President Joe Biden spoke a lot of words in his State of the Union address. Most of them were scripted. Some of them were not. None of them were “Iran,” “nuclear,” or “biggest U.S.-Israel military exercise ever.”
This president is not given to speaking softly while carrying a big stick. To Biden’s credit, he has always been wary of big-stick diplomacy, if only because it leads to costly wars that the voters don’t like. To his discredit, Biden has always been prone to shouting loudly and often nonsensically. This, his big shtick, was displayed in all its stunted glory in his State of the Union speech when he went off-script and bellowed, “Name me one leader who would change places with Xi Jinping! Show me one!”
We were looking at him. China has the world’s largest navy and has twice as many men and women in uniform as the United States does. It has had the world’s largest gross domestic product in terms of purchasing power parity and is on course to surpass America’s real GDP sometime after 2030. China is the world’s biggest exporter and has a monopoly on the delivery system, an infrastructure stretching from the China Sea to southeastern Europe. It has probably replaced the U.S. as the world’s largest producer of high-altitude weather balloons, too.
The Obama administration spoke softly and carried a small stick. Biden speaks ever more loudly, even as his stick shrinks. His unwillingness to say the word “Iran” tells us something that, in his inimitable way, he has already told us by accident. In January, a video appeared from Nov. 4 in which Biden, caught by a surprise question at an election rally in California, blurted out that the effort to revive the Iran nuclear deal was “dead, but we’re not going to announce it.”
The 2015 nuclear deal with Iran was the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. No matter that Iran is run by a corrupt clerical dictatorship that tortures its people at home, assassinates its dissidents abroad, and is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. No matter that the Iranian regime is dedicated to Holocaust denial and the destruction of the state of Israel. As Henry Kissinger said, the deal put Iran on a “glide path to a nuclear weapon.” President Donald Trump was right to withdraw from the deal and reassert the deterrent power of the big stick.
The Biden team tried to resuscitate the deal through eight rounds of talks and ever-greater concessions. It even looked the other way as the Iranian regime massacred and tortured protesters in its streets and sold drones to Russia for the war in Ukraine. The Iranians surmised that the Americans needed the deal more than they did and would give even more if pushed. They also saw that if the Americans could be pushed that easily, there was no need for a deal at all. Iran could go nuclear in its own time, whether the Americans liked it or not.
The failure of the talks is a humiliation. The Biden administration must now rebuild deterrence, but its stick no longer has the same reach. While Iran played for time in the Vienna talks, it struck a treaty with China (the Iran-China 25-Year Cooperation Program of 2021) and deals with Russia (Russia buying Iranian weapons and Gazprom winning a $40-billion deal last July to develop Iran’s natural gas fields). The Ukraine war, which the Biden administration is choosing to prolong, has weakened America’s main economic lever against Iran: energy sanctions.
The U.S. is already fighting one proxy war with Russia in Ukraine while trying to fend off another with China in Taiwan. It is now preparing for a third, this time in the Middle East. On Jan. 26, the U.S. and Israel concluded Exercise Juniper Oak 23.2. The Pentagon called it “the largest U.S.-Israel partnered exercise in history.” The maneuvers integrated Israel into U.S. Central Command and included “unmanned aerial vehicles, strategic bombers, jet fighters and precision fires” and the USS George W. Bush Carrier Strike Group. Previous exercises focused on Israel’s defense. This one focused on “long-range strikes, suppression of enemy air defense, electronic attacks, offensive counter and air interdiction, and air operations in the maritime domain.” This was a rehearsal for an American-backed Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites.
On the same day, Israeli forces mounted an unusually complex attack on the Palestinian city of Jenin, citing intelligence of an imminent terrorist attack by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Western media’s coverage of this was so dismally biased and cliched that no one thought to mention that Islamic Jihad was funded, supplied, and controlled by Iran. Two nights later, someone, almost certainly Israel, attacked a military production site in Isfahan, Iran, with drones. There were fires at two Iranian oil refineries on the same night, though a connection is unproven.
The State of the Union's purpose is to keep Congress informed. Biden said a lot this week, but he didn’t say nearly enough. Diplomatic folly and joined-up proxy wars with joined-up enemies may take us to World War III. As former President Barack Obama is reputed to have said, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.”