The Biden administration’s reaction to the Iran-sponsored killings of American troops last month has been underwhelming at best. Despite a select few airstrikes on Iranian proxies, they’ve decided thus far to refrain from hitting targets inside Iran itself. President Joe Biden is clearly more terrified of “escalation” than of sending a signal of weakness.
Biden and his staff are paralyzed by their fear of war and a naive belief in their own brilliant diplomacy. Rather than reckon with the hard realities of geopolitics, this administration acts like a flock of ostriches collectively burying their heads in the sand. They first refused to take our adversaries’ threats seriously, and now they act like they can talk their way out of this world crisis.
Perhaps no one embodies this hubris more fully than national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
Mere days before Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, Sullivan was crowing that the Biden administration had finally brought peace to the Middle East. In a now-justly famous Foreign Affairs essay published on Oct. 2, he declared that “the region is quieter than it has been for decades.” He insisted that the disastrous retreat from Afghanistan somehow strengthened America’s position in the region and even had the gall to suggest that the administration “de-escalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy between the parties after years of its absence.”
Events proved Sullivan a fool. Far from restraining the Islamic Republic and its proxies, Biden’s appeasement policies emboldened them. That’s why the “direct diplomacy” Sullivan lauded rapidly gave way to one of the worst military conflicts the region has seen in decades. Iran and our other opponents are not interested in talks to join a “liberal world order” – they are interested only in exploiting American weakness.
Even leaders in the Arab world have pointed out the dangers of the Biden administration’s naivete. Yemen’s foreign minister, Ahmad Awad bin Mubarak, recently said that American officials have been too obsessed with achieving some kind of diplomatic resolution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions to balance their rising power carefully. The United States did too little to stop the development of the “Axis of Resistance,” Mubarak argued, and now, Iran-backed Houthi terrorists are choking up global supply chains in the Red Sea.
Sullivan is a key architect of these appeasement policies. In the Obama administration, he was a top-level staffer for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and one of the most forceful advocates of diplomatic talks with Iran. He personally met with officials from the Islamic Republic in secret negotiations that preceded the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the failed Iran nuclear deal. His fingerprints are all over the result.
The Iran nuclear deal has done little to hamper the country’s heedless pursuit of the bomb. Experts from the Institute for Science and International Security estimate that it would only take about a week for Iran to develop the necessary nuclear material for a weapon. They could even have enough for as many as 12 nuclear devices in five months. The JCPOA did not make Iran weaker or slow down the race to nuclear breakout. It simply gave the Iranian regime time to build up regional strength.
Unfortunately, Sullivan’s errors in judgment extend beyond the Middle East. Speaking about Sino-Russian cooperation during a trip to the Pacific last week, Sullivan said the administration’s top goal is to “responsibly manage competition” with the Chinese Communist Party. Rather than impose serious consequences on the CCP for its “no limits” support for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine, Sullivan would simply wag his finger disapprovingly. Biden may even send Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to China — again — as a goodwill gesture later this year.
This administration does not seem to understand the global connections between the crises that have erupted since Biden took office. Retreat from Afghanistan clearly encouraged Putin’s invasion. Biden’s inability to supply Ukraine with the weapons to win the war signaled weakness to Iran and its terrorist proxies. And now, the CCP is eagerly watching American inaction while its leaders plot a potential invasion of Taiwan. By now, it is well past time to learn the lesson that weakness in one region invites aggression in others.
Sullivan has utterly failed at the role of national security adviser. On his watch, the Taliban took back control of Afghanistan, Putin instigated the largest European conflict since World War II, Hamas launched the worst terrorist attack since 9/11, Iran inches closer to regional hegemony, and Chinese aggression grows unabated. America is not safer with Sullivan and Biden at the helm — quite the contrary.
Irving Kristol famously said that a conservative is “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” It seems that reality is mugging the Biden administration pretty hard right now and that policymakers should be rethinking their failed approach. Sadly, it is altogether unlikely they will change course.
One can only hope that voters are more realistic than Joe Biden and Jake Sullivan this fall.
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Michael Lucchese is the founder and CEO of Pipe Creek Consulting.
