Former Secretary of the State Robert Gates made it clear how he felt about Biden’s leadership, it’s lacking. Gates had some interesting insight into what Biden should have done when it comes to the disaster that is Afghanistan and feels Trump was right about China. Gates explained all of this during an appearance on “60 minutes.”
“It was really tough. For a few days there, I actually wasn’t feeling very well. And I realized it was because of what was happening in Kabul. And I was just so low about the way it had ended, if you will. And I guess the other feeling that I had was that it probably did not need to have turned out that way,” Gates explained.
“Once President Biden reaffirmed there was going to be a firm deadline date, that’s the point at which I think they should have begun bringing those people out. You’d have to be pretty naïve not to assume things were gonna go downhill once that withdrawal was complete.”
Watch The Clip Below.
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates tells Anderson Cooper he felt sick watching the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. He says both President Trump and President Biden share responsibility for the withdrawal. https://t.co/Wd1Sp6kDBK pic.twitter.com/u0d1wn2Lcl
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 18, 2021
Gates then gave Trump praise over how he treated China.
“I think this is a place where President Trump got it right. He basically awakened Americans, and I would say especially the business community, that the assumptions about which we had gotten wrong, and the assumption for 40 years was that a richer China would be a freer China, and that’s clearly not going to happen. But there’s another piece of this puzzle with China and that is the economic side. Chinese now manage something like three dozen major ports around the world. They are the biggest trading partner of more than half of South America. They are everywhere. And what are we doing in these non-military arenas to compete with the Chinese?”
Watch The Clip Below.
“The assumption for 40 years was that a richer China would be a freer China, and that's clearly not going to happen,” says former defense secretary Robert Gates. “This is a place where President Trump got it right. He… awakened Americans [to this idea.]” https://t.co/aeonRGzg4T pic.twitter.com/NUi5eBoYL4
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 18, 2021
“I think [Biden] has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades. I think he has got a lot wrong. 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.”
Cooper then asked Gates if he thought Biden knew he made a mistake when it comes to Afghanistan.
I’ve worked for eight presidents… I’ve never encountered a single one of them whoever said, ‘Well, I really blew that one.’”
Watch The Clip Below.
“I've worked for eight presidents… I've never encountered a single one of them who ever said, ‘Well, I really blew that one,’” says former defense secretary Robert Gates. He says he thinks it would make presidents more credible if they admitted mistakes. https://t.co/iHUqgfwmoo pic.twitter.com/NKDz6JtfNW
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 18, 2021
Was it naive? Biden messed up the Afghanistan Evacuation so bad that it feels intentional. As Gate claims he should have been evacuating Afghanistan far sooner. But that would have made sense, and we know Dems are not going to start doing that.
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