IN THE first part of this essay yesterday I explained how Biden’s unhinged foreign policy precipitated the destruction of Ukraine. Yet while the horrors of Bakhmut and the Donbas were unfolding, another of Biden’s utopian delusions was germinating in the Middle East. His government inherited the region from Trump in a subdued state: ISIS had been shattered swiftly in 2017; the Iranian regime was first suppressed by sanctions and then shocked by the 2020 assassination of the military commander Qasem Soleimani, and Israeli security commitments were bolstered by the recognition of Jerusalem as its official capital.
Hence, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s delusional National Security Adviser and a principal architect of this recent carnage, remarked eight days before the October 7 massacre that ‘the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades’. Four months later Secretary of State Anthony Blinken admitted that the region is in its most dangerously precarious position since at least 1973. In my view this precipitous collapse has its roots in the utopian naivety, and specifically anti-Israeli machinations, of the Biden foreign policy establishment.
By rehabilitating Obama’s profoundly dangerous 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which relieves the Iranian regime of billions of dollars’ worth of sanctions in return for (supposedly) dismantling aspects of its nuclear programme, Biden’s government turned the region into a tinderbox. The classicist and commentator Victor Davis Hanson observes that the deeper strategic intent has been to resurrect ‘the unhinged Obama administration plan of empowering a “Shiite crescent” – of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, including Hamas’. This resurgent bloc was intended to birth ‘creative tension’ in the region and counterbalance the dominance of Israel and the Gulf regimes. The envisioned end-state was that of a fabled regional equilibrium, guaranteed by the counterpoising of two vast sectarian armed camps. To any thinking person, this is of course a deranged policy, certain to provoke conflict.
Indeed, the utopian nuclear deal with Iran has always contained two deadly problems. First, it magnifies the prospect of an Iranian nuclear breakout. Second, it unfreezes billions of dollars in assets for the regime that sits as the tarantula enshrined at the heart of a great web of jihadist terror in the Middle East. As retired US Central Command head General Frank McKenzie has explained, Tehran’s foreign policy has three primary objectives: regime preservation, the literal annihilation of Israel, and the total extirpation of US forces from the Middle East.
By lifting sanctions on Iran, Biden has unfrozen $90billion or more of oil revenues, which immediately propelled the resourcing of its terrorist proxies. Between 2020 and 2023, Tehran’s funding of Hamas increased from $100million to $350million per annum – a damning and irrefutable consequence of Biden’s appeasing a deadly, fanatical regime.
Importantly, experts warned from the beginning of Biden’s presidency that the restoration of the nuclear deal would animate the region’s monsters, who would in turn prey on vulnerable US bases and the state of Israel – precisely as the ayatollahs wished them to. Moreover, the Biden administration has itself de facto funded Hamas by restoring $1billion in aggregate of aid money to Palestine – funds which were justifiably rescinded during the Trump years. Critically, the Hamas-run government of the Gaza Strip has always used such aid money to conserve its own funds for military operations: it is a tragic law of the region that the more money ‘Palestine’ receives in aid, the more Hamas spends on murdering Israeli Jews.
Hence, between reliquifying Iranian funds and actively pouring money into the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, the terror network in the region, from Yemen to Lebanon, has been invigorated with alarming speed. Davis Hanson notes further that this years-long appeasement of Iran led its principal proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, to believe that the resurgent regime would protect them in a war against Israel. The US, they reasoned, would silently withdraw, as it had from Afghanistan, and would restrain Israeli military counteraction as it went.
So, why was the attack against Israel launched specifically in October last year? First, Hamas had by then accrued the money and materiel to conduct such an immense assault. But, vitally, Biden had spent the summer of 2023 attempting to broker a diplomatic agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which was intended to provide the mirage of a foreign policy success. Of course, such a deal was utterly beside the point, for Israel’s most dangerous enemy – Iran – stood outside the negotiations. And, moreover, Iran was predictably enraged by the deal’s potential finally to entrench Israel as a recognised state among the Gulf regimes. This would dispel Iranian hopes of one day leading a region-wide war of annihilation against Israel.
Iranian security officials therefore helped the Hamas leadership to plan the October 7 attack. Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps worked with Hamas fighters from August to enable the attacks by land, sea, and air into Israeli territory to murder, torture, rape and burn innocent civilians. The Israel-Saudi deal was duly derailed in the immediate aftermath of the attack.
What we see in Biden’s woeful handling of the Middle East is the same lethal combination of incompetent weakness and arrogant hubris that beleaguered his non-diplomacy in Ukraine. The US now struggles vainly to suppress the villainy it has emboldened. Its bases across the Middle East have been attacked, almost with impunity, some 170 times since October 7. At the Gate of Tears, the southern end of the Red Sea, international shipping has been under sustained attack for months. And, vitally, Iran is closer than it has ever been to achieving a dreaded nuclear breakout, a terrible prospect now rarely mentioned in the mainstream media.
Having allowed the mollification of Iran and its terror network to metastasise into a global crisis, the Biden administration is finally having to confront the glaring necessity to enforce violent deterrence. Yet, the measures enacted thus far have lacked the shock and unpredictability required to suppress the jubilant monsters that the Biden government so meticulously emboldened. Indeed, perhaps it is the painful contradiction inherent to bombing the fruits of their very own ‘Shiite crescent’ that is restraining Washington’s radical foreign policy gurus.
We see that in both Ukraine and Gaza, Biden cannot cut either of his Gordian Knots without unveiling the astounding delusions at the heart of his foreign policy. In Ukraine, he must finally bring Putin to the negotiating table. In so doing, he will concede that the policy of endless escalation through the wrecked Ukrainian proxy has failed. In the Middle East, the only solution is to punish Iran and its evil, blood-lusting clients decisively. Such punitive action will overtly disavow the lethal pro-Iranian assuagement on which his regional strategy was predicated for years.
Such entanglements are irreconcilable precisely because they are the products of absurd ideological commitments – the utopian, ignorant notions of a radical left-wing mob that has somehow occupied the highest seat of power. With the presidential election approaching, it is surely clear that the world has indulged this dangerous fool and his deluded, poisonous consultants long enough.
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