Originally posted on June 18, 2021.
At the recent G7 summit, French President Emanuel Macron said of Joe Biden, “It is great to have a U.S. president who’s part of the club.” This is a reference to the club of globalists whose “bipartisan, multilateralist foreign policy” John Daniel Davidson explains “dominated the Obama White House.” He writes in The Federalist:
The most important takeaway from the recent G7 and NATO summits in Europe isn’t President Biden’s many embarrassing and unsettling mental lapses, long pauses, and rambling non sequiturs, but the clear message coming out of these meetings: the United States is returning to an Obama-Biden era “America Last” foreign policy that puts the interests of multilateral institutions and international partnerships above the interests of the American people.
That policy shift was perhaps best encapsulated in a quip from President Emmanuel Macron of France, who said of Biden, “It is great to have a U.S. president who’s part of the club and very willing to cooperate.”
So what did this extraordinarily collaborative club manage to accomplish? One of the G7’s most pressing tasks heading into the summit was what, if anything, it would do about an aggressive and intransigent China. What the group settled on was doing almost nothing.
In all of this, Biden maintains the long trajectory of his abysmal foreign policy record. Over the past four decades the world has changed much, but Biden hasn’t. He has been wrong on almost every major international issue of his time, often for shallow, partisan reasons.
One of the reasons Trump quickly gained so much support in the 2016 GOP primaries, and continues to enjoy broad support among Republicans, was his willingness to criticize the failures of a bipartisan, multilateralist foreign policy that has dominated Washington for decades, and that particularly dominated the Obama White House.
Trump criticized America’s endless wars and interventions overseas, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, even if it meant going after fellow Republicans. He questioned the usefulness of NATO and argued that America’s allies weren’t paying their fair share.
By John Daniel Davidson
John is the Political Editor at The Federalist.
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