US must lead, or ‘chaos will prevail’
Dem contenders begin outlining policy ideas
NEW YORK — Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden promised Thursday to end “forever wars” and reassert American leadership to combat authoritarianism and global instability he says are proliferating under President Donald Trump.
Biden outlined his foreign policy vision in a speech in New York, indicting Trump’s “America first” approach as belligerent, short-sighted, incompetent and ultimately threatening to U.S. interests and democracy across the world.
“The world’s democracies look to America to stand for the values that unite us. ... Donald Trump seems to be on the other team,” Biden said, hammering the president for “embracing dictators who appeal to his vanity” and emboldening a worldwide rise of nationalism, xenophobia and isolationism.
Biden emphasized the urgency for U.S-led global alliances to combat the climate crisis, forge new trade agreements to create a more even international economy and to recommit to nuclear proliferation.
If the U.S. doesn’t lead those efforts, Biden said, “rest assured, some nation will step into the vacuum — or no one will, and chaos will prevail.”
The speech reflects Biden’s belief that his decades of foreign policy experience — 36 years in the Senate and two terms as second-incommand to President Barack Obama — are an asset both in the crowded Democratic primary and against Trump. But that long record also subjects the former vice president to substantial criticisms from the left and the right, particularly from progressives who cast Biden, 76, as a willing cog in a more hawkish, bipartisan establishment that has guided world affairs for generations.
Biden did not mention his support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq under President George W. Bush, a vote that hampered Biden’s brief 2007 presidential campaign and continues to draw criticism from rivals, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who both voted against the action as House members.
His promise to stop “forever wars” also came with qualification; he called for removing most combat troops from Afghanistan in favor of “narrowly focusing our mission” in the region.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Thursday called for remaking two of the country’s immigration enforcement agencies “from top to bottom” and establishing independent i mmigration courts, and she reiterated her support for decriminalizing border crossings in a wide-ranging plan to overhaul the country’s immigration process.
The plan puts Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat running for president, firmly on the liberal side of the immigration debate. Her announcement comes as many Democratic voters are angered by reports of squalid conditions in U.S. border facilities, the separation of children from parents and President Trump’s threats to deport “millions.”
Other Democratic 2020 presidential contenders have also offered far-reaching immigration proposals, including Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, who wants to close detention facilities with subpar conditions, and former Obama administration housing secretary Julián Castro, who first pushed for decriminalizing illegal border crossings.
Still much of the Warren proposal is framed as reversing actions taken by Trump, whom she blames for creating a hostile environment to migrants as a political strategy.
“Donald Trump wants to divide us — to pit worker against worker, neighbor against neighbor,” Warren wrote in her plan. “We can be better than this. Americans know that immigrants helped weave the very fabric of our country in the past — and they know that immigrants belong here today.”
Much of Warren’s immigration proposal would be enacted by executive action, a nod to the difficulty of passing immigration legislation through a bitterly divided Congress.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, on Thursday rolled out an ambitious policy plan to “dismantle racist structures and systems” in the United States, proposing changes to the country’s health, education and criminal justice systems that he hoped would amount to “a comprehensive investment in the empowerment of black America.”
Dubbed the Douglass Plan, after abolitionist and activist Frederick Douglass, the plan is similar to what Buttigieg outlined a month ago in an op-ed for the Charleston Chronicle in South Carolina.
“We have lived in the shadow of systemic racism for too long,” Buttigieg said in a statement, citing a rise in white nationalism, a growing economic gap between black and white workers and worse health outcomes for African Americans in the United States. Those disparities “should make us all wonder how the richest country on Earth can allow this to happen under our noses.”
The 18-page plan includes proposals to establish health equity programs; award a quarter of all government contracts to minority business owners; reduce the incarceration rate by half at the federal and state levels; and “massively increase federal resources” for Title I schools.
Some of his proposals — increasing federal resources by $25 billion for historically black colleges and universities and other minority institutions; issuing new regulations to diversify the teaching profession; and setting a goal to triple the number of black entrepreneurs within a decade — are targeted specifically at minority communities.
Buttigieg likened the Douglass Plan in scope and ambition to “the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II.”
Associated Press and The Washington Post contributed.