As a candidate, Joe Biden pledged to take responsibility for his failures.
But since taking office, Biden’s national security team has instead repeatedly weaponized classified information to shift blame for its strategic mistakes.
The latest episode: China’s budding spy base in Cuba.
Confronted with reporting about the new base, the White House and Department of Defense originally denied that China had any spy station in Cuba.
Two days later, an anonymous Biden administration official told Politico the effort had in fact gone on for years, claiming the Biden administration “inherited” the problem from the Trump administration.
This blame game follows the same pattern as the Chinese spy balloon that managed to fly over the entire continental United States in February.
First, the Biden administration tried to say it was not a big issue.
Then anonymous officials leaked classified information to several news outlets claiming the flights had started during the Trump administration.
In both instances, no senior national security officials from the Trump administration appear to have ever been briefed on the intelligence.
Yet if the Biden team has known this whole time that Cuba was hosting a Chinese intelligence base, why did it give Havana’s Communist regime so many unreciprocated favors?
President Donald Trump ended President Barack Obama’s misguided Cuba reset policy — in part after dozens of US diplomats in Havana suffered severe neurological attacks now dubbed “Havana Syndrome.”
Yet President Biden has quietly embraced attempts to forge a new partnership with Cuba.
The Biden team last year restarted migration talks with Cuba, which as state policy traffics its citizens, including doctors, to earn cash for the regime by forcibly withholding workers’ salaries and threatening families if they don’t cooperate.
In May 2022, the Biden administration announced it was easing travel restrictions to Cuba and its remittances rules — allowing large sums of money to flow to Cuba, whose repressive government takes a massive cut of any inflows.
Even Democratic New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez was dismayed.
In January, knowing full well Cuba’s deep partnership with China, Team Biden resumed a bilateral law enforcement dialogue with Cuba, which remains a state sponsor of terror and has turned over none of the individuals on our Most Wanted List enjoying safe harbor in Havana.
As Sen. Marco Rubio reminded us, this was the same law enforcement that detained and beat hundreds of Cuban protesters just months before.
This week’s news that Cuba hosts China’s spy station shows we were once again played for chumps — just like with Obama’s “reset” with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Obama-Biden-Kerry nuclear deal to “moderate” the mullahs in Iran.
None of this adds up. If the Biden administration knew about the base when it took office, why didn’t it expose and disrupt the plot earlier? Why did it instead reward Cuba with relaxed restrictions and policy cooperation, instead of punishing it for hosting a Chinese spy station? And if it knew Cuba was secretly helping our top adversary, why did it try out the appeasement policies once more?
This betrayal comes as no surprise to those who have studied or endured Cuba’s brutal regime. Should we be shocked that the two Communist dictatorships are joining hands to spy on Americans? Of course not!
But every American should be surprised and indignant when our government believes we can turn these despots into friends. That’s a recipe for the next Cuban crisis.
Morgan Ortagus is the founder of Polaris National Security. She served as the State Department spokesperson under President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
