Maybe you’ve noticed that the world has become markedly more unstable during Joe Biden’s tenure in office. Indeed, the precarity in which the U.S.-led world order finds itself is hard to miss.

Those who have somehow managed to avert their eyes from the many crises abroad rather than look upon Biden’s works and despair depend on the national media’s complicity to preserve their happy ignorance. National Review will not play along. That’s why I hope you’ll consider supporting our work by donating to our webathon.

This president entered office with the ignominious distinction of having been outspokenly wrong on just about every consequential matter relating to foreign affairs over the last half century, as NR chronicled. He went about earning his reputation as a blunderer on the world stage by engineering the disastrous and bloody withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, setting the tone for the conflicts to come and handing that Central Asian state over to the Taliban. And while most in media have tired of chronicling Afghanistan’s devolution back into a safe haven in which Islamist terrorist outfits plot the renewed export of mass violence abroad, we have not.

That undeniable confirmation for the world’s revisionist forces that America was an exhausted power incapable of defending its interests for very long was swiftly followed on by Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine — a horrific war of territorial conquest unseen on the European continent since 1945. It seems as though few in the mainstream press can identify the extent to which Biden’s fecklessness contributed to Vladimir Putin’s test of Western resolve, even though both Russian and American government officials have connected the dots for them. That willful obtuseness may serve the political interests of those in power, but that’s all it does. National Review will not placate those whose political careers are built on the premise that they can advance their own interests by sacrificing America’s.

Confusion reigns similarly when the American Left and its allies in media survey the chaos in the Middle East and see only rational actors responding with, perhaps, excess zeal to the sin of Israel’s very existence. Open the aperture, and we see a region that erupted in violence almost at the instant that Hamas unleashed a wave of inhuman brutality like nothing seen in generations — violence all but wholly attributable to Iran. Hamas is an Iranian proxy. So, too, are the Houthis, who have waged a campaign of terror and piracy in the Red Sea so successful that it represents a real challenge to American hegemony and its guarantee of free maritime navigation rights. Iran maintains similar operational control over the Shiite militias that have launched over 200 attacks on U.S. soldiers in the region, killing three and injuring scores more. Where others obfuscate to preserve the comforting fiction that Israel is the cause of all the region’s ills, we will not.

And looming ever larger on the horizon is the prospect that China will take maximum advantage of the window of opportunity provided by a weak presence in the Oval Office. In the meantime, Beijing makes no pretense of its support for all these and many more challenges to American dominance. It enjoys immunity from Houthi aggression, and it provides Iran with material support for its regional aggression in kind. China and its allies in North Korea arm and train with Russian military forces, which are supported by the lethal drones manufactured in Iran. Beijing’s efforts to supplant the U.S. in the Middle East — as evinced by its efforts to broker a rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023 — are materially advanced by Hamas’s terrorism. China and its illiberal allies seek to restore the “Palestinian issue” to a place of prominence, from which the Abraham Accords took it.

It is all one conflict. Despite their parochial disagreements, America’s enemies are united in their effort to put the age of U.S. hegemony to an end. That Manichaean binary discomfits those who prefer to believe America’s challenges abroad can be isolated and compartmentalized. The consequences if they’re wrong are too terrible to imagine, so they simply don’t. We do.

Biden’s fatal conceit is one against which National Review has railed since its founding: the grave error of “internationalism” that William F. Buckley opposed at the outset of this venture in 1955. It’s a tendency manifesting today as much in useless multinational talk shops as in rudderless military coalitions in which the United States meekly leads “from behind.” We are as true to our mission today as we were nearly 70 years ago. “We must preserve a forward-leaning posture abroad — better to counter threats before they come to our shores — and an American-led system of alliances as a force multiplier,” NR’s statement of priorities reads. “Our overwhelming priority is advancing our national interests.” And we know that yours is, too.

For that reason, we hope you will consider either donating directly to our for-profit publication, National Review (these contributions are not tax deductible), or making a tax-deductible gift to National Review Institute, the 501(c)(3) not-for-profit journalistic think tank that supports NR’s efforts and is busily incubating a new generation of remarkable conservative thinkers. Or, of course, you may give to both. Thank you for your consideration and assistance. We could not do it without you.

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