In typical Joe Biden fashion, he gave a speech yesterday to the UN General Assembly that was at times self congratulatory, sometimes insightful, sometimes incomprehensible. I get he is 80 and I get that he is speaking to an audience of his peers but what I don’t get is what he hoped to accomplish?
If you look at a progressive checklist for any speech President Biden gives, it will have Diversity, Inclusion, Environmental components. Yesterday’s speech hit on everything his puppet-masters in Washington wanted.
What I did (I know, I should get a life) was listen to the speech and then went over the liberal response and the conservative response to the speech.
The talking heads on CBS and CNN lauded the speech. Like it was the Gettysburg address. He told the World that the United States was at the forefront of all these liberal agendas and we spent billions of dollars following through with our pledges for helping raise the poor out of poverty, cleaning up the climate gases that are destroying humanity and treating women fairly and making sure we never backslide on any of those pledges.
Yea, ok.
The conservative media tore apart the speech because it barely addressed the true existential ( and real) threat to humanity, autocratic leadership and their desire for the ultimate power play.
Maybe I am to narrow minded but if I were going to give a speech at the UN, I would focus on the multiple crimes against humanity in China. The Russian ambitions in Western Europe. Iran’s movement towards becoming a nuclear power. Last but not least, the secret kingdom in North Korean and what Kim Jung Un is up to.
To me, the four corners of evil, would be my central topic. President Biden spent roughly 7 minutes and 50 seconds talking about Ukraine and Russia. He spent longer on his accomplishments and climate change.
I am not sure what the World thought of Biden’s speech but I am pretty sure World leaders have an opinion about Biden’s policies. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was just the beginning. The fact that Russia pretty much telegraphed their invasion of Ukraine months before the stepped over the Belorussian/Ukrainian border. The US was well aware of the plan and yet they barely did anything, diplomatically, economically or militarily prior. We are now into this thing to the tune of 130 billion dollars and counting. I am pretty sure there would have been other options but the US chose none of those and the fact that we hightailed out of a country faster and with little regard for the results, made Putin’s move a no brainer.
They have to be looking at us as patsies since we released six billion dollars of Iranian oil dollars to gain the release of some hostages. The Iranians promised it will be used for humanitarian aide. Yea, ok, how freaking gullible and stupid do we look now?
That money will come back to haunt us.
The problem with the Chinese is something on a level that even the smartest people in the administration can’t wrap their arms around. I don’t pretend to have any sort of solution and it way more complex than any situation we have had in the past.
Looking back in simplest terms, the fall of the USSR was fairly simple. President Reagan basically told the Russian leadership that we will outspend you and then defeat you should you try anything in Europe again. Russian power brokers knew that the USSR would never be able to compete with the West militarily and basically gave in. The dollars that flowed into the Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall basically killed any chance for hard liners to succeed in Moscow. The population wanted Levi’s jeans and MacDonalds and Communist rule and Karl Marx ideology fell to the wayside. Because it’s Russia, things change quickly and Vlad The Impaler gained traction and then gained power and solidified his power and they are back where they were 50 years ago. The rich are very rich and everyone else is poor or very poor.
China will not be that easy. They have developed a formidable military. Their leadership has unprecedented power and they have the ability to squash any dissenting voices. They also are still an economic dynamo and that has to always be taken into account. Failure of their economy will reverberate Worldwide. You can throw some low level sanctions at them but the Chinese have multiple avenues of economic survival. They have their tentacles in multiple economies and should one falter, they can ramp it up somewhere else. Im sorry but it is brilliant and it, like everything the Chinese do, is part of the long game. They don’t plan like we do, two to five years. They don’t plan like Warren Buffet does, 30-60 years. They have a much longer time horizon and it is built for the next generation of leadership as well as the present.
It will be hard to beat that ideology if you have just short time horizon ideas. This is what we should be thinking about now. We didn’t think about it 30 years ago when the Chinese decided their great economic miracle was to suppl=y the World with cheap throw away goods and destroy manufacturing around the world by pricing that manufacturing out of the marketplace. We missed it. We can not discount the Chinese any longer and I still say, they are the biggest threat right now on this planet.
Yet, President Biden, barely mentioned them in his speech.
Spot On!!! And in the 14th paragraph, first 5 sentences regarding China, you could substitute that country for Our country.....