{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/young-biden-admin-leaves-behind-a-world-in-chaos/", "Young: Biden Admin Leaves Behind a World in Chaos", "2024-12-04", "2024", "2024-12", "Republican", "Senate", "IN", "Todd Young", "Y000064", "www.young.senate.gov", "toddyoung", "https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/", "scraper", "WASHINGTON \u2013Today, U.S. Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke on the Senate floor about the Biden Administration\u2019s foreign policy legacy and outlined steps for reasserting global leadership in the years ahead.\n\nSenator Young\u2019s remarks as delivered are below:\n\nIf you conduct a quick survey of global events over the past four years, it\u2019s impossible to argue that the world is more secure today than it was when the Biden Administration began.\n\nEvents began to spiral downward in the summer of 2021, when the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan.\n\nThe Biden Administration\u2019s botched withdrawal cost the lives of 13 brave, patriotic American service members.\n\nIt left American citizens behind, and it left Afghans desperately clinging to the sides of aircraft departing Kabul.\n\nWe shouldn\u2019t forget this.\n\nIt conveyed a message of American weakness to the world, a message that was heard loud and clear in places like Moscow, Tehran, and Beijing.\n\nJust six months after the debacle in Afghanistan, Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border. Vladimir Putin launched the largest conflict in Europe since World War II.\n\nThe United States has stood with the Ukrainian people rhetorically. We\u2019ve provided some critical assistance to ensure that Ukraine did not lose against the Russian onslaught.\n\nBut it has not put the Ukrainians in a position to win.\n\nThe Biden Administration has too often slow walked deliveries of weapons, or they\u2019ve imposed other restrictions on the Ukrainian forces.\n\nThis foot dragging, this obstructionism, this bureaucratic lethargy, this timidity, has undermined our ability to convincingly deter Putin\u2019s ambitions or deter a broadening conflict.\n\nSo here we are today, the war drags on, with no strategy and defined end goal for American support of Ukraine.\n\nOf course, the American people are understandably exasperated by this development.\n\nMeanwhile, additional conflicts developed in other regions, as if that wasn\u2019t enough.\n\nDetermined to revive the Iran nuclear deal, the Biden Administration repeated the mistakes of the Obama years. They loosened sanctions on the Iranian regime.\n\nAnd the results predictably have been nothing short of disastrous.\n\nOn October 7, 2023, Hamas \u2013 the Iran-backed terror group controlling Gaza \u2013 carried out the worst attacks against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.\n\nIran-backed Hezbollah has attacked Israel from the north and forced the evacuation of Israeli civilians.\n\nIn recent months, President Biden has sadly undone much of the goodwill he initially created when he stood with Israel after October 7.\n\nIn the process, President Biden has caved to misguided or hostile voices from within his own administration who demand that Israel defend itself with one arm tied behind its back.\n\nFor four years, the Biden team has failed to formulate a strategy for restoring deterrence and stopping Iran\u2019s campaign of terror and chaos, leaving our ally Israel and the entire Middle East less safe and rolling back the diplomatic progress of the Abraham Accords of the Trump years.\n\nAcross the Pacific, the Chinese Communist Party continues to build its military, threaten Taiwan, wage economic warfare against our businesses and our supply chains, pursue economic coercion against American partners and allies, and undermine security and stability in the broader Indo-Pacific.\n\nOther than that, things are placid.\n\nWe saw this most visibly when China launched a surveillance balloon over North America last year. Traveled over the United States.\n\nHere again, President Biden failed to provide answers to the American people about that situation or to restore deterrence so that the Chinese Communist Party understands it cannot spy on our schools, on our military bases, on our homes, on our farms, on the American people.\n\nToday, our strategic competition with China continues on, as it must, with the CCP\u2019s global power and influence largely unchecked over the past four years.\n\nWhether it be in Afghanistan, the Middle East, or the Indo-Pacific, the world that President Biden is leaving behind \u2013 there is no two ways about it, let us not be mealy-mouthed \u2013 it is a world full of chaos.\n\nA band of malevolent nations \u2013 China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and others. That band is redrawing borders, threating neighbors, stealing intellectual property, sowing chaos, and threatening the global stability.\n\nUnchecked, their aggression emboldens other foes of freedom and it triggers ever more destabilizing conflicts.\n\nSo what is to be done?\n\nI know there\u2019s a natural tendency to want to withdraw from the world.\n\nTo give up on our leadership responsibilities.\n\nTo give up even on what I would characterize as our own security interests.\n\nAnd understandably, right now, there\u2019s a natural impulse to withdraw, certainly, from our global leadership role. It all just seems so daunting right now \u2013 we have domestic problems of course.\n\nBut we cannot ignore the costs of such divestment \u2013 costs which are manifesting themselves at this very moment.\n\nAbandoning our allies and partners will empower and embolden authoritarian powers such as China, Russia, Iran, and others around the world.\n\nLeadership comes with a price, but it also comes with rewards, as we have learned throughout our history.\n\nI look forward to working with President Trump and the many talented members of his incoming administration to reverse years of disastrous policies, to restore deterrence against tyrants everywhere.\n\nWe must be smart. We must be economizing in our global engagement, and I believe President Trump and the team he is building understand that.\n\nWe must continue to rebuild our defense industrial base across the country.\n\nRestoring our military readiness \u2014 from artillery and submarines to semiconductors \u2014 is critical not to promoting war but to deterring conflict and furthering America\u2019s global interests, many as they are.\n\nAnd we must continue to persuade our allies to increase real investment in their own defense.\n\nThe American people can do a lot, but we can\u2019t do it all.\n\nOur partnerships with European and Indo-Pacific nations must remain firm.\n\nBut our allies also must also understand that we cannot bear the burden of defending the entire globe alone. We need to use our diplomatic leverage, maintain a strong military, and stand with our allies and partners.\n\nA final piece is economic innovation here at home \u2013 something I\u2019ve been working a lot on in my capacity as the U.S. Senator for Indiana. In a time of technological transformation, the United States cannot just be resilient, no, we must continue to lead.\n\nAll of these pieces are critical to American foreign policy as we move forward.\n\nIt is time to turn the page on the last four years.\n\nTime to restore deterrence. And time get back to \u201cpeace through strength.\u201d", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T19:07:19Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/young-biden-admin-leaves-behind-a-world-in-chaos/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 2.0306529477238655, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}