U.S. presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump are back on the campaign trail following their first debate last week. Biden’s sometimes-struggling performance in that debate has some members…

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What millions of Americans witnessed during last Thursday’s presidential debate was far worse than the mere implosion of an incumbent’s reelection campaign. The irredeemable corruption of the Democratic Party was also laid bare for all to see. There can be little doubt that Joe Biden’s unfitness for office has long been common knowledge among his party’s leadership as well as its rank-and-file officials. Yet the Democrats deliberately defrauded the American people concerning who really controls the executive branch of our government. Nor do they intend to do the right thing even now. The party’s “senior statesmen,” former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, have publicly urged Biden to continue the charade. These people couldn’t care less how perilous it is for the United States to continue … with a cipher in the Oval Office. Obama took to X on Friday and dismissed Biden’s disastrous performance: “Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know.” But can we trust Him? This is the man who received PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year award in 2013 for telling the voters, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” Clinton also came to Biden’s defense on X, where he credited him with reducing inflation. This fails the laugh test coming from the man who once looked the nation in the eye and told us, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Perhaps a more reliable guide to Biden’s mental acuity is Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on his mishandling of classified documents, which revealed Biden’s frequent memory lapses: Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter [Mark Zwonitzer] in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023 … He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013 — when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Hur’s description is wholly consistent with the Joe Biden we saw on the CNN stage last Thursday night. It also accounts for his extraordinary behavior at the recent D-Day commemoration ceremonies and G7 Summit. Indeed, the combination of Hur’s report and Biden’s appalling debate performance effectively debunks White House claims that his cognitive decline has been exaggerated in “deceptively edited” videos by Fox News and the RNC. Yet most elected Democrats are still attempting to portray Thursday’s debacle as little more than a lackluster showing. Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), for example, wrote it off thus: “That was strike one. If this were a ball game, he’s got two more swings.” More Than a Debate Sadly, this is not a ball game. Joe Biden is masquerading as the President of the United States. After last Thursday, no one believes this man is in charge of anything. This means the people who actually run his administration wield enormous power — without the consent of the American people. Regardless of what one thinks about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, no one voted for any of the Obama/Clinton retreads who currently infest the White House. Nor was a single ballot cast for “Dr. Jill.” Nonetheless, the Democratic Party is perfectly content to let this continue if it offers even a slim chance to remain in power. Even people like Maureen Dowd see this. As she writes in the New York Times: In Washington, people often become what they start out scorning. This has happened to Joe Biden. In his misguided quest for a second term that would end when he’s 86, he has succumbed to behavior redolent of Trump. And he is jeopardizing the democracy he says he wants to save … Jill Biden, lacking the detachment of a Melania and enjoying the role of first lady more, has been pushing — and shielding — her husband, beyond a reasonable point. After Thursday’s embarrassing debate performance, she exhorted the crowd and played teacher to a prized student: “You did a great job! You answered every question! You knew all the facts!” The man subjected to this demeaning treatment is, lest we forget, our commander in chief and has the power to launch a thermonuclear attack against virtually any target on Earth. Moreover, it goes without saying that Dr. Jill’s claims were factually inaccurate. During a debate watched by roughly 51.3 million people, Biden claimed that no American soldier had been killed during his tenure in office. The actual death toll on his watch has, so far, been 13 in Afghanistan and 3 in Jordan. Biden also claimed that he had been endorsed by the Border Patrol Union, which was debunked in real time by the union itself. Biden then repeated the “fine people on both sides” lie that was debunked by moderator Jake Tapper after the debate. In the end, none of this mattered to the Democrats. After a few hours of whining about Biden’s debate performance, they began circling the wagons around him. