In the presidential debate, former President Trump repeatedly insisted that if he had still been in the White House, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine and Hamas would not have invaded Israel.
Both claims are unprovable. But Trump repeated the claim over and over again in his Thursday night debate with President Biden.
It's true, foreign policy analysts have said, that Trump could have dissuaded Putin from invading Ukraine, but they have asked, at what cost?
Trump, an avowed admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin, could have made concessions to Moscow (such as sacrificing Ukrainian territory) that many in the West would find distasteful.
After the 2022 Russian invasion, Biden was able to rally and strengthen NATO in the face of Russian aggression against Ukraine. It seems unlikely that Trump would have had that influence, given that larger NATO countries generally despised Trump during his administration.
Trump's claim that Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both Iranian-backed militant groups, were emboldened because Biden's policies strengthened Iran are also not entirely true. The Obama administration unfrozen some Iranian assets in foreign banks as part of the landmark 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which curbed Iran's nuclear aspirations.
However, it was Trump's decision in 2018 to abandon the nuclear deal (he said it did not go far enough) that sent Iran on a major quest to enrich uranium, which has now brought the Islamic Republic closer than ever to be able to produce a nuclear bomb.
Trump, whose support for Israel essentially removed aspirations for a Palestinian state from the picture, criticized Biden in the debate for what he described as failing to supply Israel with the weapons it needs to fight Hamas. Biden said that’s not true. The Biden administration held back a single shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to prevent them from being used on the crowded Gaza city of Rafah during an offensive earlier this month.
Shipments of heavy-duty weapons have continued, the Pentagon says. Trump attacked Biden for his botched handling of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. It was, to be sure, a chaotic mess that killed 13 US servicemen and dozens of Afghans.
It was one of the darkest stains on Biden’s foreign policy record. But he was fulfilling the deal Trump executed — in rare negotiations with the Taliban — before leaving office.
Trump also revived a lie he told in the months before his first impeachment about attempts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into digging up dirt on the Biden family. He said Biden, as vice president, had tried to get a Ukrainian attorney general fired who was attacking his son Hunter Biden.
In fact, the prosecutor was blacklisted by the European Union, the United States and other groups because of his refusal to tackle corruption, which international bodies had set as a task for kyiv before it could be considered for EU membership and other benefits.
Regarding the war in Ukraine, Trump said he could “resolve it quickly” before taking office on January 21. In other forums, he also said he could get Wall Street Journal journalist Evan Gershkovich released from Russian authorities who arrested him on what the United States says are trumped-up espionage charges. In both cases, Trump is making claims that are impossible to prove.
