Saturday, October 30, 2021

What will it take to restore America's image?

Conrad Black writes about
the completely avoidable and shaming debacle of the American defection from its own alliance and helter-skelter flight from Afghanistan, leaving thousands of desperate people of many nationalities who had relied upon the United States, to fend for themselves against the new terrorist regime that seized power there (and $85 billion of U.S. military hardware along with it).
We have now also learned that despite President Trump’s hugely expensive renovation of the American military, it now has no answer to Chinese and Russian hypersonic weapons.
Various well-informed British and Europeans told me that they found a variety of utterances by Joe Biden and his spokespeople grievously inappropriate or absurd. Most upsetting were Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ po-faced assurance that “the border is closed” while on the other half of the split-screen people were simultaneously wading or walking into the country illegally; climate czar John Kerry importuning the Chinese government to decelerate their pell-mell commissioning of new coal-fired power plants; Secretary of State Blinken’s fatuous lamentation about the “lack of diversity” in the new Taliban government in Afghanistan; and White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s assertion that the administration “welcomed the competition” of Russia’s hypersonic nuclear-tipped missiles.
The thought of the most successful alliance in history being “led” for three more years by an American president whose round-the-clock gaffes are not protected in Europe as Mr. Biden is in the United States by a totalitarian social media platform cartel and terminally biased national political media is a subject of profound and general disconcertion.
Despite my substantial agreement with their concerns, I vigorously attempted to defend the American interest. The best I could do was to remind them that the United States was the most successful country in history and always worked out its problems and that even after three more years of this ramshackle defeatism, a nation as great as America could quickly be restored to its traditional confidence and solidity. I was not entirely persuasive: my knowledgeable British and European friends not only do not think America is back, they think it has gone mad.
Read more here: https://www.nysun.com/foreign/has-america-gone-mad-bidens-presidency-now-being/91703/

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