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were joined by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Rep. James Clyburn, Sens. Chris Coons and Raphael Warnock, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, et al. These people couldn’t care less how perilous it is for the United States to continue for the next six months with a cipher in the Oval Office. Their only concern is about positioning themselves for the next upward failure. Thus, the Democrats can’t be trusted with the reins of power in 2024. READ MORE from David Catron: Will Biden’s Pandering Fool Black Voters Again? Is Biden’s Dementia Just Russian Disinformation? The Spectacle Ep. 117: David Catron: Why Tim Scott Should be Trump’s VP   The post Biden’s Debate Debacle Disqualifies His Entire Party appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

No real journalist on the right was the least bit stunned by the undead President’s incomprehensible utterings last Thursday night. We’d been chronicling his mental deterioration for years. In a 2020 article here, I compared then candidate Joe Biden to John Gill, the puppet leader of a Nazi planet in the classic Star Trek episode, Patterns of Force. Gill is a total wreck, drugged up and propped up whenever needed to address the public by the actual leader of the military-industrial complex. In a truly cringeworthy video, a microphone-holding Jill … praises her befuddled husband as one would a child. Unfortunately for the country, too many Biden supporters — already a deluded crowd — don’t read the American Spectator or any conservative press, or listen to the voices of reason like Glenn Beck, Megyn Kelly, Victor Davis Hanson, Scott Adams, and the Daily Wire quartet (Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh), or watch Fox News or Newsmax primetime programs. Fox News, to its credit has done much to right the ship since its awful 2020 election performance, which I slammed in another piece. The network’s exemplary coverage of the border invasion has raised the issue as a public concern and lowered Biden’s approval rating. (READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) However, the Biden sycophants saw and heard none of this. They ignored what we could not — the evidence of our own eyes and ears. They preferred the gaslighting by the Democrats and their propagandist media — that Biden was a veritable dynamo. That once out of our sight, this shuffling, mumbling, wondering, decomposing zombie turned into Lieutenant Columbo. The Democrat insiders, yes, especially their subservient media interpreters, knew this was bunk. Yet they also knew their audience wanted the blue pill not the red one, so, they kept feeding it into their eager mouths. Until last week, when the Matrix was revealed. Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams recognized it. As a trained hypnotist, he could see through the illusion and knew what or who to blame. “Journalism died this week,” Adams said on his latest podcast. Journalism as a profession — it died this week … I’m saying that the industry was destroyed — their reputation. They were bad forever but got away with it, until this week. This is the first time that the silos between the two world views just fell apart. And do you know why … ‘Cause it’s the first time that most of the country saw Trump in a natural environment with Biden … And when people saw it, they said, ‘Wait a minute. My news people have been telling me for years that he’s fine.’ And there isn’t the slightest chance that they didn’t all know the problem. And so did the world leaders, who had little choice but to further the illusion of a rapier-witted Biden to gain an advantage. A Wall Street Journal headline blurted the double-edged truth: “The World Saw Biden Deteriorating. Democrats Ignored the Warnings.” The newspaper story further elaborated: “European officials had already been expressing worries in private about Biden’s focus and stamina before Thursday’s debate, with some senior diplomats saying they had tracked a noticeable deterioration in the president’s faculties in meetings since last summer.” But after the disastrous debate, diplomatic subtlety went out the window. “The Democrats must switch horses now,” said senior German lawmaker Norbert Röttgen. And those are America’s allies. Imagine the glee with which our enemies — Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia, Ali Khamenei of Iran — watched the debate, followed by the fear. Because one of the two debaters was a malfunctioning empty husk. But the other man was, and would be again, an impediment to their plans. Trump had Iran on its economic knees. He withdrew the U.S. from the Iran Nuclear Deal and reinstated sanctions. Biden reversed both actions and gave Iran billions. The result is Iran on the verge of a nuclear bomb and the October 7th Hamas massacre in Israel. The downside to Biden’s utter collapse is that leftists can blame the failing country on the man and not their horrible policies. He was too inept to implement them well, they’ll say. But for this canard to work, the media must regain the liberals’ trust — by throwing Biden under the bus. And have they ever, judging by the brutal headlines from major news sources. The New York Times: To Serve His Country, President Biden Must Leave the Race The New Yorker: The Reckoning of Joe Biden — For the President to insist on remaining the Democratic candidate would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment. The Economist: Joe Biden should now give way to an alternative candidate. