Biden’s increasingly bizarre approach to the Middle East is caused by a lack of vision behind his actions

We’re de-escalating the situation by escalating it, and we’re launching acts of war to avoid a war, both strategies no one can really make sense of and no one would should be surprised are not producing any measurable result. 

Over the weekend, the Biden Administration responded to the recent killing of three American servicemen by Iranian-backed military groups with a series of airstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.  “What you saw last night and what you are going to see again was not insignificant,” a senior Biden administration official told NBC News after the initial round of strikes on Friday night. “When you hit 85 targets over 30 minutes, that sends a strong signal about the capability that we have,” the official continued, adding that “there are other things we’re going to do. Some you will see and some you won’t see.”  Friday’s strikes were followed by another series on Saturday which hit some 30 targets.  “This is by far the most expansive military action we’ve taken against Iran’s proxies in Syria and Iraq to date — that makes this a significant development by itself,” explained Charles Lister even before the second round of strikes, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, Washington’s oldest think tank with a focus on the region.  “In terms of measuring this by how maximalist or minimalist we could have been, this sits somewhere in the middle, not a major campaign by any means, but a notable one that if followed by more could begin to send a deterrent message,” he concluded to NBC News.  The Administration itself described this as simply the beginning with the President issuing a statement, declaring “Our response began today. It will continue at times and places of our choosing.  The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world. But let all those who might seek to do us harm know this: If you harm an American, we will respond.”  These sentiments were echoed by John Kirby, a National Security Council spokesman, who insisted the strikes were intended “to degrade and disrupt the capabilities” of the groups targeting Americans in the region.  “We’re not looking for a war with Iran,” he added.  The Friday strikes also made use of B-1 bombers launched from the United States, itself a display of our military might, but once again not too much.  Mr. Kirby was joined at a press conference by Lieutenant General Douglas Sims, who claimed the targets were selected to avoid harming civilians, though “we made these strikes tonight with an idea that there would likely be casualties associated with people inside those facilities,” so again not too much.  National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said something quite similar, “The president has approached this with a straightforward principle, which is that the United States will step up and respond when our forces are attacked. And the United States also is not looking for a wider war in the Middle East. We are not looking to take the United States to war. So we are going to continue to pursue a policy that goes down both of those lines simultaneously, that responds with force and clarity, as we did on Friday night, but also that continues to hew to an approach that does not get the United States pulled into a war, that we have seen too frequently in the Middle East,” he claimed.

The mainstream media, meanwhile, keeps reiterating what a difficult position the Administration has found itself in, especially in an election year.  As Politico put it, “In weighing his response to the Sunday drone attack, the president has had to walk a difficult tightrope: hit back strongly to the attacks and risk a war with Tehran; or act with restraint and risk emboldening the militants and looking weak on the world stage in an election year. Neither is guaranteed to stop the cycle of escalation between the U.S. military and Iran-backed proxies that began after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.”  Critics, unsurprisingly, have a rather different take, focusing on how the Administration chose to “telegraph” these strikes in advance, announcing several days earlier that the United States had chosen how to respond and providing our adversaries time to reposition equipment and personnel.  For example, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said in a statement, “The tragic deaths of three U.S. troops in Jordan, perpetrated by Iran-backed militias, demanded a clear and forceful response. Unfortunately, the administration waited for a week and telegraphed to the world, including to Iran, the nature of our response.”  “These strikes, announced well in advance, likely did not accomplish nearly enough to stop Iran’s axis,” Republican Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska, a member of the Armed Services Committee, echoed in her own statement.  Incredibly, some in the mainstream media found these potential weaknesses in the strategy to be strengths in truth.  “Friday night tried to sound loud, but will likely not echo for long,” wrote CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh in what we might call the damning of faint praise.  “This warning was likely designed to reduce the risk of misunderstanding, and perhaps enable the militias targeted to shift locations, and lessen the loss of life,” he continued rather bizarrely himself before concluding without any evidence that “power is defined by its measured use” whatever that actually means.

