Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden made a series of troubling remarks this week about U.S. national security matters, stating that the U.S. does not need a standing military and that the U.S. should be focusing on helping communist China.
“We talk about China as our competitor? We should be helping, and benefiting ourselves by doing that,” Biden said during a campaign event in Iowa. “But the idea that China is going to eat our lunch, it was like I remembered debates in the late 90s, remember Japan was going to own us? Give me a break.”
WATCH:
Biden: “we should be helping” China, “the idea that China’s going to eat our lunch…give me a break”https://t.co/dcsFyvAG1E pic.twitter.com/n8EWGhltNu
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 21, 2020
“The idea that we have a serious problem facing us now that’s different, and it’s dealing with the whole idea of cyber war, underground cables that go across the Atlantic that allow us to control everything from satellites to shipping,” Biden told the audience. “We have to be prepared to modernize those, keep ourselves way ahead of the game to make sure that they are not able to be screwed with.”
Biden continued, “So, the idea we’re gonna cut the defense budget significantly, we can cut it some, but we don’t need standing armies, we need to be smarter than we’re dealing now into how we handle this.”
WATCH:
Joe Biden: “we don’t need standing armies”https://t.co/EZy18QnhIu pic.twitter.com/0zICHLRZQO
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 22, 2020
Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan last May that former vice president Biden has an outstanding track record of always being wrong on issues pertaining to national security and foreign policy.
Here is the exchange that Brennan had with Gates:
MARGARET BRENNAN: I was rereading your memoir before we sat down to talk and you said in your memoir, Joe Biden is impossible not to like.
Quote: “He’s a man of integrity, incapable of hiding what he really thinks, and one of those rare people you know you could turn to for help in a personal crisis. Still, I think he’s been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Would he be an effective commander-in-chief?
ROBERT GATES: I don’t know. I don’t know. I think I stand by that statement.
In 2014, NPR asked Gates to back up his claims against Biden, to which Gates responded: “Frankly, I believe it. The vice president, when he was a senator — a very new senator — voted against the aid package for South Vietnam, and that was part of the deal when we pulled out of South Vietnam to try and help them survive. He said that when the Shah fell in Iran in 1979 that that was a step forward for progress toward human rights in Iran. He opposed virtually every element of President Reagan’s defense build-up. He voted against the B-1, the B-2, the MX and so on. He voted against the first Gulf War. So on a number of these major issues, I just frankly, over a long period of time, felt that he had been wrong.”
Even left-wing PolitiFact rated Gates’ criticisms of Biden’s appalling foreign policy and national security record as mostly true.