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: It’s time for Biden to pass the torch — AJC Editorial Board: To defeat Trump and for the good of the nation, the president must bow out of the presidential race. Of course, for Biden to step down and enable a more lucid idiot, the Vice President, to replace him, an obstacle of sheer evil must first be moved — Doctor Jill Biden. But like the boulder of Sisyphus, she won’t be. No public, pitiable humiliation or the obvious anguish of her husband will sway her to forsake power. Though now, even the most willingly self-deceived can see her elder abuse, as we all did just moments after the disastrous debate for her. In a truly cringeworthy video, a microphone-holding Jill unnaturally thanks an unenthusiastic crowd, then praises her befuddled husband as one would a child. “Joe, you did such a great job! You answered every question! You knew all the facts!” (READ MORE: Return From American Zombieland) Lady Macbeth had nothing on Jill, who somehow appeared even creepier than her mate. Though she did manage something the whole hypnotic leftwing media couldn’t. Made conservatives want to defend Joe Biden, if only from her. Good riddance to both in November. The post Biden Voters Get the Red Pill appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In a plea deal agreed to by the Biden Justice Department Wikileaks founder Julian Assange plead guilty to one charge of violating the Espionage Act.  He was sentenced to time served in Britain for his offense. He is now a free man. Second, just because someone or some group operates a website does not mean they are entitled to protection under the First Amendment. The Espionage Act (18 US Code Sections 781-799) is a constitutional law that prohibits disclosing classified information. Leakers violate it when they give such information to any person unauthorized to receive it and such receiving persons are guilty of an offense under the Act if they further publish classified information. There is no “free speech” exception to these laws. (READ MORE from Jed Babbin: SCOTUS Takes Strange Turns) The case arose from the 2010 publication by Wikileaks of hundreds of thousands of U.S. classified documents regarding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many of the documents — and at least one video — Wikileaks published were leaked to it by Bradley (later Chelsea) Manning, an Army enlisted man who was given a long prison sentence for the leaks and then had his/her sentence commuted by then-president Obama. Assange had fled to London where he hid, for several years, in the Ecuadorean embassy until he outstayed his welcome. He had been imprisoned by the Brits since 2019 while he was fighting extradition to the United States. Because Wikileaks is a website, Assange has many supporters who claimed he was a journalist and a publisher so anything he did was protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press. That is entirely wrong. In 2017, when he was the head of the CIA, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo said of Wikileaks that, “It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” Pompeo said that documents hacked from the Democratic National Committee had been given to Wikileaks which published them. Because Wikileaks doesn’t even attempt to perform the basic journalistic functions of news gathering and investigative reporting, it is not a news media organization and Assange is neither a journalist nor a publisher. Wikileaks sole purpose is to obtain leaks and publish government secrets. Thus, it and Assange fall outside the First Amendment’s protections. The question boils down to whether or not the publication of any government secrets can be prosecuted and what limits, if any, does the First Amendment put on the publication of government secrets. Before Assange A little history is in order. During the Nixon Administration, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the seven- thousand-page study of the Vietnam war that came to be known as the “Pentagon Papers” to the New York Times which, after the government tried to restrain publication, went ahead and published them. The study was, to one degree or another, classified. Its publication was highly embarrassing to the U.S. government going back to the Johnson administration. The Supreme Court was presented with an attempt by the Nixon administration to prevent the publication of the secret “Pentagon Papers” through the courts. In a three-paragraph per curiam decision — which means none of the justices signed the ruling — SCOTUS said “any system of prior restraints comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity” and “the Government thus carries a heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint.” The Court found that the government hadn’t met that burden. But in six separate concurring opinions, the Court was all over the place. The opinions ranged from Justice Black saying that no power of prior restraint can be given to the government to Justice Brennan concluding that prior restraint on publication — censorship — would be permissible in certain circumstances, but the vague, nonspecific claims of harm to national security made in that case were insufficient to justify prior restraint. There have been a few cases in recent years regarding highly classified information but, again, they are not like the Assange case. For example, Edward Snowden — an employee of an NSA contractor — leaked to the New York Times about two million secret and top-secret documents as well as the details of top-secret NSA programs that were put in place after the 9-11 attacks to spy on terrorists here and abroad. Snowden fled to Russia after the leaks which significantly damaged our ability to gather intelligence on terrorists. There was an opportunity for the government to attempt a prior restraint in the Snowden case and it tried. President George W. Bush made a personal call to the Times’s publisher to plead for restraint. But the New York Times — like it did in the Pentagon Papers case — published the story. On the same day that the story was published NYT reporter James Risen published a book containing much of what Snowden leaked. Snowden, unlike Assange, didn’t pretend to be a journalist. Assange Is No Journalist With regard to Assange, Sen. Rand Paul (Libertarian-Sorta-R-KY) was, as usual, both right and wrong. He said on X, “This plea deal sets a dangerous precedent, criminalizing journalism and damaging our First Amendment rights. The ‘Land of the Free’ can and must do better.” (READ MORE: Hunter’s Laptop: The Other Story) Paul is right in that we need to do better, but his jump to the conclusion that Assange is a journalist is neither factual nor logical. Assange is neither a journalist nor a publisher. Again, Wikileaks was created solely to publish government secrets. And Assange didn’t act responsibly. He gave the government no notice that he was going to publish its secrets. So when can someone who publishes our nation’s most closely-held secrets claim that he is a journalist or publisher? When is prior restraint appropriate? The Supreme Court’s opinion in the New York Times‘s Pentagon Papers case gives us no clue of how the government can prevent publication of its secrets, but there must be some means to protect secrets that will damage national security. We are left a twofold problem. First, every publisher has some level of responsibility to protect the nation’s secrets. When something is so important and will damage the government’s ability to protect major secrets no publisher should deny a request to withhold publication which demonstrates the damage that publication will cause. It shouldn’t require a personal telephone call from a president to a publisher. That requires that the publisher take some responsibility on itself. Most newspapers have a strong liberal bias. We cannot expect newspapers such as the New York Times or the Washington Post to deny their biases and withhold any reports no matter how damaging to the nation. We are left with prior restraint, brought by an injunction in federal court, to prevent publication of secrets that will damage the nation. Second, just because someone or some group operates a website does not mean they are entitled to protection under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court punted on the New York Times‘s Pentagon Papers case. There will be another opportunity — if publishers give the government a chance — to set out just when prior restraint is proper. The next time — and there will be one — the Court cannot fail to set out how to protect our most highly valued secrets. The post We Must Prevent the Next Assange appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

I have been thinking for months of writing a piece about President Biden’s mental deficiencies. My argument would have been as follows: given what is obviously going on with this feeble man, who is supposedly the leader of the free world, why isn’t the ambassador to the U.S. from every one of our allies crashing down the doors at the State Department and demanding that something be done to remove this cipher from office? Why aren’t our friends in the UN doing anything? Why aren’t honest governors and mayors, and honest members of both parties in Congress, speaking out? Why do the members of the Cabinet, who have the power to remove him under the 25th Amendment, refuse to act? The whole situation is appalling. Biden is so out of it that one can hardly blame him for anything.  