It’s difficult to choose the single worst portion of Thursday night’s State of the Union address — for sheer unmitigated awfulness, it was a target-rich environment. Personally, however, the lowest point came when Capitol Police arrested Steve Nikoui, the father of Marine Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui, one of 13 U.S. Marines, soldiers, and sailors killed by an ISIS-K bomb as they put their lives on their line to protect those being evacuated from the Kabul International Airport. The charge was obstructing an official congressional function — one wonders if similar charges might be levelled at the pro-Hamas demonstrators who delayed the State of the Union by almost 30 minutes by forcing President Joe Biden’s motorcade to the Capitol to take a detour. I suspect not.

Neither Biden nor his high-level national security team has ever been properly held accountable for the sheer incompetence of the final withdrawal from Afghanistan. One can agree or disagree with the need to finally draw a line under our involvement. One can question what withdrawing every last U.S. soldier and contractor meant when we’d already drawn things down to the barest minimum necessary to enable the Afghan army to continue to fight, before abruptly pulling the logistical rug out from under it. 

One can insist that, one way or the other, 20 years had been enough. What one cannot do, except by indulging in the worst kind of intellectual dishonesty, is argue that Joe Biden didn’t preside directly, in the personal contravention of the best military advice, over a heartrending and unnecessarily catastrophic final chapter in our decades-long Afghanistan involvement. The Abbey Gate parents, for three years, have asked that Biden finally take ownership of his responsibility for the deaths of their children. This morning, they are still waiting. As we’ve seen throughout this administration, the buck never stops at Biden’s desk.

The Afghanistan withdrawal may well be the poster child for incompetence cloaked in dishonesty, but there exist many other examples mostly obfuscated in last night’s speech. The day after the Oct. 7 massacres, I expressed my concern about the weakness of the Biden administration and the pernicious influence of “the Squad.” Several weeks later, I went further, noting that Biden was starting to waffle in his support for Israel. Now the waffling has given way to unproductively nagging criticism of Israel’s efforts to finally render Hamas militarily harmless, an essential prerequisite to Middle East peace. (READ THE PIECE: The Lie Behind the ‘Hearts and Minds’ Plea)

Last night, appallingly, Biden actually parroted Hamas’ absurdly inflated civilian casualty claims while failing to make the obvious point that the surest route to minimizing civilian casualties in Gaza would be for Hamas to stop using women and children as human shields. But this would require confronting the Jew-hating, pro-Hamas wing of his own party, something he clearly lacks the courage to do. Now he’s proposing that the U.S. military create a port for bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza. He insists that this will not involve U.S. “boots on the ground” but offers no convincing explanation of how that might work. It’s hard to even make a list of all the ways this could end very badly, nor does it address the obvious fact that the chief barrier to humanitarian assistance isn’t the absence of a port but rather grand larceny on the part of Hamas.

The entire concept reeks of Biden’s delusional wishful thinking, the kind that relied upon trusting the Taliban to protect our withdrawal from Kabul. One might also note a more precise parallel, namely, our attempt in Somalia to provide security for food shipments, an attempt that culminated in the “Black Hawk Down” disaster. “Mission creep” is almost assuredly baked into this proposal, as is Biden’s increasingly strident insistence on a six-week ceasefire on terms dictated by Hamas, one the Democrats hope will be extended indefinitely — or, at least, until Biden is safely reelected.

But Biden’s combination of incompetence and dishonesty also encompasses the two other major Iranian proxies in the war for control of the Middle East. Despite our carefully “calibrated” pin-prick responses, the Houthis grow ever bolder in their attacks on Red Sea shipping. Hezbollah continues to pound northern Israel with rocket attacks, even in the midst of a Biden administration diplomatic effort. Iran lurks in the background, demonstrating its contempt for Biden — and for the U.S. — with every attack by one of these groups. And Biden emboldens Iran by his increasingly fruitless insistence on reviving President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal. The contrast with the effective policies of, as Biden kept saying, his “predecessor” could not be more stark. (RELATED: Biden Is George III. Who Does That Make Trump?)

