As the 2020 presidential election only gets closer, former Vice President turned Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is knocking incumbent President Donald Trump for his incessant foreign policy belligerence. Even after having repeatedly criticized the organization previously, this week, Trump is participating in the NATO summit in London, and Biden criticized Trump for failing to fulfill the possibilities of his position as president of the United States. Instead, Trump is sticking to lashing out just about whenever and wherever he can.
‘American leadership has served as the backbone of NATO since its founding — until President Trump. His abdication of America’s traditional leadership role could not come at a more critical moment for the alliance… NATO’s ability to remain the world’s strongest alliance — and to act collectively in the face of security threats — depends on shared values, trust, and cohesion. The failure of American leadership and rising authoritarianism, even among some NATO members, threaten these critical pillars of NATO.’
Biden cited example threats that NATO needs to address including mounting global aggression against democracy from Russia, who — no matter the president and his supporters’ incessant refusal to come to terms with reality — carried out a massive meddling campaign in connection to the 2016 U.S. elections, and, additionally, have launched attacks like their invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Their takeover of that area has resulted in conflict that’s claimed the lives of some 13,000 Ukrainians.
Trump has failed to systematically address that crisis or others, like the fact that “authoritarian governments are resurgent around the world and are taking advantage of democratic backsliding within NATO’s ranks,” as Biden put it. Trump has even suggested that the Crimea crisis essentially be swept under the rug with a re-inclusion of Russia in the G7 summits of world leaders, which would return them to their status as G8 summits. They were originally kicked out because of their attacks in Crimea, not because of outsmarting then-President Barack Obama, as Trump completely baselessly claimed.
In contrast, Biden insists that if elected president, he “will prioritize strengthening national democratic institutions in member states that are not living up to NATO’s core values” and also work to address threats like Russian aggression.
Ahead of this week’s NATO summit, the White House claimed that Trump would be focusing on highlighting threats posed by Russia (and China), but he’s gone off script so many times that the agenda was hardly set in stone. It wasn’t even close. Shortly before Trump arrived at the summit, the Trump admin took a potshot at its actual longtime target — U.S. allies. The office of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer announced plans for tariffs of up to 100 percent on billions of dollars worth of French goods, which are meant as retaliation for new taxes on digital services companies like Google and Amazon that are based in the U.S. Topping the mess off — Trump had been set to meet one-on-one with French President Emmanuel Macron at the NATO meeting.
These foreign policy failures may cost Trump the presidency. In current head-to-head polling, Biden comes out an average of about ten percent ahead of Trump.