But I never wrote the piece. It would’ve been like writing about how the sky is blue. Who on earth needed to be told that Joe Biden was non compos mentis and had no business being anywhere near the White House? No, I didn’t understand at all why our allies weren’t kicking up a fuss — at least not publicly — about the fact that the man in the Oval Office was a walking corpse. It was easier to understand why Democrats in positions of power preferred to stay silent. In any event, I didn’t feel I had anything to say that would be new to anyone who’d been following the news. Biden and the Great Debate Then the great debate happened. A whole lot of people acted as if they were shocked by how Biden performed. He was out of it. Distracted. Some of his sentences trailed off into utter gibberish. At times he seemed to freeze for a few seconds. And he had a vacant look in his eyes. (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Remembering Sacrifice in New York) But all in all he did better than I expected, given what I’d observed of him during the last few months. I was amazed that he got through the entire ninety minutes without totally zoning out or wandering offstage. You had to have gotten your news from the broadcast networks or MSNBC or the New York Times in order to be at all surprised by the way Biden came off at that debate. In fact the poor old thing looked exactly like every patient I ever saw, years ago, sitting in a wheelchair and staring pathetically into space, when I used to visit my grandmother in the nursing home. He’d obviously been fed lines and, for the most part, he repeated them more effectively than I’d thought he was capable of. But no one who’d actually bought into the mainstream media’s line about Biden during recent months — the claim that he was entirely cogent and that his occasional missteps had been outrageously exaggerated by his opponents — could have been anything but shocked by what they experienced on the evening of June 27. Even the most loyal Democrats had to admit that they were (at the very least) unsettled by Biden’s performance. On Friday, it was reported that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson had suggested that Biden’s Cabinet discuss invoking the 25th Amendment, which provides for the removal of the president if the majority of the Cabinet decides he’s incapable of discharging his duties. (Movie fans will recall this amendment from the movie Air Force One.) The New York Times, which in recent years has focused on demonizing Trump and deifying Biden, ran an editorial headlined, “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race.” The Washington Post’s fence-straddling editorial called Biden’s performance “calamitous,” but also maintained that “preventing another Trump presidency is the paramount consideration.” Yes, heaven forbid that America return to power, peace, and prosperity. And the Los Angeles Times, which at this point is probably the nation’s stupidest newspaper, ran an editorial headlined, “For the sake of the nation, Biden must reassure Americans he is up to a second term.” While acknowledging that Biden had come off as “tired, listless, and occasionally confused,” the editors stated that he was “still vastly preferable to Trump.” Of course anyone who truly thinks Biden is, at present, capable even of being a Walmart’s greeter, or a guy whose job it is to collect grocery carts from a parking lot, is delusional. The fact is that for the first time in human history, the most powerful job on earth is nominally in the hands of a man who should, like Jimmy Carter, be in a hospice. Of course he’s not really running the country. It’s a scandal that for a long time now a lot of people on Fox News and on various websites have been discussing, with credibility, the question of who really is in charge. Biden Hardly to Blame Americans shouldn’t have to wonder who is running their country. The whole situation is appalling. Biden is so out of it that one can hardly blame him for anything. But his wife, as far as I’m concerned, is a monster. She’s the one who has enabled all of this. Any woman whose primary devotion was to her husband would never have gotten him into this mess in the first place, let alone encouraged him to run for re-election. (READ MORE: Nostalgia Is Coming Back to New York City) What kind of callous ambition could cause a woman to behave in such a way? How could anyone be so eager to live in the White House as to put her mentally disabled husband through such a charade? And why hasn’t this been said more often, and more prominently? How does this woman live with herself? How does she sleep at night? How, knowing that her addled husband, at a time when both Russia and China are flexing their muscles, is nominally our Commander in Chief, can any of us sleep at night? The post How Can People Be Shocked by Biden’s Performance? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

