When you’re President of the United States; commander-in-chief; leader of the free world, you’ve got to be able to walk and chew gum. You’ve got to be able to do multiple things, well, at the same time.
Unfortunately, when our current president attempts to shake hands with people who aren’t there, and has to be corralled by the Easter Bunny, it’s hard to have much confidence that this man is up to the task.
On the domestic front, he’s screwed up just about everything. 8 1/2% inflation – the highest we’ve seen in more than 40 years. Our southern border a total mess – and about to get a whole lot worse if he moves ahead with abolishing Title 42. Violence and homicide on the rise, due to Democrats’ soft-on-crime, defund-the-police policies. And targeting parents as “domestic terrorists” when what we really need is more parental involvement in our children’s education.
And on the international front, where I really want to focus this week, yes, President Biden has his hands full dealing with Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. (Of course Biden’s catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan sent out a message of weakness to the world’s worst actors that he could be had.)
But while Biden had his eye on pushing back Putin, he took his other eye off the world’s even-worse actor, the PRC, the Chinese Communist Party. And as a result, the Commies have had a big win, and the United States has suffered a big loss. In of all places, the Solomon Islands.
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“The Solomons,” as they are colloquially known, are a tiny island chain in the South Pacific, about 1300 miles from Australia. Their familiarity to most Americans is limited to their historical significance, as they were the location of some of the fiercest fighting in the World War II Pacific Theatre, including the Battle of Guadalcanal. Their total population is about 700,000, which is about the population of one American congressional district (and there are 435 of those.)
But the Solomons are of strategic consequence when it comes to our national security goal of containing an expansionist-minded communist China. China has long been building islands in the South China Sea, and then militarizing them, and they’ve now apparently come to a security pact with the government of the Solomon Islands. The Biden administration foreign policy mavens belatedly decided to send a high-level delegation to the Solomons to try to stop it from happening. But the deal has already been signed. The Biden administration appears to have been asleep at the wheel.
US ally Australia is particularly concerned about China potentially building a military naval base so close to them. It’s even being referred to in Australia as their version of our Cuban Missile Crisis.
The US’s principal concern is that this security arrangement between China and the Solomons could allow our chief adversary on the world scene to project power across the Pacific region. In my opinion, this concern is well founded and the Biden administration should have done everything within its power to prevent this development from having happened.
But you’ve got to be on top of your game to prevail in a rapidly developing world scene. And this administration clearly is not.