Vote for Joe Biden to Save the World Order

 A Foreign Policy Emergency

We need to elect Joe Biden as president in November in order to save the world order that includes the United Nations, the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization. That world order has haltingly and imperfectly helped us to avoid destroying our entire civilization in war as we came close to doing in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Not much was said about foreign policy during the Democratic Convention that ended last night, and that is unfortunate because we have a foreign policy emergency that is just is serious as the domestic emergencies that Biden, Obama, Harris and others spoke about during the convention.

We Almost Destroyed Our World

President Trump is trying to take us back to the world order that led to the First and Second World Wars. His “America first” foreign policy is intended to free us from the constraints of international cooperation and international organizations. He wants to take us back to the Nineteenth Century world of national autonomy and bilateral treaties. To our eternal sorrow, we know how that world ended. In 1914, it exploded in a war in which more than 16 million people died, and the major European nations were all effectively bankrupted.

At the end of that war, an attempt was made to create a better international order, but the attempt failed in part because the United States failed to support it. After a twenty-year truce, hostilities resumed with greatly improved military technology. In World War Two, more 60 million people died; many of the world’s cities were reduced to rubble; and the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We Created International Institutions

When World War Two ended in 1945, the world’s leaders looked at each other in horror, and they said to themselves, “We can never do that again.” Under the leadership of the United States, they created today’s world order with the United Nations at its center. That world order is far from perfect. It did not prevent the Korean War, the Vietnam War or the current, seemingly endless conflicts in the Middle East, but that order is all that stands between us and the destruction of our world. We should not abandon our international institutions because of their weakness. We should improve and strengthen them, and if we do, we may someday have a world in which peace and not war is the norm. We cannot go back to the world of 1914 because we know how it ended.

Biden Supports Our International Institutions

Joe Biden will restore American support for the international institutions that preserve our world.  Biden is no one’s idea of a “peace candidate.” In 2002, he voted to authorize President Bush to use military action in Iraq, but Biden understands why the United States must support the international institutions of today’s world order. He will restore America’s leadership in that order.

It is no exaggeration to say that a vote for Joe Biden is a vote to save the world. So, in November, vote as if our lives depended on because they do.