OPINION:
Presidents Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter, who are exiting the stage of history together, are accidental presidents whose tenures were marked by foreign policy disasters.
Carter was defeated in a landslide when he ran for a second term in 1980, carrying just six states. Mr. Biden, the most unpopular president in 70 years, was blocked from running for reelection by leaders of his party.
After Watergate, almost any Democrat could have won in 1976, even a peanut farmer and one-term governor of Georgia whose hallmark was moralizing.
Even after he left office, Carter couldn’t stop lecturing the world, as in his 2006 book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” which suggested that Israel was to blame for turmoil in the region.
Mr. Biden was a Democratic hack who was twice in the right place at the right time.
In 2008, Barack Obama tapped him as his running mate to reassure the party establishment. In 2020, Mr. Biden was the compromise candidate the party united behind to stop Sen. Bernie Sanders. COVID-19 gave him an excuse to hide for most of the campaign.
Iran figures prominently in the foreign policy fiascoes of both men. Carter eased the ayatollahs’ path to power. Mr. Biden aided their nuclear program and helped them spread terror throughout the Middle East.
At the beginning of his presidency, Carter announced that human rights would be the centerpiece of his foreign policy, then helped to bring to power one of the bloodiest regimes on Earth. Iran executed more than 2,000 political prisoners from 2021 to 2023.
At the start of the Carter years, the Shah of Iran, a longtime U.S. ally, was in power. Ayatollah Khomeini worked Carter like a pitchman at a carnival sideshow. We won’t be hostile to U.S. interests, Khomeini assured Washington. In Farsi, “Great Satan” is a term of endearment.
While ostensibly supporting the Shah, we quietly undercut him. After he abdicated, we stopped the Iranian military from staging a coup to block Khomeini’s takeover.
The aftermath of the Iranian revolution included the 444-day Iran hostage crisis. A botched rescue operation was an embarrassment that foreshadowed Mr. Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal.
To lure Iran back to negotiating a nuclear deal, Mr. Biden eased sanctions on its oil exports, which increased 50% during his time in office.
In the final year of the Trump administration, Iran’s military spending reached its lowest point in decades — about $3 billion. Under Mr. Biden, Tehran’s military budget doubled to $6.8 billion. That meant more support for the regime’s terrorist proxies, leading to Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Mr. Biden also presided over our humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, which signaled weakness to the world and set the stage for years of chaos.
Ignoring the warnings of his military and intelligence advisers, the president closed Bagram Air Base and relied on the Taliban to provide security at the Kabul airport, resulting in the deaths of 13 American service members and more than 100 Afghans.
The U.S. pulled all support from the Afghan military, which had lost 50,000 fighting the Taliban. Eager to be remembered as the president who ended our 20-year war in Afghanistan, Mr. Biden left behind $7 billion in military equipment and stranded tens of thousands of our allies.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to reassert U.S. sovereignty over the Panama Canal, which Carter fecklessly gave away in 1979.
At the time, President Ronald Reagan argued that control of the canal was vital to our security. But Carter couldn’t resist another opportunity to prove that in its international dealings, America was guided by “fairness, not force.”
Now China, renowned for its fairness, is in a position to close the waterway. Through a Hong Kong-based company, it controls the ports at both ends of the canal.
Carter normalized relations with China, betraying yet another ally, Taiwan.
By withdrawing our recognition of the budding democracy and agreeing to Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is part of One China, he planted a land mine that could explode in our faces whenever China decides to take the island by force.
Carter and Mr. Biden came to Washington at about the same time. Mr. Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972. Carter was elected president four years later.
It was fitting that President Biden delivered the eulogy at Jimmy Carter’s funeral. They delineated an era of monumental foreign policy failures — blunders with lethal consequences.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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