Young: Biden Admin Leaves Behind a World in Chaos

WASHINGTON –Today, U.S. Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke on the Senate floor about the Biden Administration’s foreign policy legacy and outlined steps for reasserting global leadership in the years ahead.

Senator Young’s remarks as delivered are below:

If you conduct a quick survey of global events over the past four years, it’s impossible to argue that the world is more secure today than it was when the Biden Administration began.

Events began to spiral downward in the summer of 2021, when the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan.

The Biden Administration’s botched withdrawal cost the lives of 13 brave, patriotic American service members.

It left American citizens behind, and it left Afghans desperately clinging to the sides of aircraft departing Kabul.

We shouldn’t forget this.

It conveyed a message of American weakness to the world, a message that was heard loud and clear in places like Moscow, Tehran, and Beijing.

Just six months after the debacle in Afghanistan, Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border. Vladimir Putin launched the largest conflict in Europe since World War II.

The United States has stood with the Ukrainian people rhetorically. We’ve provided some critical assistance to ensure that Ukraine did not lose against the Russian onslaught.

But it has not put the Ukrainians in a position to win.

The Biden Administration has too often slow walked deliveries of weapons, or they’ve imposed other restrictions on the Ukrainian forces.

This foot dragging, this obstructionism, this bureaucratic lethargy, this timidity, has undermined our ability to convincingly deter Putin’s ambitions or deter a broadening conflict.

So here we are today, the war drags on, with no strategy and defined end goal for American support of Ukraine.

Of course, the American people are understandably exasperated by this development.

Meanwhile, additional conflicts developed in other regions, as if that wasn’t enough.

Determined to revive the Iran nuclear deal, the Biden Administration repeated the mistakes of the Obama years. They loosened sanctions on the Iranian regime.

And the results predictably have been nothing short of disastrous.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas – the Iran-backed terror group controlling Gaza – carried out the worst attacks against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.

Iran-backed Hezbollah has attacked Israel from the north and forced the evacuation of Israeli civilians.

In recent months, President Biden has sadly undone much of the goodwill he initially created when he stood with Israel after October 7.

In the process, President Biden has caved to misguided or hostile voices from within his own administration who demand that Israel defend itself with one arm tied behind its back.

For four years, the Biden team has failed to formulate a strategy for restoring deterrence and stopping Iran’s campaign of terror and chaos, leaving our ally Israel and the entire Middle East less safe and rolling back the diplomatic progress of the Abraham Accords of the Trump years.

Across the Pacific, the Chinese Communist Party continues to build its military, threaten Taiwan, wage economic warfare against our businesses and our supply chains, pursue economic coercion against American partners and allies, and undermine security and stability in the broader Indo-Pacific.

Other than that, things are placid.

We saw this most visibly when China launched a surveillance balloon over North America last year. Traveled over the United States.

Here again, President Biden failed to provide answers to the American people about that situation or to restore deterrence so that the Chinese Communist Party understands it cannot spy on our schools, on our military bases, on our homes, on our farms, on the American people.

Today, our strategic competition with China continues on, as it must, with the CCP’s global power and influence largely unchecked over the past four years.

Whether it be in Afghanistan, the Middle East, or the Indo-Pacific, the world that President Biden is leaving behind – there is no two ways about it, let us not be mealy-mouthed – it is a world full of chaos.

A band of malevolent nations – China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and others. That band is redrawing borders, threating neighbors, stealing intellectual property, sowing chaos, and threatening the global stability.

Unchecked, their aggression emboldens other foes of freedom and it triggers ever more destabilizing conflicts.

So what is to be done?

I know there’s a natural tendency to want to withdraw from the world.

To give up on our leadership responsibilities.

To give up even on what I would characterize as our own security interests. 

And understandably, right now, there’s a natural impulse to withdraw, certainly, from our global leadership role. It all just seems so daunting right now – we have domestic problems of course.

But we cannot ignore the costs of such divestment – costs which are manifesting themselves at this very moment.

Abandoning our allies and partners will empower and embolden authoritarian powers such as China, Russia, Iran, and others around the world.

Leadership comes with a price, but it also comes with rewards, as we have learned throughout our history.

I look forward to working with President Trump and the many talented members of his incoming administration to reverse years of disastrous policies, to restore deterrence against tyrants everywhere.

We must be smart. We must be economizing in our global engagement, and I believe President Trump and the team he is building understand that.

We must continue to rebuild our defense industrial base across the country.

Restoring our military readiness — from artillery and submarines to semiconductors — is critical not to promoting war but to deterring conflict and furthering America’s global interests, many as they are.

And we must continue to persuade our allies to increase real investment in their own defense.

The American people can do a lot, but we can’t do it all.

Our partnerships with European and Indo-Pacific nations must remain firm.

But our allies also must also understand that we cannot bear the burden of defending the entire globe alone. We need to use our diplomatic leverage, maintain a strong military, and stand with our allies and partners.

A final piece is economic innovation here at home – something I’ve been working a lot on in my capacity as the U.S. Senator for Indiana. In a time of technological transformation, the United States cannot just be resilient, no, we must continue to lead.

All of these pieces are critical to American foreign policy as we move forward.

It is time to turn the page on the last four years.

Time to restore deterrence. And time get back to “peace through strength.”