Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) slammed President Biden for his fecklessness in foreign policy, snapping that Biden “has put a kick me sign on the back of Uncle Sam.”
Cotton spoke of China’s attempts to become a power broker of diplomacy, Biden’s first year in office in which he appeased Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Biden’s tenure permitting Saudi Arabia to cozy up to Iran.
“Over the last two years, Joe Biden has put a kick me sign on the back of Uncle Sam,” Cotton began. “That’s just another lesson. When America recedes from the world, we don’t get peace and tranquility. We get chaos and war and adversaries acting against our interest.”
“Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are anti-American dictators,” he declared. “They didn’t need Joe Biden to give them overlapping interests, but Joe Biden has given them opportunity to exploit America’s receding from the world. You look in China, for instance. Joe Biden came into office saying China is not a competitor of ours, and what do we get? Them sending a spy balloon across America and rattling sabers against Taiwan or in Russia. Joe Biden spent his first year in office appeasing Vladimir Putin, and what do we get? We get the first or the biggest land war in Europe since WWII, and we get them downing our aircraft drone over the Black Sea.”
“These kind of weak actions provoke and beget more aggression from our adversaries,” he opined, “and now you see Xi Jinping strutting across the world stage and trying to establish himself as a broker of peace among countries. It just gets back to the basic rules of foreign affairs: either you run the show or the show runs you. We’ve been used to running the show for decades, but under Joe Biden we’re increasingly letting others run the show and let it run against us.”
After Fox News host Martha MacCallum pointed out that John Kirby, the coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council, admitted that Biden had no plans to speak to Jinping, Cotton asserted, “Again, this is an example of what happens when you recede from the world. Barely two years ago, former President Trump had helped broker peace for instance between Israel on the one hand and Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and other Arab and African nations. We were hoping two years ago that we’d soon get a peace agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia brokered by the United States. Instead, under Joe Biden what we received is a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran.”
“All of these countries around the world that prefer to work with America, that have been longstanding partners of America like Saudi Arabia, like the United Arab Emirates, like Bahrain or Qatar on Jordan or Egypt have security needs. They have threats that they face primarily from Iran. Those security needs don’t go away when America goes away or when the Democratic Party turns its back on longstanding allies because they don’t like the fact that some of these countries oppose President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran or that they worked with President Trump. Those security needs will be filled by other countries, our adversaries like China,” he concluded.