Pride cometh before the fall, and the denizens of the Biden administration have the bruises to prove it.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reflected on the almost four years since he assumed his position in an essay for Foreign Affairs. It carried his characteristic lack of self-awareness.
Blinken credited his bosses, colleagues, and himself with pursuing “a strategy of renewal” and, against all available evidence, putting the United States “in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago.” The word “deterrence” was absent from the Foreign Affairs piece — and expectedly so. After all, there’s little evidence to suggest that Blinken, President Joe Biden, or anyone else involved in implementing their failed foreign policy vision places any value on the concept.
Hours after Blinken’s attempt at taking a victory lap went up online, nearly 200 Iranian ballistic missiles were launched at Israel. Incredibly, this wasn’t the first time within the last 365 days that the Biden administration’s failures were compounded by its hubris. On Sept. 29, 2023, national security adviser Jake Sullivan boasted that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
“The amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced,” he added. A week later, that boast sounded more like a self-incrimination in the wake of Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel.
Popping champagne without having achieved anything is, at best, a precarious and more likely doomed political undertaking. And yet the Biden administration has done exactly that repeatedly, and with predictably disastrous results. Of course, it’s an impossibility that Sullivan, Blinken, or Biden himself would admit the hard truth about their tenure in power: They failed.
On their watch, America’s enemies in Eurasia and the Middle East felt emboldened enough to plunge their respective regions into chaos and visit atrocities upon our allies. It’s no mystery why. On the 2020 campaign trail, Biden talked a tough game, promising that he would strike fear into the heart of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Then, once he took office, he gave the thumbs up to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that his predecessor had been blocking, giving Putin an indication of the barely-there spine underpinning the new administration.
The Biden brain trust never even pretended to have such a spine when it came to Iran, taking pains to make amends with the mullahs and unfreezing cash that would be spent by the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism on, you guessed it, terrorism.
And then there was Biden’s hapless surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban. If there was ever a telltale sign that a country was being led by men lacking in both judgment and resolve, that was it.
Is it any wonder why Putin and Hamas felt confident enough that they could wreak havoc with relatively few consequences? They weren’t deterred because Biden had made no credible effort toward establishing deterrence.
It is another weighty irony that Blinken spends much of his essay and so much of his time in power extolling the importance of America’s allies. He and his ilk pay plenty of lip service to this observation, yet the Biden administration has, time and again, proven to be an unreliable friend.
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Once Ukraine and Israel were under siege, Biden said the right things for a time before becoming mealy-mouthed. The U.S. supported Ukraine but wouldn’t give it all of the tools necessary to repel the Russian invasion. Israel had a right to defend itself but not to win. Is a friend who opposes your utter destruction but hopes not for your success a friend at all?
It will be a great relief to Americans and their allies alike when Sullivan, Blinken, and Biden are reduced to writing their own autohagiographies from the comfort of retirement instead of the halls of power. The world has already paid far too great a price for their delusions.