President Joe Biden continues to show weakness on the international stage following his visit to Kyiv, Ukraine, where he looked like a “guy who walked out of an old folks home, wandering around looking for someone to show him the way back to have some custard for dinner,” said Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer.
A clip of Biden walking through Ukraine’s capital with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as air raid sirens go off was likely arranged, added Gordon Chang, a prominent author and lawyer, calling it an “embarrassing” move and a disadvantage for the U.S.
“Clearly they arranged that, and for the press secretary to actually sort of propagate that even further is just embarrassing,” Chang told Newsmax‘s “Chris Salcedo Show“ on Friday.
“The Chinese look at this, and they do sense the weakness that both [Secretary of State] Tony [Blinken] and [Shaffer] talked about. And because of that, we have got real concerns about what’s going to happen in not only East Asia but also, for instance, in North Africa with Algeria maybe attacking Morocco. So we’ve got concerns all over the place because of the weakness of the administration.”
The war in Ukraine was entirely avoidable, added retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Blaine Holt, but the United States’ failure in Kabul, Afghanistan, foreshadowed what was to come.
“I knew … when Kabul fell, we were going to have a war in Ukraine. And we still had a deterrable war at that point,” Holt told Newsmax.
“But the weakness just continued. We didn’t give Ukraine what they need to deter anything. And we caught ourselves, you know, thinking, ‘Oh, well, this might be a minor incursion; maybe it’ll be over in five days with some of the rhetoric that we heard this time last year,’ if you recall at this point last year. If you recall, the president had said, ‘Oh, well, a small … invasion, we would have to look at that differently.’
“… I knew that the Russian military would probably embarrass itself, and I knew it would grind on. But we really haven’t done anything to stop it at this point.”
The U.S. needs to have a strategy “irrelevant of NATO or Poland or Ukraine and define what we want to achieve,” said Shaffer.
The peace deal the Chinese offered — “that’s a power move on their part. They’re trying to show they’re the adults in the room. We should be doing that. By the way, Blinken and company knew this was coming last week and did nothing to anticipate it. … He’s always one step behind. That has never been more apparent than the way he’s talking about the issues today.”
China on Friday called for a cease-fire and peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, and Zelenskyy cautiously welcomed Beijing’s involvement — but said success would depend on actions, not words.
Beijing claims to have a neutral stance in the war that began one year ago, but has also said it has a “no limits friendship” with Russia and has refused to criticize Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine — or even refer to it as an invasion. It has accused the West of provoking the conflict and “fanning the flames” by providing Ukraine with defensive arms.
China has been supplying Russia with assistance “from the very first moments of this war,” said Chang, but the Biden administration “doesn’t want to impose” real costs on China, which is why the Chinese ignore them.
Holt said the relationship between Russia and China needs to be reevaluated, as they are “clearly doing acts of war against us.”
“We’ve known this forever that there is direct support going on, but the Biden administration pretends not to know that for purposes of trying to be nice,” added Shaffer.
“Tony Blinken is constantly trying to show weakness, when strength is required.”
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