Much the same mixture of incompetence and intellectual dishonesty characterizes the Biden approach to China and Ukraine. Cinese President Xi Jinping continues to increase political pressure on Taiwan and its potential allies. Furthermore, at a time when China is relentlessly expanding both its nuclear arsenal and its conventional forces, the U.S. response remains sluggish, mired by the years-long neglect of our defense industrial base that Biden still fails to address. Our Asian allies, mindful of the increasing threat, keep looking to us for leadership and failing to find it. The government of Taiwan, which certainly has skin in this particular game, has been consistently forthright in its support for Ukraine. Maybe it knows something about deterring dictators that many of our politicians have failed to grasp.

Despite his loud words last night, Biden’s support for Ukraine has been less than stellar. Behind the “minor excursion” statement that predated Putin’s invasion lay the expectation that, first, Russia would never launch a full-throated conventional assault (to echo Obama, that kind of thing was “so 1980s”), and, second, because, in the off chance that Putin did launch such an invasion, it would be over in a matter of days. Biden got it wrong then, and he and his advisers have consistently gotten it wrong ever since, slow-walking critical aid, delivering it, if at all, only well after it might have made a decisive difference. Ukraine’s chance for the kind of battlefield successes that could have led to a fair and reasonable negotiated settlement has been steadily undermined, largely because Joe Biden has allowed himself to be repeatedly buffaloed by Putin’s threat, nuclear and otherwise.

That Biden chose to open his speech with a reference to Franklin Delano Roosevelt is an insult to history. That Biden chose to link the threat to democracy in Ukraine to his party’s fantasies of a threat to democracy here at home is insulting to the American people. The Ukrainians are fighting for their existence as a nation, not for some abstract ideal beloved by Biden’s posse of tame presidential historians. And democracy in the United States is under far greater assault from Biden’s own party, its loudly proclaimed pretenses to the contrary notwithstanding.

We face multiple threats around the globe — that much, at least, Biden’s speech got right. But while Biden talked the talk last night, his entire presidency has shown his unwillingness to walk the walk. I’ve tried to draw attention to this in my American Spectator essays this past year. I strongly believe that Iran’s mullahs have, in effect, already declared war on us. I believe that Chairman Xi wants more than simply seizing Taiwan and instead wishes China to supplant the U.S. as the most influential nation on earth and, not incidentally, to force us to kowtow to the designs of the CCP. And I believe that Vladimir Putin’s appetite for reconstituting the old Soviet Union in all its glory (albeit with a neo-Nazi rather than communist flavor) will scarcely be satiated if he gets all he wishes in Ukraine. He wants more and has made that clear, as witness his increasingly obvious designs on the Baltics. (READ MORE from James H. McGee: Putting America First Means Standing Up to Bullies)

Moreover, anyone who believes that we can simply ignore all this, that we can allow the world to go its merry way, that these are all merely regional threats incapable of reaching us in our splendid isolation — well, anyone who believes this is a fantasist, pure and simple. The threat now pours across our southern border, promoted and encouraged by our overseas enemies, forcing us to defend against militarized drug cartels, state-sponsored terrorists, and professional assassins seeking to murder our political leaders. Pretending that Russia, Iran, and China have no hand in this, either directly or by proxy — think Venezuela, for example — is yet another form of wishful thinking. 

Build a wall, by all means, but don’t kid yourself that this gets the job done. The U.K. has a better physical barrier than we could ever create, a 12-mile-wide moat called the English Channel, and yet it can’t stop wave after wave of illegal immigrants, including some who’ve turned out to be terrorists. The U.K.’s failure is one of political will, not lack of barriers, and Biden’s failure is much the same. The most damning mistake of Biden’s entire presidency has been his abrogation of virtually every one of his predecessor’s border policies.

But simply reinstating these policies is not enough, not anymore. It’s not just the U.S. that is being inundated by illegal immigration. For years now a global tsunami of people in motion has been building, and because it is global it can’t be brought under control without global cooperation. And if we abdicate our position in the world, we’ll never succeed in gaining that cooperation, since no one who matters will value our friendship or respect us as potential enemies.

Joe Biden doesn’t get this, has never gotten this, and likely never will get this, if last night’s speech is any indication. Empty bluster neither reassures our allies nor deters our enemies. We need a president who understands all these things and one who has the strength of character to embody them. Instead, we have Joe Biden, and, as he reminded us yet again last night, he is none of the things we need.

James H. McGee’s 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.