Hayward: Democrats Ignore Global Crises Created by Biden and Harris at Kamala’s Coronation

The general narrative of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) this week was to erase Kamala Harris’s dismal record as vice president — indeed, to somehow pretend that former President Donald Trump has somehow been in office all this time and she is running as a plucky challenger brimming with hope and joy.

Nowhere was this crude narrative construction more evident than in foreign policy, as the great failures of the Biden-Harris administration went completely unmentioned.

WATCH — NBC’s Welker: Harris Didn’t Say Much About How She’d Be Different from Biden:

Aside from a weird, and demonstrably untrue, crack that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un wants Donald Trump to be president again, Harris only talked about two big foreign policy issues: the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Those are important matters, to be sure, but neither of them has been any sort of triumph for the Biden-Harris administration and Harris struggled mightily to give the impression that she had anything to do with them at all. 

On Ukraine, Harris’s coronation speech (“nomination” does not seem like the right word for someone who never received a single primary vote) simply boasted about sending endless amounts of money to Ukraine and claiming Trump would abandon the Ukrainians to Russia’s tender mercies.

Harris said nothing about the Ukrainians keeping her and Joe Biden completely out of the loop while they planned and executed an invasion of Russia’s Kursk region. The Ukrainians are still in Kursk, so the full story of their counter-invasion has yet to be written, but using American support to pull off a risky operation like that without fully involving the White House is a questionable strategy. Harris seems to have no questions about it.

On the Gaza war, Harris tried to thread a needle while wearing oven mitts, seeking to mollify Jewish Democrat voters by declaring her full-throated support for Israel’s right to self-defense while swooning over the Palestinians, who she painted as innocent waifs wholly unconnected to the butchers and rapists of Hamas.

Judging by the angry crowds outside the DNC and online reactions to her pandering attempt, at least one of the groups Harris sought to mollify did not buy what she was selling.

The Gaza war is a difficult topic, but frantic acts of domestic political triangulation are not serious foreign policy. American Jewish voters might be glad to hear Harris acknowledge Israel’s right to defend itself, but the actual Israelis are not thrilled with how she and Biden have been dumping all of the moral responsibility for the war in their laps, hectoring Israel for a “ceasefire” while Hamas keeps making maximalist demands and walking away from the negotiating table.

Harris also avoided criticizing the excesses of the frighteningly large and powerful pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic Party, which should tell American Jewish voters everything they need to know about how serious she is. She might not have pandered to the Palestinians enough to win Michigan last night, but she is not going to do anything about pro-Hamas mobs shoving Jewish college students into closets.

The rest of American’s foreign policy challenges were ignored. On the day Harris accepted her coronation, the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists of Yemen hit an oil tanker with drones and pirate boats, turning it into a floating environmental hazard. Biden and Harris have utterly failed to secure international shipping against the Houthis. Rising shipping costs from their failure are a contributing factor to the malaise and stagflation hitting American consumers.

American service members in the Middle East have been subjected to dozens of attacks from Iran-backed militia forces, with minimal response from Biden and Harris. Under Joe Biden’s presidency, the Iraqis are talking about kicking American forces out of the country altogether.

Biden and Harris have already gotten Americans kicked out of vital counter-terrorism bases in Africa, and of course Harris wasn’t going to mention their bloody disaster in Afghanistan, which left Afghans in the grip of a brutal extremist junta. The Taliban treats women like livestock. Right around the time of Harris’s coronation, the Taliban was announcing that women are no longer allowed to show their faces or speak in public.

The astonishingly inept administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris has somehow managed to put more than $11 million of American money in the hands of the Taliban, on top of the billions of dollars of military equipment they abandoned to the extremists. $11 million is, admittedly, small change compared to the amount of money the Biden-Harris administration loses track of every day, but it remains a telling indictment of how this administration treats foreign policy like a fantasy role playing game, with minimal attention paid to the actual consequences of its actions.

Harris vaguely promised she would “never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists,” but her entire tenure in the White House has been all about hesitating. Her sole mention of Iran in her coronation speech was a promise to stop doing what she has been doing for three and a half years.

Her ideological godfathers, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, made sure Iran had all the money it needed to back those terrorists, thanks to Obama’s disastrous “nuclear deal.” Donald Trump was absolutely correct about that deal — about Iran’s cheating, and the dangers of putting billions of dollars in the hands of an aggressive terrorist-supporting regime with dreams of becoming a regional superpower.

The Original Sin of the Biden-Harris administration was declaring war on American energy production, which not only contributed to the grinding inflation sucking thousands of dollars out of family budgets every year, but also enriched and empowered hostile forces like Iran and Russia. Harris has given no signal that she intends to change course, or even understands the scope of her administration’s error.

Perhaps the greatest void in Harris’ speech was China, which would have been a very awkward topic to breach, given the very special relationship her running mate Tim Walz has developed with the Communist tyranny.

The problem facing America is that China, for all of its economic stumbles and setbacks, is still very serious about displacing the United States as the hyperpower for the 21st Century. Harris is cooking up sound bites while Beijing is making plans.

“I will make sure that we lead the world into the future on space and artificial intelligence — that America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century and that we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership,” Harris said in her sole mention of China on Thursday night.

Leaving aside the absurdity of thinking Kamala Harris has a solid grasp of either space travel or artificial intelligence — or how China had pulled ahead in both on her watch — it is telling that she can only imagine the American contest with China in terms of two buzzy high-tech competitions that get lots of clicks on social media.

China is waging a serious contest for political, strategic, technological, and economic dominance. China remains a very real threat to America’s allies in the Pacific, from Taiwan and the Philippines to Japan. Harris is dropping a few buzzwords and looking forward to swooning Big Media articles painting her as a high-tech pioneer.

China has a coldly logical pitch for smaller nations thinking about entering its orbit and taking its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) money. Part of that pitch involves reminding Third World countries that hooking up with the Americans means listening to endless LGBT harangues, and maybe facing a “color revolution” if they do not listen carefully enough.

China would never dream of weakening itself with the lunatic open borders policies Harris embraces. The Chinese do not abandon their population to the whims of mass migration, although they occasionally redraw their borders to run through your backyard and then tell you to get off their lawn.

There must be a coherent American strategic response to China’s malevolent, but quite coherent, global agenda. There must be a clear ideological response to China’s aggressive promotion of authoritarianism. Kamala Harris, last seen blaming evil grocery store owners for inflation and promising to punish them with price controls on food, is not well-positioned to lead that effort.