Biden Owns the Worst Foreign Policy Debacle in Decades
BUCK: We’re gonna talk about the surrounding of the airport in Kabul. We’re going to discuss how we got to this point. The Biden administration on vacation right now, Joe Biden, along with some of his other senior staff while people are seen on video at Kabul airport scrambling across the tarmac trying to get aboard U.S. Air Force jets evacuating people.
This is a disaster the Biden administration promised us would not happen. This is the catastrophe we were told, “the smartest guys and gals in the room,” so to speak, will avoid; and yet here we are. We’ll break down every aspect of this. And then later on in the show, we’ll be joined by our friend Sean Parnell, former U.S. Army combat veteran who served in Afghanistan.
Also, our friend Matt Walsh from The Daily Wire will be here in the third hour to talk about some foreign policy and also some covid policy here at home. Plus, the Obama birthday party seems like there was some serious spreading of covid that went on, but it was a sophisticated spreading of covid at the Obama birthday party. We’ll get into all of that and more today with you.
But let’s just start with this. It would be hard to think of a bigger blunder, a bigger foreign policy mess in the first year of a presidency than what you are seeing right now unfold in Afghanistan. There are so many aspects of this. What’s happening right now is that the Taliban is in control. They have photos of themselves — video — in the presidential palace in Kabul, the capital city.
They’ve seized all the major provincial capitals. They have done it in a matter of days. A breathtaking Taliban blitzkrieg the likes of which nobody at the top level of the federal government was predicting. And yet now we’re to be told that somehow this is the Biden administration knowing what’s going on? Now it’s Trump’s fault? They’re scrambling for any defense whatsoever.
Let’s just remember — let’s take a trip down memory lane, Clay — to what in July the Biden administration was saying. Play clip 2.
BIDEN: No! It is not!
VOICE: Why?
BIDEN: Because you have the Afghan troops have 300,000 — well-equipped, as well equipped as any army in the world and an air force — against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable.
BUCK: Really well-equipped army, Clay, that apparently did not fight at all against the Taliban.
CLAY: Yeah. And let’s just go ahead and play some of these greatest hits which I think are going to come a long way towards defining the Biden administration. We already thought that it was a level of incompetence that we hadn’t seen in a long time. Friday, we talked about the fact that basically everything Joe Biden has touched has blown up in his face.
But 5-1/2 weeks ago, he was asked whether there might be any parallels between the fall of Saigon in 1975 and Afghanistan, and he said, “No.” I think it’s fair to say Afghanistan and Kabul is Saigon on steroids. But 5-1/2 weeks ago, Joe Biden told you that what you are seeing on your television screen and on your telephones as you watch and follow this on social media, that it was impossible. Play cut 3.
BIDEN: None whatsoever! Zero! What you had is you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our embassy. Six, if I’m not mistaken. The Taliban is not the South… (sputters) North Vietnamese army. They’re not… They’re remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s gonna be no circumstance you’re gonna see people being lifted off the roof of — of a embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.
BUCK: Now, that’s exactly what we saw.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: So isn’t that a remarkable circumstance? Prophetic in its opposite, in a sense here. It’s like Joe Biden said, “This will not happen,” Clay, and the things that he promised would not are actually what did happen.
CLAY: And it happened in 5-1/2 weeks, Buck! I can’t remember any American leader — I’m trying to think — making a prediction that is this irrevocably wrong. It’s different knew it upon and we can argue about what the significance of it was and all of those different impacts. But within 5-1/2 weeks for a foreign policy explosion like this? Listen to cut 4. This was last month in July — 5-1/2 weeks ago — Joe Biden said it’s “highly unlikely” Afghanistan will fall to the Taliban.
It happens before we can even leave the country!
BIDEN: So the question now is, “Where do they go from here?” That the jury is still out. But likelihood is going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.
BUCK: That’s exactly what happened. It happened at lightning speed. Clay, this is the biggest policy, intelligence, and, honestly, military-industrial complex failure in certainly decades, maybe in living memory, or maybe you’d have to go back to Vietnam all the way.
CLAY: You and I, arguably… I said two generations. I’m 42; you’re 39. There, I believe, is a strong argument that there has been no American foreign policy failure the likes of this that’s occurred in our lifetimes, and in the lifetimes of a lot of our listeners and for those of you who are able to remember Saigon in 1975 to signify the end of the Vietnam War.
This is a monumental, categorical failure for the Joe Biden administration. And we still don’t know, Buck, how it’s going to end, because there’s mass chaos all over Afghanistan right now. You have American military planes that can’t take off because civilians who are trying to flee the Taliban have taken over the airport there in Kabul.
We’ve got all sorts of American citizens who may or may not be able to get out safely. We’re now relying on the Taliban to not exert any form of violence on the remaining Americans there. We’ve had to bring in over 6,000 troops I think at this point. Buck, this is what’s so wild about this, too, Buck. Friday, as our tease was, we said, “Hey, we’re gonna come in on Monday…”
And based on all the data and all the evidence, Kabul was gonna have fallen to Taliban. How in the world is Joe Biden still on vacation? How did Jen Psaki, the spokesperson, leave, if you and I on Friday, Buck, could say, “Hey, this is going to be a disaster; we’ll be talking about it on Monday”? You and I wouldn’t miss this radio show. And the president of the United States still hasn’t talked, the head spokesperson? This is an unbelievable dereliction of duty that I think every American, regardless of political party, should be disgusted by.
