Joe Biden sold his candidacy on the promise that the adults would be back in charge. He took that same message to world leaders. Reality was different.
Rather than define itself with competence, Biden’s mismanagement and the gross incompetence of his national security team have hemorrhaged U.S credibility, empowered terrorists, and shot adrenaline into the ambitions of global rivals Russia and China.
Lifting sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 energy pipeline scored a generational victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Afghanistan withdrawal displayed gross incompetence and all but guaranteed an al Qaeda and Islamic State resurgence. The list goes on: A Haitian gang leader holds Americans hostage, Houthi rebels seized the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa just months after the State Department took them off the terror list, and Iran Envoy Rob Malley’s apologia for Iran’s behavior seems to have no limit. For Biden’s aides to walk back the president’s commitment to defend Taiwan at best highlighted the president’s senility and at worst encouraged hawks in Beijing.
None of these mistakes, however, approaches what South Korea’s foreign minister suggests was a hitherto fore secret Biden administration initiative to end the Korean War. The Korean War, of course, began more than 70 years ago just months after then-Secretary of State Dean Acheson omitted Korea from his outline of America’s defensive perimeter in the Pacific. The war technically never ended: While the 1953 Armistice Agreement ceased hostilities and created a demilitarized zone along the 38th parallel, it was not a formal peace treaty.
Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong, however, says that the Biden administration is prepared to issue a declaration formally ending the war. “We have recently had very close consultations with the U.S. about the format and contents of an end-of-war declaration,” he said. “Coordination between South Korea and the U.S. has almost been completed.” The South Korean administration hopes to use such a declaration “as a starting point” for a renewed effort to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.
To declare the war over on the hope of peace is naive. To do so before achieving such goals, however, actually risks a far hotter conflict.
The problem is that the U.S. operates under the U.N. flag on the peninsula and can continue to do so long as a peace agreement is allusive. To declare the war over would instantly delegitimize the American role and those of neutral monitors along the DMZ. The South Korean peace camp might whisper sweet nothings into Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s or national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s ears, but reality is stark. Not only Pyongyang, but also Beijing and Moscow would demand America’s exit the day after any declaration ending the conflict. In effect, what Biden proposes is not peace but a surrender that would make a dry run of the chaos in Afghanistan.
It is not a cheap or far-fetched analogy: Biden justified the Afghanistan withdrawal in his promise to end “forever wars.” What liberals and isolationists deride as “forever wars,” however, is really just a rebranding of traditional containment and deterrence. Nowhere has that deterrence kept tyranny at bay more starkly than in Korea. While President Harry S. Truman’s contemporaries lambasted him for embroiling the U.S. in an endless war and throwing a lifeline to Syngman Rhee’s corrupt South Korean regime, America’s intervention and strategic patience allowed South Korea’s economy and democracy to evolve. Juxtaposing North and South Korea today shows the wisdom of that investment.
For Biden to undercut that now would represent a penchant for naivete and self-destruction that, just a few years ago, would be beyond the realm of imagination for America’s enemies.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
