JNS
“No matter how much he tries to avoid it, President Biden’s failure in Afghanistan is a permanent stain on his legacy,” Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee said.
U.S. President Joe Biden described the four years of foreign policy under his guidance as a success on Monday in a valedictory speech at the U.S. State Department.
Biden said his time in office had left America and its allies strengthened while U.S. rivals and adversaries had been weakened.
“Did you ever think we’d be where we are with Iran at this moment?” Biden asked. “Iran directly attacked Israel twice with hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones, and twice they failed because the United States organized a coalition of countries to stop them and ordered U.S. aircraft to come to the defense of Israel.”
“Now Iran’s air defenses are in shambles. Their main proxy, Hezbollah, is badly wounded,” he added. “As we tested Iran’s willingness to revive the nuclear deal, we kept the pressure with sanctions. Now Iran's economy is in desperate straits. All told, Iran is weaker than it’s been in decades.”
Biden pointed to the collapse of the Assad regime in December as evidence that his administration’s policies had significantly weakened Russia and Iran, who had been Assad’s primary backers.
The outgoing president, who will be in office until Jan. 20 when President-elect Donald Trump is sworn in, acknowledged that Israel also deserved credit for weakening Iran and Hezbollah, and said that Iran and Russia had also done “plenty of damage all by themselves.”
“But there’s no question our actions contributed significantly, and now major authoritarian states are aligning more closely with one another: Iran, Russia, China, North Korea,” Biden said. “That’s more out of weakness than out of strength. As the new administration begins, the United States is in a fundamentally stronger position with respect to these countries than we were four years ago.”
Biden also said he continued to believe his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was the “right thing to do,” a point of particular dispute between Biden and many Republicans.
“In my view, it was time to end the war and bring our troops home, and we did,” Biden said.
The Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), an army veteran who lost both of his legs in Afghanistan in 2010, accused Biden of attempting to “gaslight” the American public about his foreign-policy record.
“Joe Biden misled the American people at every stage of the withdrawal,” the Republicans wrote. “Worse, to this day, not one member of his administration has been fired for their conduct leading up to and during the fall of Afghanistan.”
“No matter how much he tries to avoid it, President Biden’s failure in Afghanistan is a permanent stain on his legacy,” they added.
Biden also said that Israel and Hamas are “on the brink” of agreeing to a ceasefire-for-hostages proposal that he first outlined in May.
“We’re pressing hard to close this,” Biden said. “The deal we have structured frees the hostages, halts the fighting, provides security to Israel and will allow us to significantly surge humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians who suffered terribly in this war that Hamas started. They’ve been through hell.”
“So many innocent people have been killed, so many communities have been destroyed,” he added. “Palestinian people deserve peace and the right to determine their own futures. Israel deserves peace and real security, and the hostages of their families deserve to be reunited.”
Biden urged the incoming Trump administration to maintain U.S. dominance in artificial intelligence and to compete with China in the development of clean energy despite skepticism from many Republicans about climate policy.
“The energy transition has already happened,” Biden said. “China is trying to dominate clean energy, manufacturing, critical materials, supply chains. They want to capture the market of the future and create new dependencies. The United States must win that contest and we will shape the global economy on our planet for decades to come.”
