Sen. Cotton says Biden’s Cabinet picks signal return of Obama's ‘disastrous’ foreign policy
Cotton looks back at foreign policy decisions made during the Obama administration
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}President-elect Joe Biden’s appointments appear to signal a "return of the Obama administration's foreign policy,” which “had disastrous consequences for our nation,” Senate Armed Services Committee member Tom Cotton, R-Ark., warned on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday.
Cotton, an Army combat veteran, made the comment two days after Biden announced a number of key Cabinet appointments, including Antony Blinken as secretary of state, Alejandro Mayorkas as secretary of homeland security and Avril Haines to serve as the first woman to lead the intelligence community, among other positions.
Describing his Cabinet appointments during an interview with “NBC Nightly News” on Tuesday, Biden said, “This is not a third Obama term because we face a totally different world than we faced in the Obama-Biden administration.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“President Trump has changed the landscape,” the former vice president continued, before referencing the president’s foreign policy stance. “It's become ‘America First,’ which meant America alone.”
“We find ourselves in a position where our alliances are being frayed,” Biden went on to say during the interview. “It's a totally different -- that's why I found people who joined the administration and key points that represent the spectrum of the American people as well as the spectrum of the Democratic Party.”
In response, Cotton pointed to former President Barack Obama’s memoir “where he says a lot of these people were responsible, for instance, for advising him to go to war in Libya, a war that's now in its 10th year.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}He called the war “a 10-year after-party that's introduced civil war and slavery and unleashed a flood of migrants into Europe.”
“Look at ISIS, the rise of ISIS happened after Barack Obama rushed us out of Iraq,” Cotton said Wednesday.
He also noted that Biden’s appointments are from “the same group that said that you could never have a separate peace between Israel and Arab nations without resolving the Palestinian question.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}BIDEN PICKS BLINKEN, MAYORKAS, SULLIVAN FOR KEY CABINET POSITIONS
“There are so many peace deals that President Trump has brokered between Israel and Arab nations, it's hard to keep track of them,” Cotton went on to note.
Three Middle East peace deals have been brokered during the Trump administration. Late last month, Trump announced a peace deal that would normalize ties between Israel and Sudan and claimed there "would be many more peace deals to come in the Middle East."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The administration has already brokered peace agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Cotton also brought up China and comments made by Jacob Sullivan, Biden’s pick to be America's next national security adviser.
“People like Jake Sullivan have said we should be celebrating the rise of China,” Cotton noted. “It was on the watch of so many of these nominees that China literally built islands out of the water in the South China Sea and militarized them, far extending the reach of their missiles and aircraft and their ships.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Sullivan is a former top Hillary Clinton adviser who championed the ill-fated unraveling of Libya almost a decade ago.
He comes with a storied pedigree of foreign policy experience, having served as a senior policy adviser to Clinton's 2016 presidential election campaign, deputy chief of staff at the Department of State under the Obama administration and then-Vice President Biden's national security adviser, along with multiple degrees, fellowships and professor posts at Ivy League schools.
Blinken has held senior foreign policy positions in two administrations over three decades, according to the Biden transition, and has advised Biden on foreign policy since 2002. During the Obama administration, Blinken served as deputy secretary of state and as a principal deputy national security adviser to former President Obama. During the first term of the Obama administration, Blinken served as Biden’s national security adviser.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Mayorkas, the first Latino and immigrant nominated to serve as secretary of homeland security, served as the deputy secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration from 2013 to 2016 and director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2009 to 2013. During that time, Mayorkas led the implementation of DAC and led the department’s response to Ebola and Zika.
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Haines, if confirmed, would be the first woman to serve as DNI. Under the Obama administration, Haines served as a principal deputy national security adviser and as a deputy director at the CIA — she was the first woman to hold both of those positions.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Fox News’ Brooke Singman and Hollie McKay contributed to this report.