WASHINGTON — Sen. John Kennedy, DC’s king of the one-liners, gave a withering assessment of the Biden administration’s approach to foreign adversaries on the latest episode of “Pod Force One,” out Wednesday.
“I don’t want America to be the world’s policeman, but I don’t want [Chinese President] Xi Jinping or [Russian President Vladimir] Putin or the ayatollah in Iran to be, either,” he told Post columnist Miranda Devine.
“And these are hard men,” Kennedy (R-La.) went on. “They’re hard men. Dealing with them is like hand-feeding a shark, and they understand one thing.”
Sen. John Kennedy argued that former President Joe Biden looked “weaker and weaker” as his time in the White House dragged on. Tamara Beckwith“I mean, we’re in the middle of a prison riot in Ukraine, and [Biden national security adviser Jake] Sullivan would go over there and try to quote Socrates … instead of showing force.”
Kennedy, 73, went on to describe Xi, with whom President Trump has said he plans to meet next week in South Korea, as the “quarterback” of the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis.
Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington on ‘Pod Force One.’ Subscribe here!
Jake Sullivan has long been a top foreign policy luminary in Democratic circles. Getty Images“Their goal is to have Russia dominate Central and Eastern Europe, the ayatollah dominate the Middle East, and China dominate the Indo-Pacific, with freedom to Rome and sub-Saharan Africa and South America,” he said.
“And that’s not a world that’s safe for Americans.”
Kennedy, a staunch supporter of Ukraine and Israel, also noted that after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, killed an estimated 1,200 people inside the Jewish state, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “did the right thing.”
President Joe Biden had to navigate difficult foreign policy crises in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Getty Images“Israel beat Hamas, they beat Hezbollah,” he said. “They backed off Iran, and they did it with President Biden hanging all over their back and Europe saying, ‘Stop, stop’ and Israel said, ‘No, we’re not going to stop until we kill these people who want to kill us first.'”
In contrast to Biden, who “was getting weaker and weaker as a president, not just politically, but also physically,” Kennedy argued that America’s adversaries are “scared of Trump” — comparing the president to legendary MLB pitcher Nolan Ryan.
“The batters thought he was crazy,” the senator said of the hurler nicknamed “The Ryan Express.” “They didn’t know whether he was going to throw a strike or throw at their head, and it gave him a little bit of an edge.
Full Episode
The Louisiana senator argued that America’s enemies fear President Trump. Tamara Beckwith“That’s what President Trump is like. He’s unpredictable. And when he backed Israel, and he went in and they took out those nuclear facilities in Iran, that alone made the world a much safer place, because our enemies thought, ‘Whoa, this man will kill you, and hurt you the entire time you’re dying.'”
“If Biden had done that,” Kennedy went on, “we could have had peace in life sooner, but it was never going to happen.”
