National Security experts say 2020 Democratic presidential leader Joe Biden made a series of troubling comments this week during campaign stops that, if brought to fruition, would dramatically endanger Americans.
Biden, the former Vice President, told one crowd “we don’t need standing armies” while telling another that America “should be helping” our near-peer competitor, 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.”
Biden: “we should be helping” China, “the idea that China’s going to eat our lunch…give me a break”
— RNC Research
“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 another Iowa 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.”
Joe Biden: “we don’t need standing armies”
— RNC Research
The Pentagon has identified China as the United States’ primary adversary going forward, along with a resurgent Russia.
“China is building up its military in ways that threaten U.S. and allied interests in the Western Pacific and in the South China Sea in particular,” the Defense Department noted in March 2019, quoting Alan R. Shaffer, the deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment.
Robert M. Gates, who served as secretary of defense under President Obama, has remarked that Biden has most often been wrong when it comes to his foreign policy and national security strategies.
“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,” Gates told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan in May.
When asked if Biden would make a good commander-in-chief, Gates replied, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I think I stand by that statement.”
In 2014, Gates said much the same thing when asked about Biden’s foreign policy and defense bona fides.
“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.
“[Biden] 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,” Gates continued.
“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.”