Biden’s Telling Retreat

By Rich Lowry

Sunday, February 04, 2024

 

Joe Biden is in retreat.

 

Not literally this time, as we witnessed in Afghanistan in 2021, but from his ideologically driven reversal of a host of Trump policies upon taking office in January 2021.

 

In what might be called the Great Reversal, President Biden rolled back Trump policies as a matter of course and on principle, assuming that anything his predecessor was responsible for must be immoral or ineffectual.

 

Now, either the president has implicitly admitted the foolishness of these moves by restoring the policies that he had relegated to the dustbin of history, or the failure of his approach has been rendered obvious by events.

 

Consider just the last couple of weeks.

 

Biden wants Congress to empower him, or even force him, to implement the kind of shutdown at the border that he inherited upon taking office.

 

He’s reinstated the terror designation that Trump had made against the Houthis and that he lifted within days of taking office.

 

He’s instituted a pause on funding for UNRWA after reversing Trump’s suspension in aid back in 2021.

 

And he’s embroiled in an increasingly intense proxy war with the Iranian regime that Trump had been starving financially but Biden let off the hook upon taking office.

 

That’s quite the roll call.

 

Biden is never going to admit he was wrong on anything. In fact, he and his mouthpieces have been insisting, preposterously, that it was Trump who screwed up the border and he’s just been dealing with the consequences.

 

Of course, upon taking office Biden set out immediately dismantling what Trump had accomplished on border security. He ripped up Remain in Mexico in early February 2021, although the reversal would take a while to work its way through the courts, as well as the asylum agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. In a statement about the asylum agreements, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hailed the end of the agreements “as the first concrete steps on the path to greater partnership and collaboration in the region laid out by President Biden.”

 

The revocation of the terrorist designation for the Houthis also came very early, in February 2021, a couple of weeks after the border actions.

 

Biden waited all the way until April 2021 to restore funding to UNRWA. This time, Blinken said, “The United States is pleased to announce that, working with Congress, we plan to restart U.S. economic, development, and humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people.”

 

Biden’s more accommodating approach to Iran was another near-instantaneous February 2021 initiative, with Biden rescinding Trump’s invocation of “snapback sanctions” and lifting travel restrictions on Iranian diplomats in New York. Reduced enforcement of oil sanctions, meanwhile, would mean an additional $32 billion-$35 billion in revenue for Tehran, according to the calculations of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

 

As with the border, the Biden administration will never admit a serious intellectual and policy error on Iran. Yet, enriching a regime that is funding proxy forces involved in a shooting war with U.S. forces in the Middle East is so blatantly stupid that it doesn’t matter what the administration says. As part of its retaliation for the latest attacks, by the way, the administration is imposing more sanctions on Iran. If this is the right thing to do now, it clearly never made sense to ease up on the Trump-era financial squeeze.

 

The standard justification for the Biden reversals was that his administration was going to get along better with foreign countries and adopt a more humanitarian approach than Trump’s. What we’ve instead gotten is chaos and emboldened U.S. enemies.

 

Trump has numerous disadvantages going into November, including the lawfare campaign against him, his abiding unpopularity, and his lack of discipline. What makes him competitive is that President Joe Biden is failing, and, in some instances, the woeful outcomes are directly traceable to his reflex to do the opposite of his bogeyman of a predecessor.

 

The Great Reversal has come a cropper.