Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in an interview on 60 Minutes, repeated his previous contention that Joe Biden has been wrong about foreign policy and national security over the 40 years that Biden has served in government said Fox News.
Previously Gates had written in a memoir that while he thought Biden had integrity “Still, I think he’s been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Robert Gates “60 Minutes” Interview: Biden Has “Gotten A Lot Wrong” https://t.co/4uN9UGTHg0
— Dr. Lynn J Anderson (@andersonDrLJA) October 18, 2021
When prompted on 60 Minutes to explain what he wrote about Biden in his 2014 book Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, Gates was ready with a laundry lists of Biden’s faults.
“He opposed every one of Ronald Reagan’s military programs to contest the Soviet Union. He opposed the first Gulf War. That list goes on,” Gates told Anderson Cooper.
“Now I will say that in the—in the Obama administration—he and I obviously had significant differences over Afghanistan,” Gates continued. “But he and I did agree in our opposition to the intervention in Libya and frankly on issues relating to Russia and China.”
Gates also took issue with the manner in which the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan took place under Biden.
When asked by Cooper if Biden made a mistake in the way the withdrawal happened, Gates said flatly: “Yes.”
On the other hand, Gates credited former President Donald Trump with being prescient about the dangers of China at a time when people mocked Trump’s warnings. Gates generally has been critical of the former president.
“I think this is a place where President Trump got it right,” he said.
Trump “basically awakened Americans and I would say especially the business community to a China that—the assumptions about which we had gotten wrong,” Gates continued. “And the assumption for 40 years was that a richer China would be a freer China, and that’s clearly not going to happen.”