It’s hard now to recapture just how “leading from behind” became a catchphrase for Barack Obama’s approach to foreign policy. Attribution for the phrase, at least in the Obama context, is all over the place. Did he ever say it? Finding a direct on the record statement to that effect has become remarkably difficult, perhaps because it became a source of embarrassment, something to be attributed to lesser administration officials rather than to a president desirous at every turn of burnishing his reputation for wisdom and originality. Let’s be honest with ourselves. We have no right to complain when no one else in the world wants to do our bidding. Still, if we take the phrase as summarizing a loudly proclaimed Obama policy of eschewing unilateral action while allowing our allies to take the lead — as exemplified, for example, by the Libya intervention, so loudly touted in the beginning, so disastrously wrong in the end — then we should have no trouble attaching “leading from behind” to the Obama legacy. Of course, a very similar approach characterized the Jimmy Carter years and also the Bill Clinton era. One might quite fairly conclude that “leading from behind” has been a feature of Democrat foreign policy since the meltdown of the Johnson administration in 1968. (READ MORE from James H. McGee: The Trump-Biden Debate Changed Everything, or Did It?) Joe Biden, of course, has made this policy his own, even if his handlers avoid the phrase. And “leading from behind” has been the formula for the ongoing Biden train wreck that has utterly destroyed the U.S. position on the world stage. The reason is simple. “Leading from behind” is inherently nonsensical, no matter how it’s proponents try to dress it up as clever. It is the abdication of leadership, and it has set the stage for a world in which our enemies no longer fear us and our friends no longer trust us. We could still be leaders if we choose to be. Our military, although long neglected, remains the most powerful in the world. Our economy, although burdened by a complete lack of fiscal responsibility, remains stronger than any potential rivals, stronger than China, stronger than the European Union, stronger than, well, anyone who might think to challenge us. Although our industrial base has been allowed to wither, and important business sectors farmed out to the rest of the world, we still have immense industrial capabilities, and massive energy and other resources, despite the best efforts of the green fanatics to hobble us. Unsurprisingly, our standard of living remains the envy of most every nation. So how then is it that nothing seems to be going our way in the world? How is it that our best interests seem thwarted at every turn, sometimes by genuine great power rivals such as the Chinese, sometimes by international pygmies such as the Houthis. The answer is quite simple. Our place in the world is falling apart because we insist on “leading from behind,” which is another way of saying that we refuse to lead. Biden and his foreign policy minions sometimes seem simply not to care, other times to be frustrated when no one seems to pay attention to our wants or needs. These supposed “adults in the room” instead seem to bumble about the world with the air of petulant children. I suspect that there are several reasons for this. First, there’s the persistent embarrassment within our “progressive elites” — by which one might say the entire Democrat party foreign policy establishment — for being American. The “ugly American” of the 1950s book and movie took the silliness of some American diplomats — never a hard target — and reified it into vision of glib incompetence, a vision encouraged by relentless Soviet propaganda and hardened by European condescension. The Europeans, after all, have taken endless comfort in contrasting the bumbling Americans with their own sleek sophistication, and our own left-wing intellectuals, in and out of government, have always been susceptible to seeking European approval. Second, sadly, the Democrats have consistently made a hash of things. P.J. O’Rourke famously said of Republicans that they are “the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.” But when it comes to foreign policy, and particularly national security policy, it’s the Democrats who’ve consistently proven their incompetence. Lyndon Johnson made his Vietnam policy the handmaiden of his domestic agenda, and, in the end, he made a dog’s breakfast of both. Jimmy Carter? Even his signature foreign policy success, the Camp David Accords, were really about the courage of Begin and Sadat, particularly the latter, who ultimately paid for his share of the Nobel Peace Prize with his life. Ronald Reagan gifted Bill Clinton the fruits of victory in the Cold War and he spent them, foolishly, on a “peace dividend” that left our military ill-prepared for the challenges of the 21st Century. It was under Clinton and his Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, that the U.S. began “kicking the can” in terms of maintaining an adequate nuclear deterrent and a robust defense industrial base. In presiding over the infamous “Black Hawk Down” disaster in Somalia, Clinton also signaled U.S. fecklessness to the world, a signal that Osama bin Laden, for one, read loud and clear. It’s in this connection, in particular, that our complaints about the defense spending of our NATO allies are embarrassingly hypocritical. At the height of the Cold War, for example, the German Bundeswehr was a large, well-trained, and supremely well-equipped fighting force. Now it is the butt of bad jokes, even within Germany itself. The Germans, sadly, needed no encouragement to spend