Few, however, have chosen to comment on precisely how bizarre and backwards the entire episode and the Biden Administration in general has been.  The idea that we are going to “de-escalate” a foreign policy crisis by escalating it with repeated military strikes might as well be the equivalent of George Orwell’s famous trio of oxymorons, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength,” or like saying you are going to stop abusing your spouse by hitting her a little less frequently.  An airstrike, by definition, is an escalation, and the only applicable questions are whether it is warranted or not and whether it will be effective or not.  In that regard, it should be clear to most that after almost 170 attacks on our installations, a response is certainly warranted, but it’s equally bizarre that the response itself is announced in advance, giving the enemy time to prepare and minimize the impact, as if a boxer told his opponent he was only going to throw a punch every 30 seconds and where those punches would land.  The Administration cannot even appear to agree with itself on this, either.  After announcing the attacks well in advance last week, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan appeared on State of the Union on Sunday to declare, “I’m not going to, obviously, describe the character of that action because I don’t want to telegraph our punches,” despite that the two strikes which had just occurred were telegraphed by the President himself.  Also, after the strike we always take the time to brag about the sophisticated weapons used, the number of targets hit, the extent of our operations, and more in a clearly Trumpian “my nuclear button is bigger than yours” bit of posturing, all while insisting we’re trying to minimize the impact anyway.  Perhaps even worse, the only clearly, consistently stated objective for all of our responses so far has been to “avoid a wider war” while we are, in fact, going to war, piling oxymoron after oxymoron to the point where meaning is lost.  We’re de-escalating the situation by escalating it, and we’re launching acts of war to avoid a war, both strategies no one can really make sense of and no one would should be surprised are not producing any measurable result.  The media, whether out of sympathy for the President or an ignorance in these matters in general, accepts this premise without question, refuses to consider the inherent contradictions, and almost magically starts using the same language, as though foreign policy were the same as a football game in a competition for the longest drive rather than actually winning.  In reality, none of the terms or phrases that are frequently used, “most significant,” “maximalist,” “minimalist,” “middle,” etc., much less the intense focus on how this looks, are relevant.  In fact, they mean nothing in this context – if dropping a nuke is maximalist and launching a cruise missile is minimalist, the range between two extremes is so vast as to be useless, like saying you want to fly a plane between the size of a mosquito and a blimp.  The only thing actually relevant is whether our policy is successful and achieves our objectives.

Sadly, our objectives are unknown beyond some general claims of degrading their capabilities and deterring them from future attacks.  Are we protecting our bases?  Protecting shipping?  Protecting our troops?  Trying to destroy the Iranian backed groups behind it?  Trying to weaken Iran in general? Nobody knows, but given that we have not responded to every provocation (the latest count is something like 5 responses to 165 attacks on our interests) and insist we do not want a wider war, there are obviously some attacks we will tolerate but not others.  One can agree or disagree that we should tolerate attacks of any kind, but why has the Administration not clearly detailed those they consider absolutely unacceptable under any circumstances, the proverbial red line past which they cannot cross?  Is that attacking our bases?  Killing our soldiers?  Sinking a ship in the Red Sea?  In the absence of anything coherent, and in the presence of any response accompanied by the insistence we do not want a war and are taking endless steps to minimize the impact of our own actions, it is only logical for our enemies to believe there is some level of violence we will tolerate and they are obviously testing us to figure that precise level out, believing there is little risk of a major attack from our side no matter that they.  We cannot say this for sure, of course, being unable to read the their minds, but their public statements suggest they are unimpressed with this approach.  The fires weren’t even out after our airstrikes, when Houthi leaders were claiming they plan to escalate the situation even further despite all our focus on de-escalation.  “The US-British coalition’s bombing of a number of Yemeni provinces will not change our position, and we affirm that our military operations against Israel will continue until the crimes of genocide in Gaza are stopped and the siege on its residents is lifted, no matter the sacrifices it costs us,” Houthi spokesman Mohammed al-Bukhaiti wrote on X. “Our war is moral, and if we had not intervened to support the oppressed in Gaza, humanity would not have existed among humans. The American-British aggression against Yemen will not go unanswered, and we will meet escalation with escalation.”   Ultimately, it seems the strikes over the weekend and even the threat of additional action in the future, what the Administration is calling a “multi-tiered response” has left us precisely where we began:  American and international interests will continue to be under attack in Iraq and Syria, and shipping in the Red Sea will continue to suffer from repeated Houthi assaults while we continue a series of ineffectual responses.  Only time will tell if the situation escalates further or the status quo, however unacceptable, is maintained, which brings us back to why.  How have we gone from bragging about how peaceful the Middle East is to worrying the whole region will burst into war?

