During a speech in New York on Tuesday, 2020 frontrunner Joe Biden slammed President Donald Trump’s handling of escalating tensions in the Middle East, saying, “What we’ve heard so far from this president are tweets, threats and tantrums.”
Biden told the crowd, “We have not heard a sober-minded explanation to reassure the American people that this decision and its consequences were thought through. No level-headed words meant to dial down the tensions and to take us off the path of conflict.”
He continued, “What we’ve heard so far from this president are tweets, threats and tantrums. All we’ve heard from this administration are shifting explanations, evasive answers, repeated assertions of an imminent threat without the necessary evidence to support that conclusion.”
Watch the video below:
Joe Biden on fallout from strike that killed Iranian general: "What we've heard so far from this president are tweets, threats and tantrums." https://t.co/9TzcdPG1Sa pic.twitter.com/wkKXxtVKqK
— ABC News (@ABC) January 7, 2020
Since a U.S. strike killed an Iranian general, tensions in Iran have continued to escalate and Trump claimed that a tweet was a notification to Congress that he will strike back at Iran if they attack the United States.
During his Tuesday speech, Biden said that Trump “does not have the authority to go to war with Iran without congressional authorization.”
He added, “Presidential notification of Congress about the need to exercise war powers cannot be satisfied in 280 characters or less. And no president should ever take the United States to war without securing the informed consent of the American people.”
Joe Biden: "Donald Trump does not have the authority to go to war with Iran without congressional authorization."
— ABC News (@ABC) January 7, 2020
"Presidential notification of Congress about the need to exercise war powers cannot be satisfied in 280 characters." https://t.co/CtYYCaKEpg pic.twitter.com/0saN41omdO
Though Biden is widely viewed as the most competent 2020 candidate on foreign policy, he has been under attack from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) who argued during a Monday night CNN interview that “Joe Biden helped lead the effort for the war in Iraq. The most dangerous foreign policy blunder in the modern history of this country.”
But Biden also is able to tout his experience in the Obama administration, who secured a nuclear deal with Iran — a deal that Trump has since blown up.
