OPINION:
The Biden administration arrived in January 2021 with the media amen chorus heralding the return of competence and professionalism in foreign affairs. The Kennedy School and McKinsey were back. Of course, the chorus did not appreciate the irony of reminding America what happened the last time “the best and the brightest” were in charge. A trip to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial might jog their memory.
For all its boasting of foreign policy expertise, the Biden administration has overseen the most catastrophic failures in foreign policy in recent history.
After all, the unpredictable amateurs in the Trump administration delivered broader peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, stronger ties with Britain and Japan, and relative calm in Afghanistan. They also put Russian President Vladimir Putin in a box, eliminated Lt. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the world’s most sinister terrorist, and kept Communist China on its side of the Taiwan Strait. But don’t worry, The Washington Post and The New York Times said — the experts would restore America’s rightful place at the Davos gabfest.
Well, these experts have fulfilled their promise, and they have changed the world, but not for the better.
What our nation needs is a keen focus on the American interest in any given crisis, the reassurance of allies and deterrence of adversaries, and the bold deployment of all levers of American power in a deliberate manner. Unfortunately, the Biden administration has taken the opposite approach.
U.S. forces left Afghanistan with dozens of young service members dead and our reputation in tatters. The experts did not even have the decency to tell the British, French, Dutch and Italians that we were leaving. Boris Johnson could not get a return phone call. The whiz kids said the Abraham Accords was a public relations stunt and proceeded to hand the theocratic fanatics in Tehran $150 billion in exchange for not developing nuclear weapons until after the Biden administration departs. At the same time, the Arabs and Israelis now look to their collective defense and have even contacted the Russian dictator, Mr. Putin, because they can’t trust the administration to combat the mullahs.
Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping is telling the Biden administration exactly what he wants to do to Taiwan and the West. Yet the White House does not seem to believe him. Mr. Xi has plainly stated that a forced unification of Taiwan with the mainland is an option. He has already wrecked Hong Kong’s democratic autonomy. He has threatened Australia, India, the Philippines and Vietnam while militarizing the South China Sea. But Taiwan is the key. To the Chinese Communist Party, an independent, democratic Taiwan represents a century of humiliation. Gaining control of Taiwan establishes Beijing’s hegemony over the most vital areas of the Pacific.
Mr. Xi found his mark in the Biden administration. His foreign minister berated the secretary of state, calling America irredeemably racist. In response, Secretary Antony Blinken could only retreat into faculty lounge pieties about how much we need to improve — this in front of a government that has murdered 100 million of its own people since 1949. Mr. Xi has also increased warplane flights into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone since the start of the Biden administration. After the fall of Kabul, those military flights mounted exponentially. The message is not subtle: The United States abruptly abandoned an ally after 20 years of war; what makes you think it would come to the aid of a small island and risk Seattle for Taipei?
Furthermore, U.S. domestic energy production is shattered, and we are now mendicants begging the likes of Venezuela for oil. Our southern border is overrun with no end in sight, and the U.S. military’s sinking esteem is startling. If you were wondering why the recruitment of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines is at an all-time low on the Biden administration’s watch, the answer is not hard to find. In addition to the debacle in Afghanistan, there is the administration’s search for phantom extremists and its balkanization of our troops along racial and sexual lines. Meanwhile, they are laughing in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran as they stumble into our manufactured, self-imposed crises.
Then there is Mr. Putin. Recall the last time he invaded Ukraine. Then-Vice President Joe Biden, Mr. Blinken and Jake Sullivan were calling the shots in the Obama White House. But during the Trump administration, Mr. Putin did not move against any of his neighbors. The one time he threatened U.S. interests in Syria, 300 of his mercenaries disappeared on Mr. Trump’s orders. He went back into his lair, fearing Mr. Trump’s “unpredictability.”
Review the bidding. Mr. Putin has waged a war of extermination in Ukraine and, in doing so, lost twice as many troops in a year as America did in 10 years in Vietnam. Six million refugees have flooded the borders of Eastern Europe, and perhaps 3 million Ukrainians — primarily women and children — have been dispatched to Russia for reeducation. His war in Ukraine has left behind trails of crimes not seen on this scale in Europe since 1945. But, given the Biden administration’s track record, he believes it will wilt the longer he stays in the field.
This is not right-wing hyperbole. All one needs to do is listen to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As the redoubtable Marine Corps veteran and military scribe Bing West notes, the administration does not have what military doctrine calls “a desired end state.” Mr. Putin does — the extermination of Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelenskyy does — the liberation of his country from Russia. The Biden administration does not.
The Joint Chiefs chairman, Army Gen. Mark Milley, insists that the Ukrainians cut a deal now regardless of the success of Ukrainian arms or the wishes of the people who are under attack. He has gone so far as to tell the Russians what we will and will not do to support Kiev.
As Mr. West says, “General Milley likes to show a note card from a White House meeting in October 2021. … Contain war inside the geographical boundaries of Ukraine.” Nothing works like telling the enemy what you will do in advance.
This means that Russia proper is a sanctuary, just as North Vietnam was in the Johnson administration and Pakistan was in the G.W. Bush and Obama administrations. Mr. Putin can go back and forth across the border with impunity because America’s top general has told him we would not give Ukraine the weapons that can incinerate Russian depots and wipe out columns of assembled tanks and troops before they reach Ukrainian soil.
But don’t worry — the experts are in charge. The world may be on the brink, but at least the Champagne is flowing at Davos.
• Robert Wilkie served in the Trump administration as the 10h secretary of veterans affairs and as undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. He serves as distinguished fellow at the Center for American Security at the America First Policy Institute.
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