The only way to answer that question is to consider what has changed since President Biden took over.  Why is it that we are continually beset with foreign policy crises that appear to have no acceptable solutions?  Second, what can be done to change this dynamic and actually come up with solutions?  The first question is usually answered by referring to specific events during President Biden’s time in office that are believed to have demonstrated an underlying weakness to our adversaries, beginning with the disastrous retreat in Afghanistan, followed by our failure to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine or even to end that war two years later.  These and other examples, however, strike me as symptoms rather than the underlying disease, the effect of President Biden’s persona, people, and individual policies rather than the actual cause.  Framing this another way, many Biden Administration critics compare him to former President Trump, and point to a lack of toughness as a key reason these events simply didn’t happen, or at the least happened with much less frequency, while his predecessor was in office, concluding that Biden is weak and Trump is strong.  These are also what we might consider the outward show which, while reflecting some part of the truth, fails to capture the underlying difference.  The underlying difference, in my opinion at least, is the lack of a fundamental guiding principle through which to plan and evaluate actions.  Teddy Roosevelt is revered as perhaps the greatest foreign policy President of all time, a master at the art of clever diplomacy backed by military might, who famously described his approach as “walk softly and carry a big stick,” but this was a reference to how he chose to conduct himself, not what he sought to achieve.  In Roosevelt’s day, two objectives were paramount:  Protecting North and South America from foreign intrusion, and positioning America as a true power on the world’s stage.  Everything he did can be viewed from that perspective – from peacefully blocking Germany from meddling in Brazil, to brokering peace between Japan and Russia, to liberating Cuba from Spanish influence, to starting construction of the Panama Canal, all comes back to his vision, implemented via his approach. 

Much more recently, President’s Trump’s foundation was “America First,” a foreign policy based on whether or not an action or agreement served American interests in the world – in his view, of course, which everyone is free to disagree with, the salient point is he had one.  Thus, the same man who berated our allies in Europe to spend more on defense simultaneously appeared to flatter our adversaries.  Why?  Because our allies clearly needed to do more – the War in Ukraine is evidence enough of that – and our enemies needed to feel like they could deal with him personally, the same Roosevelt was aware Kaiser Wilhelm II was an unstable whack job in private, but praised him in public.  Similarly, President Trump, rightly or wrongly, viewed the Middle East in general as a sinkhole of American resources, and rather than continuing to mollify the region with policies that had failed for decades, he recognized correctly in my opinion, that the best course of action was to remove one of the thorniest issues from discussion.  Instead of seeking a peace deal between Palestine and Israel, what is effectively a foreign policy unicorn sought since I was in high school, he sought peace between Israel and other countries.  Undoubtedly, he was aware that this would anger Iran, which he decimated with sanctions, and potentially cause unrest with the Palestinian people, but he calculated that was worth the risk. The result was a breakthrough reproachment between Israel and Arab nations that was thought impossible, and the continued isolation of Iran. While there were some relatively minor assaults during this tenure, there was nothing remotely on the scale of October 7 or the recent attacks. Critics are now rewriting history, claiming that President Trump failed to stop Iranian violence because after the killing of Qasem Soleimani, Iran responded – with a single, ineffective missile strike and did nothing. This, however, only proves the point. It was a successful deterrence – a bold, unexpected, unannounced action that demonstrates both our own might and removes a key player from the enemy leadership. Trump succeeded where President Biden has failed because all of these actions were motivated by a vision that went beyond simply not starting a larger war, or trying to be everything to everybody as Biden has done with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, or to use President Barack Obama’s infamous phrasing, simply to not fuck anything up.  Because the Biden Administration lacks any vision, they talk themselves into circles instead of producing measurable results, in a world where words are meaningless in many of these matters. Forget vision, he barely has an approach, merely a laundry list of things that are hard to define and produce no meaningful outcome even should they be defined – rebuild alliances that were supposedly frayed, protect democracy, avoid war, etc. – and the result is a backwards, often bizarre failure whether or not the media is capable of properly analyzing it.  Sadly, all of will be paying for it now and for the foreseeable future, some with their very lives.