It was as prophetic as it was true when former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said of then Vice President Joe Biden, “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Those words have been borne out as we have witnessed repeated miscues, missteps, and miscalculations by Mr. Biden since he took office in January 2021. His national security impairments are a real and present danger to our nation. Just as he often appears lost on a political stage following a policy speech, so too he is lost on the international stage as he wanders aimlessly from one foreign policy disaster to another.
We saw this in August 2021 when he orchestrated a disastrous and ill-advised withdrawal from Afghanistan that created an immediate vacuum for radical terrorists to take control of that beleaguered nation once again. Thirteen US servicemen and women lost their lives in that very avoidable evacuation debacle.
We then witnessed Mr. Biden’s naiveté in failing to deter Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russian President Valdimir Putin had massed his troops for months in advance of the invasion. Yet as war approached, Mr. Biden suggested publicly that Russia would face fewer consequences if the attack took the form of a “minor incursion” into Ukraine. Mr. Putin was not deterred.
We then observed Mr. Biden’s pollyannaish attempts to renew an unwise nuclear deal with Iran, seemingly unaware that Iran’s leaders are not and never have been dependable negotiating partners. They lie reflexively. That should have been clear to Mr. Biden. It wasn’t. Iran’s hegemonic goals in the Middle East and hatred for Israel and the US did not abate after Mr. Biden’s diplomatic fawning. Indeed, Iran has continued to use its terrorist surrogates across the Middle East to destabilize the region and assert its control through the acts of violent allies in Iraq and Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen at the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula.
Even now we are witnessing Mr. Biden’s dismal national security skills after the brutal massacre of innocent Israelis on 7 October 2023. Israel is taking effective action in slaying Hamas. Yet Mr. Biden’s mixed message—one of supporting Israel while mollycoddling pro-Hamas campus protesters at home and abroad—is music to the ears of Iran’s leadership that supports Hamas. In response to US military support for Israel, Iran’s trained surrogates in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen have repeatedly threatened Israeli and US operations in the region. The Biden response to those threats has been ineffective. Since the war in Gaza exploded, Iran’s puppets have attacked American forces over 165 times with a mix of drones, rockets, mortars, and ballistic missiles. Now three Americans are dead and 34 seriously wounded. Unfortunately, Mr. Biden’s pinprick retaliatory strikes against inconsequential Iranian targets are what the terror mullahs in Tehran now expect of him. They know Mr. Biden better than he knows them. They know him like Mr. Gates knows him.
It is time for Congress to be clear when Mr. Biden is not. We are at war with Iran. President Biden’s delusion and the collective denial of his Administration are not characteristics of effective leadership. Iran knows it. Which is why they continue to regard the US as a collection of amateurs more inclined to rhetorical balderdash than any consequential response against Iran.
Congress should pass a Sense of Congress resolution that, in its estimate, we are in a state of war with Iran. It should call for the establishment of both an air and sea blockade—an act of war in response to the de facto war Iran is waging against the US.
Such a resolution will make clear that Congress’s taste for minuscule military strikes has expired and that it supports action to bring Iran to its knees until and unless it (1) renounces support for their surrogates across the Middle East, (2) ceases all efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, and (3) halts its provision of military assistance to Russia in its war against Ukraine. Of course, such a resolution—while making Congress’s views clear—will not be accepted by Iran. But it will be declarative to friends and enemies alike.
In the meantime, US should form and lead a coalition to unleash attacks against Iran’s oil infrastructure as well as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s navy and seaports, air force and air bases, and energy grid.
And what of its terror surrogates? Take away their arterial support by attacking their circulatory system from the points where they draw US blood back to the heart of the problem: Iran’s leadership.
We must demonstratively punish Iran’s violence, or Mr. Gates’s prophecy will become the epitaph for Mr. Biden’s incompetence.
(This commentary by me originally appeared in the Washington Times, page B3 on February 1st, 2024)
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