thing providing some measure of stability to the Earth for the last few decades has been the power and benevolence of the United States. “America’s very greatness was what makes it difficult for the American liberal mind to deal with the outside world,” reads a Robert Kaplan article in The Atlantic, noting that while liberals me be good at reform, they’re terrible at national security. “Foreign policy is not about the relationship among individuals living under the rule of law but about the relationship among states and other groups operating in a largely lawless realm.”
Putin doesn’t respect stupid yellow and blue flags on Instagram; he respects guns and oil in the real world. An out-of-touch moron like Zakaria wants to live in an order-less post-American world … but I doubt he’ll move out of America into it.
And because it can never be said enough: Donald Trump was the first president since Jimmy Carter to initiate no new foreign wars, and he negotiated four peace deals between Israel and her Arab neighbors – including the Arab country where I went to business school and met Syrians who hated Obama.
Biden hasn’t “restored” America’s relations with anyone. How many more people have to suffer before CNN and others learn that lesson?