Joe Biden’s part-time, 2020 presidential campaign was a glaring example of free stuff – universal pre-K, free higher-education tuition, college loan forgiveness, trillions more in Covid relief, citizenship for illegal immigrants.

Democrats and their sycophantic media portray this as compassionate caring for others. Such concern may reside in some hearts. But the more powerful truth is it’s an enduring effort to buy the political allegiance of voters, a major reason why the Founding Fathers opposed parties.

Do you think it’s an accident that despite the hollow rhetoric of Kamala Harris, the Biden administration is de facto allowing and encouraging thousands of illegal immigrants to enter the country? And in some cases transporting them directly into Northern states, there to blend into the existing population of illegals.

It is true, the Republican Party earned three decades of 19th-century national political dominance by its post-Civil War policies. But, that voter approval did not come from billions of dollars in infrastructure contracts to union workers under the guise of economic stimulus.

The GOP’s political successes from 1860 on came from fighting against slavery, finally bestowing the right to vote on blacks and then enforcing that right against resisting Southern Democrats and the Klan.

President Grant even dispatched federal troops into Southern states to guarantee that right, a legal precedent that President Eisenhower, another Republican, used some 80 years later to send the 101st Airborne into Little Rock to ensure blacks could attend public schools.

Now, Joe Biden is taking this free stuff philosophy and grafting it on to American foreign policy. When the 78-year-old president sits down this week in Switzerland with Russia’s 68-year-old President Vladimir Putin, the Democrat will confront the utter uselessness of his foreign policy generosity.

In recent days, as a sign of hopeful summit goodwill toward Putin, Biden lifted economic sanctions on the company and its president, a Putin crony, building a massive undersea natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.

Thousands of American organized workers, whose unions endorsed the Democrat last fall, were suddenly unemployed by Biden’s Jan. 21 decision to kill the Keystone XL pipeline.

They might wonder, now, how that project to strengthen U.S. energy independence with Canadian oil was such a global environmental catastrophe. While Biden approved helping a pipeline that strengthens Russia’s economy and Putin’s political, economic and strategic influence across European allies.

Oh, and Putin’s project will devastate European sales of American LNG.

In return, Putin decided to sell Iran a sophisticated satellite system that will enable Tehran to globally monitor such things as U.S. troop movements in Iraq and Israeli military installations, among others.

If Biden hadn’t been at the bottom of his law school class, he might have studied history while he was vice president. In 2009, as a sign of goodwill in resetting relations with Russia, Barack Obama unilaterally cancelled a missile defense system in Eastern Europe to protect against future Iranian ICBMs.

He hoped then for Putin’s help reining in Iran’s export of terrorism and its nuclear weapons ambitions. In return, Putin sold Iran a nuclear reactor, allegedly for electrical generating, and then a sophisticated air-defense system. Putin then sold another reactor and the same air defense system to NATO ally Turkey. Thanks very much.

When Obama’s nerve faltered over his gratuitous “red line” threat to retaliate against Syria for using chemical weapons on civilians, the wily former KGB colonel offered the naïve American a face-saving exit. He appeared to engineer a Syrian surrender of all its chemical weapons.

Putin then acquired from Syria Russia’s first warm-weather port, sent in more Russian troops to quell rebels and launched a vast training program for Iranian militia operating there.

When Syria again used gas on civilians, President Trump dispatched 57 Tomahawk missiles to erase the Syrian base that launched the attack.

As early as last February, allegedly as a gesture to encourage renewed nuclear negotiations with Iran, Biden cancelled Trump’s re-imposition of economic sanctions. The Democrat sought and got nothing in return.

Then, as he prepared for his first foreign trip, Biden lifted other sanctions on Iranian officials and energy companies. Again, diplomatic free stuff.

Imposing sanctions makes for great photo ops, but they’ve not really changed anyone’s behavior in recent years. Obama and Trump slapped a large number of them on Russia, starting with its annexation of Crimea. Biden could lift any one of them and get more nothing in return.

In an NBC News interview last week, Putin claimed to know nothing about any satellite sale to Iran, then called the sale he knew nothing about “fake news…nonsense, garbage.”

Biden may believe the Russian leader. Which is a matter of concern to some of Joe’s countrymen.

As my Red State colleagues have detailed numerous times, this president has displayed disturbing signs of mental and verbal confusion since taking office. I too wrote about his poor health.

Addressing U.S. troops in Britain, the 46th president strangely admitted, “I keep forgetting I’m president.” No one else can.

Later at the same event the president was mugging with audience members as his wife Jill addressed the crowd. She noticed. “Joe,” publicly chided the presidential guardian, “pay attention.”

Hopefully, the president will pay attention during this week’s early summit. Previous Moscow misreadings of American leadership have led to serious confrontations, like the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

Biden has called Putin “a killer.”

Putin still says he can work with Biden. Here’s his somewhat more nuanced appraisal of Biden and Trump, as translated by NBC News:

I believe that former U.S. president Mr. Trump is an extraordinary individual, talented individual. Otherwise he would not have become U.S. president. He is a colorful individual.

You may like him or not. But he didn’t come from the U.S. establishment. He had not been part of big time politics before. Some like it, some don’t like it, but that is a fact.

President Biden, of course, is radically different from Trump because President Biden is a career man. He has spent virtually his entire adulthood in politics … Just think of the number of years he spent in the Senate … That’s a different kind of person. And it is my great hope that yes, there are some advantages, some disadvantages, but there will not be any impulse-based movements on behalf of the sitting U.S. president.

We have some hopes, too. Just no great ones.