By Lyle Goldstein
President Joe Biden’s foreign policy deserves higher marks than most have given it. Biden boldly pulled the plug on the Afghanistan quagmire, so that Americans could stop hemorrhaging blood and treasure in an endless war. He has performed a delicate “Goldilocks routine” with respect to Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine: giving a vital assist to save Kyiv, while balancing that support with caution, asserting, “We’re trying to avoid World War III.”
That statement makes his recent remark on “60 Minutes” with respect to Taiwan all the more puzzling. If trying to avoid a devastating great-power conflict is among the president’s foremost goals, as it should be, this comment appears clearly to tack in the opposite direction.
One would be tempted to put it down as a misunderstanding, but the record shows that this is Biden’s fourth time making such an assertion. And, of course, it’s the fourth time that his administration was quick to note, following the president’s remarks, that there is no change in U.S. policy. The president seems quite content to put his own interventionist spin on “strategic ambiguity,” but does he realize he is lighting the fuse for national and international disaster?
This piece was originally published in The Chicago Tribune on September 22, 2022. Read more HERE.