Charlie Spiering
@charliespiering
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Joe Biden leaning heavily on the symbolism on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall and comparing it to the current conflict
Joe Biden opposed Ronald Reagan's military buildup every step of the way. By doing so, Biden effectively opposed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall.
Opposed Reagan Military Buildup in 1980sThroughout the 1980s, Biden opposed Reagan’s proactive means of dealing with the Soviet Union. Biden instead favored détente — which, in practice, meant Western subsidies that would have enabled the moribund USSR to remain solvent much longer than it ultimately did. Biden was a leading critic of the Reagan defense buildup, specifically vis a vis the MX missile, the B-l bomber, and the Trident submarine.
Missile DefenseBiden criticized President Reagan for his “continued adherence” to the goal of developing a missile defense system known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, calling the President’s insistence on the measure “one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft.”
Biden’s opposition to missile defense continued for decades thereafter:
On July 24, 2001, Biden chaired a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in which he said in a prepared statement:“I worry that funds devoted to missile defense, or the recent tax cut, are hurting our ability to meet these more current and realistic threats. And I worry that a narrow-minded pursuit of missile defense, without having any notion of what missile defense to develop, could derail both our programs in Russia, as well as our negotiations with North Korea.”
On July 31, 2007, Biden said:“In 2001, Bush’s new foreign affairs team were so intent on going ahead with Reagan’s Star Wars missile defense shield that they were willing to pull out of earlier arms control treaties to get there, inviting, in my view, another arms race. The missile defense system seemed to be the perfect metaphor for the neoisolationist policy. Let’s arm the heavens, they were saying, and protect the US, the rest of the world be damned. The [Bush] administration had said they were willing to walk away from the decades-old ABM Treaty in order to unilaterally develop and deploy the missile defense system, and now they were putting real money behind it. They were willing to put tens of billions of dollars into the Maginot line in the sky that could quite likely set off another arms race, while cutting funding for a program to help Russia destroy its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons before they got into the hands of terrorists.”
On December 13, 2007, Biden said:“[We should] cut somewhere in the order of $20 billion a year out of the military for special programs, from Star Wars, to a new atomic weapon, to the F-22, to the Nimitz-Class Destroyer. You can save $350 billion. That would allow me to do everything I want to do — my priorities on education, health care and the environment — and still bring down the deficit by $150 billion.”
https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/organizations/bidens-senate-voting-record-policy-positions
There's a reason why people say that he has been consistently wrong on every single foreign policy position throughout his political career. It's because it's true.
