Is the ‘average’ American citizen smarter than the U.S. presidential candidates? It would certainly appear so.
Former Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has hotly debated her recent civil war faux pas with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (and Governor Chris Christie) in the news leading up to the presidential debate on January 10th. But whether Haley’s remarks about 160 year-old history were indeed a “gaffe” or just another indication she plays both sides of the aisle, Americans are more concerned with 2024 and President Joe Biden’s disastrously failed foreign policies.
A new poll shows 40 percent of Americans identify foreign policy issues as a top five concern on which the U.S. government should focus – an increase of twice the amount from a year ago. Biden’s foreign policy has indeed become his Achilles heel, and it’s easy to see why.
Biden has made the Russia-Ukraine war America’s burden, with some leaders questioning whether his obsession with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has more to do with Biden financial ties to Ukraine, and less with U.S. national security.
Biden has recklessly and wrongly accused Israel, America’s greatest ally in the Middle East, of bombing Gaza “indiscriminately;” while he continues to fund a Hamas-supporting United Nations agency with over one billion U.S. tax payer dollars since 2021 – an agency that former President Donald J. Trump defunded.
Biden’s surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban in August 2021 killed Americans, our allies, and abandoned billions of dollars of equipment, now in the hands of various militants around the world; Biden’s administration has taken U.S. policy on Taiwan, traditionally and strategically ambiguous, to a whole new level of confusion and contradiction. Yet America’s greatest threat to national security, Biden’s purposely opened borders that have allowed mass illegal immigration and the flow of drugs killing Americans at unprecedented numbers, is stupidly blamed on “climate change.”
Are you paying attention? Biden’s social experiments with the U.S. military are flourishing with your tax dollars – like transgender ballroom dancing in Peru and a trip for transgender Space Force Lt. Colonel Bree Fram to speak at an event cosponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Oslo called “Amplifying LGBTQIA+ Inclusion in the Workplace and Society.” Fram was recently in the news for stating that trans “inclusion is a national security imperative.”
Really? Does the Department of Defense understand that its primary mission is to identify, engage, and destroy the enemy? Fram’s boutique gender nonsense is a distraction from increasing U.S. combat readiness that harms our nation’s security.
Speaking to groups and conferences in Central Europe last year, I sadly realized that we have become a global laughingstock. It’s embarrassing, but that is not our worst problem – the Biden administration has weakened our nation militarily, socially and economically, destroyed global perceptions of our abilities, and greatly opened up our families and communities to potential attack and destruction. Make no mistake, the ‘managed decline’ of America by the ‘third term of Obama’ has been purposeful and strategic. The promised “fundamental transformation” is almost complete.
Yes, elections do matter. President Joe Biden’s foreign ‘policy’ actions are an unprecedented disaster that will have long-lasting repercussions for U.S. national security. Yet, the lower-tiered presidential candidates, trying to reach Trump-level ratings, too often focus on ‘tit-for-tat’ debating. Moreover, their shallow understanding of foreign policy (yes, Haley, too) has been a real sobering eye-opener since the debates began in Fall 2023. Only Vivek Ramaswamy (who did not qualify for the January 10th debate) has recently shown a deeper understanding of effective ‘America First’ foreign policy.
In my new book Last Warning to the West, I write about Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ‘Hungary First’ approach to foreign policy (much like Trump’s ‘America First’), making Orbán the much-maligned enemy of both the European Union’s top-down autocracy and the Woke Biden administration. Orbán has 12 Points for success, one of which is “Keep national interests at the center of foreign policy.” As I explain:
Putting “nation first,” like the slogan “America First,” in foreign policy and foreign aid continues to strengthen the nation while also building alliances and supporting other countries; it is not ‘isolationism’—it encourages alliances and collaboration but not at the expense of the well-being of your own citizens. ‘After all, what else is the purpose of any country’s foreign policy except to put its own interests, the interests of its citizens, first?’
Americans wish Joe Biden would. He flew halfway around the world to Kyiv, but has never visited the devastated American town of East Palestine, Ohio, where chemical leakage from a train derailment threatens the region’s human and environmental health. He has pledged U.S. weapons to Ukraine, ones that the U.S. military needs; he has committed over $150 billion to secure Ukrainian borders, while protecting his own policies that keep the U.S. southern border open to mass illegal immigration and increase the presence of Mexican cartels, deadly fentanyl, and the threat of terrorism in the U.S.
Many (including Orbán) have declared that if Trump were president, we would not be in such a precarious security position, and I agree with them. You can be sure Trump will prioritize our national security issues in his Iowa town hall, held the same night as the CNN January 10th debate.
And let’s hope that in this next debate, only five days before the Iowa caucuses, that the lower-rated presidential candidates will respect Americans enough to focus on the real issues and on effective solutions to solving our Biden-induced national security crises.
Shea Bradley-Farrell, Ph.D., is president of Counterpoint Institute for Policy, Research and Education in Washington, D.C., and an expert in national security and foreign policy. Her latest book, “Last Warning to the West, Hungary’s Triumph Over Communism and the Woke Agenda,” is available now at Amazon.