their own peace dividend after “The Wall” came down. But the Germans also needed look no further than to their American NATO allies to find justification for further cuts. The U.S. forces that won both the first and second Gulf wars were legacy forces, trading on the materials strengths and innovative strategies evolved during the 1980s. The massive U.S. military expenditures of the 21st Century were largely driven by the needs of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. During this same period, our nuclear deterrent atrophied and our naval forces dwindled precipitously. Moreover, we spent hugely on the defense version of “luxury goods,” wasting precious training time and resources on an increasingly aggressive “social justice” agenda. Obama’s “Pacific pivot” was essentially all talk and no action when it came to strengthening our ability to match the burgeoning Chinese military threat; much the same might be said of Biden’s sad lack of urgency when it comes to enhancing our naval presence in the Pacific. No wonder then, that we find ourselves playing catch up as we now face not one, but multiple threats. Beyond Military Policy Still, the failure to lead was not just about military expenditure. Even more so, the Democrats sent signals to the entire world that we were fundamentally unserious when it came to persistent or emerging threats. When Angela Merkel set her heart on Nord Stream 2, Joe Biden gave his blessing, even though it fundamentally undermined his administration’s messaging to Putin regarding threats to Ukraine. In the midst of increasingly aggressive Chinese naval threats to our Philippine allies, John Kerry waltzes off to Beijing, kowtowing to Xi Jinping in his continued pursuit of an increasingly unhinged climate change agenda. In the final analysis, the Democrats inability to implement a coherent foreign policy comes down to a slavish subordination of foreign to domestic affairs and a whiny, childish approach to the burdens of international leadership. Allowing “the Squad” to dictate Middle Eastern policy demonstrates an infuriating lack of moral clarity. Proposing to spend a half trillion dollars on student loan forgiveness while failing to adequately fund our defense needs tells the world that we are fundamentally unserious. Hamstringing our domestic energy production capabilities undercuts both our own independence and our ability to support our allies. And not one of the source countries lifts a finger to help us cut off the flood of migrants pouring across our southern border. Why should they? Why should anyone respect us when, internationally, we demonstrate every day our total lack of self-respect. Let’s be honest with ourselves. We have no right to complain when no one else in the world wants to do our bidding. We set an example of selfish domestic preoccupation and then wonder why other nations do likewise. We want others to sign up to our solutions to the world’s ills without making any effort to persuade them to come aboard. We want to hobnob with the gilded denizens of the World Economic Forum while hiding behind the shibboleths of multilateralism when it comes to facing the world’s ills. We want to slipstream behind the EU and the UN when it comes to climate policy, or, God help us, allow the WHO to dictate how we deal with public health emergencies. This is what happens when Greta Thunberg or Amal Clooney become avatars for our State Department. (READ MORE: The US May Become the Strong Man Whose House Was Plundered) A New Foreign Policy Which brings us once more to the meaning of “leading from behind.” If the Obama folks no longer want to claim it, indeed seemingly hide from it, we might take our lead from someone who did claim the phrase, namely Nelson Mandela, who said, “It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.” This is altogether different from hiding among like-minded others at the G-7 or the UN, and it’s the very opposite of the Obama era formulation. Instead, it’s Dick Winters in “Band of Brothers” pulling soldiers from the shelter of ditches on the road to Carentan, standing upright under fire, setting an example, making clear the needs of the dire moment. It’s leadership, pure and simple. If we want a world in which American interests are properly served, then “leading from behind” isn’t the way to do it. We may lack the power to dictate solutions to the world, and that’s a good thing — we don’t need to be the “world’s policeman,” nor, emphatically, should we ever want to be the world’s dictator. That may be the fantasy of a Putin or a Xi or a mullah bent on creating a caliphate, but it’s not our way. But if we want a world that is congruent with our interests, then we have to identify those interests, articulate them clearly, show them to be interests beneficial to others, and then demonstrate through our actions how we mean to bring good things to fruition. We have to both talk the talk and walk the walk. We have to lead. James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited. The post We Must End the Democrats’ Failed Foreign Policy appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.