Joe Biden appeared to suggest the elected, conservative governments of NATO allies Hungary and Poland are “totalitarian regimes” like Belarus.
Speaking at a town hall event on Thursday on foreign policy, the Democratic party presidential candidate praised Donald Trump “on the deal with Israel recently” but condemned the U.S. President’s supposed inaction with regards to Russia and North Korea.
“You see what’s happened in everything from Belarus to Poland to Hungary, and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the world,” Biden said, telling the ABC-screened event: “This President embraces all the thugs in the world. I mean, he is best friends with the leader of North Korea, sending love letters.”
Poland has been a strong ally of America under the Trump administration, not only meeting its commitments to NATO but also by joining the United States in an energy partnership which has seen the former Soviet satellite boost its imports of American liquefied natural gas by more than 1,000 per cent between 2018 and 2019.
The former vice-president’s comments marked the second time he has taken aim at Poland in recent months, having previously attacked its LGBT ideology-free zones — misleadingly dubbed ‘LGBT-free zones’ — as an assault on “human rights” which “have no place in the European Union or anywhere in the world”.
Supporters of these zones say they are really just areas where the local authorities have endorsed non-binding resolutions against the promotion of transgenderism and sex and same-sex relationships education for young children, which the country’s president publicly opposed during his successful re-election campaign earlier this year, insisting that “parents are responsible for the sexual education of their children” and there is “no consent for this phenomenon to happen in our country in any way.”
Homosexuality itself remains legal all over the country.
The Hungarian government, meanwhile, responded to Biden directly and in no uncertain terms, with foreign minister Péter Szijjártó stressing that relations between Washington and Budapest are flourishing under the presidency of Trump, who he said shares similar views to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on issues including illegal immigration and the protection of Christian communities.
Biden had “involved Hungary in the presidential election campaign” as a result of these commonalities, Szijjártó suggested, adding that the Democratic presidential hopeful’s assertions “have nothing to do with reality”.
“[I]t would be best if Joe Biden could answer some of those old questions that have been out there for a while, before attacking Central Europe,” he shot back, adding: “It would be great if Joe Biden could tell us why he put pressure on the Ukrainian government to fire its chief prosecutor, and how all of this related to the investigation into his son’s Ukrainian energy deals grinding to a halt.”
Academics have predicted a Biden victory in November would mean countries in conservative Central Europe would be forced to adopt the far-left policies on “social and racial justice” that are promoted by much of the U.S. media and the academic establishment.
“A key difference between the approaches of the U.S. Democratic and Republican politicians to eastern Europe seems to lie in the contrast between values promotion and security commitments,” stated Cristian Nitoiu, Florin Pasatoiu, and Loredana Simionov.
The Democrats, they suggest in a commentary for the globalist London School of Economics (LSE), “seems to be focused on achieving a certain level of ideological influence: especially when it comes to the promotion of liberal values, such human rights, democracy, the rule of law and more recently social justice”.
If Biden enters the White House, they added, “Countries in the region will be expected to show a commitment toward closer relations across the Atlantic, not only when it comes to upholding the existing security architecture, but also closely mimicking liberal values-led developments in the U.S., especially in the area of social and racial justice.”
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