The Biden administration’s newly released National Security Strategy said some of the right things, but judged by its association with real action, it falls well short of the nation‘s needs.
Parts of the strategy document are predictably absurd. On the home front, “We face an increased and significant threat within the United States from a range of domestic violent extremists, including those motivated by racial or ethnic prejudice, as well as anti-government or anti-authority sentiment.” This fixation on white supremacist extremism would not be so problematic were the Biden administration’s focus on it not so plainly political. After all, left out of this domestic terrorism concern is the priority threat posed by those inspired to bring the Islamic State and al Qaeda’s bloody message to American streets. Most counterterrorism officials believe that Islamist-inspired or directed terrorism remains the most likely culprit for mass casualty attacks.
More ominous is the strategy’s reference to “reinforcing respect for civil rights and civil liberties” and its pledge to address “the crisis of disinformation and misinformation, often channeled through social and other media platforms, that can fuel extreme polarization and lead some individuals to violence.”
Considering the Left’s obsession with “misinformation” on Twitter and Facebook and the Biden administration’s gleeful deployment of the FBI against pro-life activists, these words will ring hollow for many people.
What about some positives?
The administration rightly observed that “the United States has long benefited from international trade’s ability to promote global economic growth, lower consumer prices, and access to foreign markets to promote U.S. exports and jobs.” Excluding trade cheaters such as Communist China, this endorsement of free markets is valuable and something we wish to see stated more often by Republicans.
When it comes to the increasingly overstretched defense department, Democrats’ identity politics agenda again shined through. The strategy promotes “diversity and inclusion” without offering a plan for how to boost U.S. military readiness in the Indo-Pacific region.
We find a familiar dichotomy of rhetoric and action throughout the strategy document. President Joe Biden warned that “our competitors and potential adversaries are investing heavily in new nuclear weapons.”
His response?
On Iran, the U.S. “will pursue diplomacy to ensure that Iran can never acquire a nuclear weapon. … Iran’s threats against U.S. personnel as well as current and former U.S. officials will not be tolerated, and as we have demonstrated, we will respond when our people and interests are attacked.”
Left out is that the Biden administration has provided a limitless timetable for Iran to prevaricate in nuclear negotiations. In the same vein, the White House has only reacted to multiple Iranian assassination plots on U.S. soil with delayed indictments. And the administration showed its hollow hand when it added that “we will always stand with the Iranian people striving for the basic rights and dignity long denied them by the regime in Tehran.” Sorry, a few piecemeal words at the United Nations does not represent a courageous U.S. stance alongside the women of Iran.
On NATO, Biden said: “We will count on our Allies to continue assuming greater responsibility by increasing their spending, capabilities, and contributions.” Except that Biden offered no associated action to extract these expectations. Many of Europe’s most powerful economies continue to free-ride off U.S. defense spending nearly one year after Russia launched the most major land war in Europe since 1945. Indeed, Germany is again kowtowing to China, utterly ignoring Beijing’s gift of priceless political cover to Russian President Vladimir Putin over his war on Ukraine.
On Russia, Biden offered yet more weakness. Forgetting his foolish abandonment of Trump-era nuclear weapons research, Biden claimed to support “developing a more expansive, transparent, and verifiable arms control infrastructure to succeed New START.” Translation: “Russia is applying nuclear blackmail and we’re responding with a call for new arms talks.” It’s a natural extension of the White House’s appeasement-based nuclear strategy.
Put simply, the U.S. doesn’t have so much as a strategy as a hodgepodge of hat tips to the political Left and pledges utterly divorced from real-world action. That’s not a recipe for success.
