It is well known by now that on his heady first day in office, Old Puppet Joe eliminated 11,000 American jobs at the stroke of a pen by stopping the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which was to transport Canadian crude oil to the United States. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had a “Let them eat cake” moment when he responded to concerns about these lost jobs by saying: “we are very eager to see those workers continue to be employed in good-paying union jobs, even if they might be different ones.” Hey, great idea, Pete, and considering your regime’s support for the construction of a gas pipeline in Afghanistan, maybe these workers could go offer their services to the Taliban.
Yes, it’s true: while killing a pipeline for Americans, the Biden administration, according to Michael Rubin in the Washington Examiner, “has apparently brokered a meeting between the Turkmenistan government and the Taliban for a trans-Afghanistan pipeline to bring Turkmen gas across Afghanistan and Pakistan to India.” So while a pipeline in America contributes to global warming and threatens to make a new Atlantis out of Barack Obama’s sumptuous multimillion-dollar waterfront estate, a pipeline in Afghanistan for the Taliban is a marvelous symbol of peace and reconciliation, as well as a provider of jobs, and it apparently doesn’t harm the environment at all.
Rubin also notes that this Taliban pipeline “was the same deal that now-Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad sought to make with the Taliban in the years before the Sept. 11 terror attacks when he was a consultant for the Unocal Corporation.”
It seems as if everyone is benefiting from all this except Americans, particularly those who lost their jobs because of Biden’s handlers’ decision to kill the Keystone XL Pipeline. One of the most prominent of those handlers, Barack Obama himself, gave a hint that this kind of thing was coming during his first campaign for the presidency in 2008. A wire service photo captured him crossing an airplane tarmac holding CNN’s Fareed Zakaria’s book The Post-American World; Obama was holding his place in the book with his finger, as if he didn’t dare put it down and lose his place.
Zakaria described his book this way: “This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.” In it, he detailed a scenario that Leftists are doing their best to bring upon America, or to which they are endeavoring to draw us back. Zakaria’s ideal world is one in which the United States would “no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures.” He asserts that the “rise of the rest” is the “great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems.”
Zakaria’s book predicting America’s inevitable decline turned out to be a veritable blueprint for Obama’s presidency. Throughout his eight years in office, Obama seemed determined to make Zakaria’s “post-American world” a self-fulfilling prophesy. Obama went to work from his first day in office to make Zakaria’s wishful thinking about America’s decline become a reality. As the most powerful man in the world, he would level the playing field, even if it meant cutting America off at the knees. Good and evil would be made equivalent, with evil sanctioned by the world’s only remaining superpower: democracy and tyranny, dictator and elected leader would be given the same moral sanction.
Now, after four unexpected years of an America-First president who did all he could to restore the safety and prosperity of Americans after the devastation of eight years of Obama’s socialist internationalism, Barack Obama’s third term has begun, in the guise of the Biden/Harris administration. And so Biden’s handlers’ brokering a deal for a pipeline for the Taliban while killing one for Americans is just a hint of what is to come. Trump used to like to say that he was not president of the world, but president of the United States; Biden, by contrast, is president of the world, not of the United States.
A few weeks after the election, Trump’s former Defense Secretary James Mattis declared that he hoped the Biden administration won’t put America first. He didn’t say which country he thought a president of the United States should put first instead. However, now we know that at least one of them is Afghanistan.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