BUCK: It turns out that electing a visibly declining sub-mediocrity as president and surrounding him with pronoun-in-their-bio advisers making momentous decisions about U.S. national security is a really bad idea. No matter what you think of Trump — and we’re gonna see them try. They’ve already done this a little bit. “Oh, Trump set the timeline.
“Oh, Trump is the one that put this together; the Biden White House, the hands were tied.” It’s pathetic. But what else are they going to say? “We’re a bunch of idiots”? “We have no idea what we’re doing”? Clay, it defies belief how much this White House has messed this up. It defies belief that they couldn’t have seen this coming at all! Here’s what was expected…
CLAY: We saw it coming, Buck! (laughs)
BUCK: Well, a few days ago, but a month ago —
CLAY: Now, a month ago, you said this on this show! If we went back to archives you said the people that you’re talking to are saying… I well remember it; I know a lot of our listeners do. Based on the people you were talking to, that it was going to happen even faster.
BUCK: Oh, yes. Right. Sorry. Yes. I knew the Taliban would run the country and it would happen faster than Biden. I didn’t know it was gonna happen in five weeks, though. That’s the part of this that’s completely shocking.
CLAY: That’s still wild. But if we are able to foresee that and discussing it on this radio program with nowhere near the ability that the White House has to get all the data, to have all the information, this is a unmitigated disaster the likes of which many of our listeners have never seen in our lives.
BUCK: So what was believed would happen here, just so everyone knows. We’ve gotta remember, they’re lying to you right now, the Biden White House is lying when they say this isn’t any way what they thought was going to happen, that they prepared for, that’s why they’re sending about 6,000 troops —
CLAY: 6,000 troops.
BUCK: — back in to try to make sure, ’cause if the Taliban surrounds as they already have and then decides to open fire on the airport or start bringing down planes, we’re gonna have a disaster that goes even beyond anything we’ve seen.
CLAY: That’s correct.
BUCK: You’d have to go deep into the Vietnam War for something like that. So we have a circumstance here where the Biden White House has no narrative that is credible that does not make them look like abject fools. They at least thought… The consensus, Clay, was we spent all this time…
Biden even mentioned the 300,000 troops. We spent all this time training these different contractors who were out there working with the police and the military. I remember being out there watching these guys getting training while I was with the agency years ago and the belief was that at least there’d be a stalemate for a while, right?
CLAY: To allow a retreat with honor, for lack of a better phrase.
BUCK: This was the Taliban getting waved into city centers and town squares —
CLAY: With almost no resistance and almost no casualties.
BUCK: — by the people that we trained and worked with.
CLAY: That we spent tens of billions of dollars, a trillion dollars total. That’s how we allowed this to happen.
BUCK: How could we not have known? You say, “Oh, well, everyone in Afghanistan knew the Taliban was eventually going to take over.” Although Biden said a month ago, it’s not inevitable. It absolutely was inevitable the Taliban was gonna take back most, if not all of the country. The question was the speed. But I don’t have access anymore to the PDB.
CLAY: Yeah. That’s right. (laughing)
BUCK: I don’t have hundreds of billions of dollars of military and intelligence apparatus at my disposal.
CLAY: Yeah, we were better analyzing this than the entire Biden White House.
BUCK: Two dudes sitting here — one with a Mountain Dew and one with a Diet Creamsicle Shasta or whatever —
CLAY: (laughing) In T-shirts.
BUCK: — in T-shirts were sitting here better at analyzing the fall of Kabul than the Biden administration. I think this is where you’re starting to see there’s panic in this White House, Clay, not so much just because of what’s going on in Kabul but because this goes to a broader narrative of this is worse than Jimmy Carter. In fact, Biden is starting to make Jimmy Carter look like some kind of a strategic genius by comparison, and that’s something that really terrifies the left, because they want power here. That’s what matters first and foremost.
CLAY: Is it wild that as Biden has stayed completely silent in terms of speaking in front of the public — and he is reportedly going to fly from Camp David to the White House to speak at 3:45 eastern. We’ll certainly be talking about what he says tomorrow. That will happen after today’s show. How is it possible that he’s remained silent for this long? Is it crazy, Buck, that I was thinking, “Is he okay?” That was one of my first thoughts when he’s not in front of a camera.
BUCK: I think he’s shocked. I think there’s a shock right now that’s going all the way up. We’ll play more of this for you. If you hear how Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, responded to a question about the air lifting off the embassy, they don’t even have good BS talking points to deploy right now. They’re completely just —
CLAY: Shell-shocked.
BUCK: — shell-shocked in a sense, although they’re actually not the ones out there on the front line. So why don’t we come back to that what the narratives are and then we’ll update you in real time because this is happening in real time. And remember now, this is a period where video and footage and everything is making its way out of Afghanistan —
CLAY: In real time.
BUCK: — in real time so people can see exactly what’s happening here. So we’ll come back with this crisis in Afghanistan and just remember this, folks, it did not have been this way, the withdrawal, whether you think we should have pulled troops out or not, this Biden White House is inept beyond words, an absolute catastrophe.
