OPINION:
“Don’t,” President Biden said when asked for his message to the Iranians contemplating an attack upon Israel, so of course the Iranians did. The value of the word and command of the president of the United States showed itself in full as Iranian drones and missiles rained down on Israel by the hundreds. That value is now zero.
Why would it be anything else? As the Biden administration continues into what is hopefully, for the sake of world peace, its final year, the deterrence and credibility of the United States are at lows unmet since the fall of Saigon nearly half a century ago. (That is, we should note, less time than Mr. Biden has been a public figure.) The Biden regime, having hollowed out the American military and American deterrence — through incompetence, ideological fixations, inconstant policy, and chronic underinvestment in the armed forces — has left the United States nearly without credible hard power.
Consequently, since 2021, a major predictor of world events has been whether or not Mr. Biden publicly forbids them. If he does, they will happen. He expressed confidence that the Afghanistan surrender would come off fine, so of course, it was a generational disaster with an American body count. He told the Russians not to invade Ukraine, so they did. He set himself against the Houthi closure of the Red Sea, and so they made it happen. He warned Vladimir Putin against killing Alexei Navalny, so, of course, Navalny died in prison. The cause was “unknown,” but in the traditional Russian style, likely an accidental slip onto a bunch of bullets. Now, Mr. Biden’s public demand that the Iranians not attack Israel has been met with precisely that.
The reader should, therefore, draw no comfort from the president’s repeated demands that China not start a third world war with an invasion of Taiwan.
It is important to grasp what this signifies. The standard for the United States is not to control events abroad. That is impossible. What the chief executive of the federal government ought to do, though, is put the credibility of the United States on the line only when he has the means and the will to impose consequences. Everyone from Moscow to Mexico City, Beijing to Tehran knows Mr. Biden has neither.
Mr. Biden is in the habit of making strenuous demands and utterly failing to enforce them. He becomes visibly baffled that the mere demand is not enough. It is bad enough that the defiance of his exhortations makes the United States seem weak. Far worse is that he makes the United States seem ridiculous. It is more than mere interpretive appearance. Under Mr. Biden, “ridiculous” is a total summation of the state of American power in the world. Our enemies are increasingly aware that American leadership is weak.
The roots of the weakness are varied. One is the general bent of modern progressivism, which simply doesn’t believe in American power and is more interested in using the armed forces as a vehicle for gender ideology than for national defense. Another is the embedded clique of pro-Iranian and anti-Israel ideologues in the present White House, including former President Barack Obama himself — who, it is an open secret, still directly runs U.S. policy toward Iran.
Still another is the hollowed-out state of the U.S. armed forces after the so-called war on terror era, which, when coupled with the precipitous decline of American industry, has yielded a military establishment that can’t recruit enough men and women and can’t adequately equip the ones it can.
Yet another is Mr. Biden’s invincible confidence in himself, a mid-tier intellect and lifelong strategic incompetent wholly convinced of his Metternich- or Kissinger-level genius in foreign affairs. An ordinary man of ordinary ego, faced with visible failures on the stupefying scale achieved by Mr. Biden, might adjust course or seek other counsel. Psychologically, characteristically, ominously, our president is incapable of that self-reflection — and that humility.
The pity is that Mr. Biden’s shortcomings — intellectual, conceptual, strategic — reflect upon him but afflict America. That’s the nature of leadership in our system, and it illuminates why it is so important to have a president with discernible principles beyond an iron personal confidence unmoored from outcomes.
As this is written, the Iranian attack on Israel is for now concluded, but the Israeli response has yet to come. President Biden told the Iranians “don’t,” and news reports show that he told the Israelis the same thing. It tells us a couple of things, one being that the president cannot discern between Iranian aggression and a defensible and deserved Israeli response.
The other thing it tells us is that the Israeli counterattack will absolutely happen. We know because Mr. Biden has forbidden it.
• Brooke Leslie Rollins is president and CEO of the America First Policy Institute and former director of the Domestic Policy Council in the Trump administration.
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