That’s a Good Question!

“How would we do this if we were stupid?” the Biden Administration wonders

Joe Biden, adrift at the policy level…...

---

Over at Commentary, John Podhoretz has been making the case that Team Biden is, well, stupid. By way of evidence, he cites the Biden Administration’s incomprehensible policy—if that is the word for it—on the Gaza War and the Mideast generally. This is, indeed, a classic example of stated goals negated by actions taken and realities on the ground.

The President and his people insist that their long-range goal is a general Mideast peace settlement based (1) on a formal Israeli/Saudi Arabian rapprochement and (2) on the fabled two-state solution. But as Podhoretz points out, the Administration’s approach to the Gaza War negates the incentives that would induce Saudi Arabia to embrace (1). And given all that has happened on and since October 7, 2023, (2) has become a practical impossibility.

One may ask: Why would Saudi Arabia want to normalize relations with Israel? Well, there are two reasons. First, Israel is the Middle East’s most economically and technologically advanced country. Thus the Saudis stand to benefit from closer economic ties to the Jewish state. Second and more importantly, Saudi Arabia sees the Islamic Republic of Iran as the greatest threat to its security. Israel being the Middle East’s predominant military power, the Saudis would like very much to forge an alliance, de facto if not de jure, with the Jewish state.

But the Biden Administration seems blind and deaf to these realities. By working to prevent an Israeli military victory over Hamas, the Administration is undermining Saudi Arabia’s chief incentive for closer relations with the Jewish state. If they come to see Israel as a paper tiger, subject to American dictation, the Saudis will think twice about an alliance. And by its continual coddling of Iran, its brain-dead pursuit of an accommodation with (nonexistent) regime moderates, the Administration is undermining its position as an honest broker between Israel and the Saudi Arabia.

Then there’s the business of the two-state solution. It could be argued with a certain plausibility that the Administration must pay lip service to the concept. But Biden & Co. seem genuinely committed to it—while blind and deaf to the reality that the 10/7 Hamas pogrom has effectively killed off the two-state solution. Nobody wants it—not the Palestinians, not the Israelis, not neighboring Arab countries. The Palestinians cling to their genocidal nationalist ideology. The Israelis, observing this, have no desire to see a terrorist state set up right next door to them. The neighboring Arab states, suspecting with good reason that a Palestinian state would be another Iranian proxy, want no part of it either. But the President and his minions continue to promote this idea, despite the fact that it’s as dead as a doornail.

Nor is that all. Hag-ridden by the fear that war and rumors of war might have an adverse impact on his reelection campaign, the President has lost the plot—not only in the Mideast but also where the Russo-Ukrainian War is concerned. In both cases he tried to split the difference, with the inevitable result that no one is happy with him. The turn against Israel didn’t help him with the “anti-Zionist” Left in this country—all it did was prolong the Gaza War. In like manner, his partial and hesitant support of Ukraine against Russia was enough to keep Ukraine in the fight, but not enough to knock out Russia when V. Putin’s legions were on the back foot. And once again, a winnable war was needlessly prolonged.

Though his most fervent supporters would never admit it, Joe Biden is his own worst enemy. We can see now that the Afghanistan debacle was not a bug, not a momentary lapse, but a feature of American foreign policy in the Age of Joe. He possesses an infallible instinct for the dumbest, most counterproductive course of action. As John Podhoretz all too truly noted, Biden and the people around him are just plain stupid.

People keep telling me that the election of Donald Trump would be a disaster for America and the world, and they may be right. But their argument is undercut by the fact—the undeniable fact—that the reelection of Joe Biden would also be a disaster for America and the world. This is bad news at a time when we’re likely headed for a crisis on the scale of September 1939. For America today has not the quality of leadership, political or military, that saw us through the great crisis of the twentieth century. Instead we’ve got Biden and Trump. So we can only hope that Bismarck was right when he quipped that “There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America.”