In Chicago last week, the Democratic Party’s A-list was on full display, but it wasn’t the kind of A-list you might think. It was a list of foreign policy abominables, the Democratic leaders responsible for squandering America’s hard-fought Cold War victory and creating the conditions for today’s increasingly dangerous confrontations with Russia , China , and Iran . The blunders began under former President Bill Clinton and have continued unabated through the Biden-Harris presidency.
First, for those who didn’t live through it, here’s a quick primer on the end of the Cold War. It began nine months after President Ronald Reagan left office when the Berlin Wall was smashed by freedom-loving citizens while Communist East German soldiers watched helplessly. A week and a half later, the Velvet Revolution of 1989 began in Czechoslovakia and spread rapidly across Russian-dominated Eastern Europe.
The democratic fervor extended to China. Popular protests erupted in the spring of 1989 and climaxed at Tiananmen Square in Beijing that June. Thousands of protesters, mainly students, gathered near the tomb of Chinese Communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong to demand democratic reforms. China’s government responded by crushing the protests with tanks and troops, massacring hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union followed in 1991 as former Soviet Republics like Ukraine and Kazakhstan chose independence over vassalage to Moscow. That left China isolated as one of the last bastions of Marxism. The following year, Clinton won the presidential election.
Clinton inherited America’s Cold War victory and its “peace dividend,” a respite from high levels of defense spending during the 44 years of confrontation with the Soviet Union. But he inherited none of the wisdom of the statesmen who preceded him on how to deal with Marxist regimes. Two months after taking office, Clinton granted most-favored-nation, or MFN, trade status to Communist China, stating that he “hoped” democratic reforms would flow from U.S.-China trade. Nancy Pelosi, who rounded up congressional support for the move, stood by his side.
The theory that democratic reforms would automatically result from free trade had never been tested, much less proved. There was no evidence in the historical record that trade ever changed an authoritarian regime, especially an avowedly Marxist government determined to keep the Chinese Communist Party in control. Despite this lack of proof, the theory became an article of faith in Washington. Next, Clinton pushed negotiations with China to enter the World Trade Organization, giving its exports access to Western economies worldwide.
Granting China MFN status ignited its economy. After a long slump in the 1990s, growth took off with China’s new access to our economy and investment. So did its ambitions. In 1997, China purchased a mothballed Soviet aircraft carrier called the Varyag from Ukraine. At the time, Clinton’s national security team dismissed the purchase as insignificant. Blinded by the theory that trade with China would draw it closer to the West, they were incapable of foreseeing that the Varyag was China’s first move in a long game to achieve naval dominance over the United States. Today, China has a bigger navy than the U.S.
Clinton’s liberalization of trade with China ushered in the destruction of millions of American manufacturing jobs and the hollowing out of our industrial base. As manufacturing jobs shifted to China, Beijing’s treasury fattened. Revenues from its foreign exports funded China’s military rise.
Former President Barack Obama’s foreign policy missteps are so numerous I’ll only hit the highlights. He let Russian President Vladimir Putin seize Crimea without any serious consequences, thereby fueling Putin’s appetite for conquering Ukraine. He failed to back Iran’s Green Movement in 2009, when pro-democracy protests broke out nationwide. Instead, he strengthened the ayatollahs by negotiating a nuclear deal that gave Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief while doing little to prevent it from eventually developing nuclear weapons. He was oblivious to the rise of the Islamic State, dismissing the terrorist organization as “junior varsity.”
Then, there’s Afghanistan, where Obama declared a “war of necessity” shortly after taking office. Calling it “a war we have to win,” he surged American troops into the country under a muddled policy that announced a date for their pullout when their mission to transform the country had barely begun. Predictably, the Taliban hunkered down to await the eventual departure.
Obama’s war of necessity came to an ignominious end when President Joe Biden summarily pulled out U.S. troops in a humiliating withdrawal that left billions of dollars of military equipment in the hands of the Taliban, further emboldening hostile leaders like Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. On Biden’s watch, the foreign policy blunders of his predecessors were compounded by his own.
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The axis of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea poses an existential threat not only to America but to democracies worldwide. The U.S. and West now face the gravest threats to the post-war world order since the Cuban missile crisis.
America had a once-in-a-century chance to create a stable peace after the end of the Cold War. The Democratic Party’s A-list of foreign policy abominables blew it.
John B. Roberts II is a former political strategist and executive producer of the McLaughlin Group. He is the author of Reagan’s Cowboys: Inside the 1984 Presidential Campaign’s Secret Operation Against Geraldine Ferraro.
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