White House national security spokesman John Kirby struggled Thursday when asked to name the top foreign policy achievement for President Joe Biden in 2023.
During a briefing with reporters — the last of the year — Ed O’Keefe of CBS News asked Kirby to look back over the year and name the most important success.
Kirby waffled for a moment, saying that he was running out of time, and suggesting that Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre wanted him to go.
“There’s a lot we’ve achieved in foreign policy … ” he began.
“You know, we’re running late, and I don’t want to belabor this,” he continued, saying that the answer would take 20 minutes.
Kirby eventually listed the “Quad” alliance in the Indo-Pacific, the Australian nuclear submarine deal, helping Ukraine hold Russia back, and helping Israel “put pressure on Hamas.”
(Former President Donald Trump actually formed the Quad alliance in 2017.)
Ultimately, he said that the top achievement was “shoring up alliances.”
“I think if I had to bucket into one thing, one of the most important things he’s done on the foreign policy front is shore up and revitalize our vast network of alliances and partnerships. No other nation in the world has that kind of a network at their disposal.”
Kirby said that Biden had taken the time to invest in relationships that “had been let lapse” by President Donald Trump.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.