The most visible libertarian in public life came out swinging on the second night of the Republican National Convention, wasting no words on eviscerating Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s career of being wrong on foreign policy.
And of course, that’s not a right-wing talking point. It was President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden’s own defense secretary who deemed Biden “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Although Paul, far more isolationist than the Republican Party establishment and, in many cases, even President Trump himself, hasn’t been right on every or even most foreign policy issues, he absolutely nailed Biden on his most fatal and still untapped flaw: a lifetime love affair with illegal wars.
“Compare President Trump with the disastrous record of Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, who consistently called for more war,” the Kentucky senator said in his prepared remarks. “Joe Biden voted for the Iraq War, which President Trump has long called the worst geopolitical mistake of our generation. I fear Biden will choose war again. He supported war in Serbia, Syria, and Libya. Joe Biden will continue to spill our blood and treasure. President Trump will bring our heroes home. If you hate war like I hate war, if you want us to quit sending $50 billion to Afghanistan for luxury hotels … you need to support President Trump for another term.”
Paul’s slight historical revisionism on Trump’s stance on the Iraq War at the time aside, every other word of his dissection of Biden’s record is true. Everyone knows the catastrophic consequences of the Obama-Biden administration’s support for our misguided campaigns in Syria and Libya, but Biden’s role in the Serbia conflict has fallen out of recent memory. So let’s recap.
While Bill Clinton was still reeling from the fallout of his impeachment, the Monica Lewinsky affair, and the highly credible allegation that he raped Juanita Broaddrick while Clinton was Arkansas attorney general, he and the reportedly estranged Hillary Clinton found a new crusade to unite them. In her own words, the former first lady professed that she “urged him to bomb” the civilian-occupied Belgrade, then of communist Yugoslavia and now the capital of Serbia. While the Clinton administration allowed millions to be murdered in the Rwandan genocide, the Clinton defense secretary went on television to claim that Serbs had “murdered” 100,000 Albanians, when in reality, that number was likely between 4,000 and 5,000 in a long-brewing conflict that saw Serbs suffer the worst “physical, political, legal, and cultural genocide” since the Nazis and Axis powers invaded the region in 1941. Ethnic tensions escalated over the next decade, according to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Biden didn’t just vote to bomb journalists and civilians in Belgrade over a conflict that, unlike in the Middle East, we had zero interest in. Instead, he co-sponsored the resolution authorizing the strikes, deemed a war crime by Amnesty International.
And unlike the Iraq War, this is actually an issue with cold, hard evidence that Trump was always on the opposite side.
“Well, I would have done it a little bit differently,” Trump said in 1999 when asked by Larry King of Clinton’s decision to bomb. “And I know this would sound terrible. But look at the havoc that they have wreaked in Kosovo. I mean, we could say we lost very few people. Of course, we had airplanes 75,000 feet up in the air dropping bombs. But look at what we’ve done to that land and to those people and the deaths that we’ve caused.”
“So, you know, I don’t know if they consider that a success because I can’t consider it a success.”
