The president’s interest in being reelected and the country’s interests abroad are increasingly diverging.
The president’s interest in being reelected and the country’s interests abroad are increasingly diverging.
I t is becoming hard to avoid the conclusion that Joe Biden regards doing the job to which voters elected him as the biggest obstacle in the path of his reelection. In making the case for his continued tenure in the White House to voters, what Biden needs and what Biden wants are in increasing conflict.
Biden needs Israel to win its war against the terrorist group Hamas — a righteous war in which the U.S. has invested its treasure and prestige — with all possible alacrity. But Biden wants that war to be as sanitary as possible and to avoid association with Israel’s tactics, which prolongs the war and the torment to which Israel’s left-wing critics in the West have subjected the president.
Biden needs Ukraine to beat back the Russian advance, but he wants to achieve that without unduly antagonizing Moscow. To that end, Biden spent the first years of the war agonizing over the weapons platforms he would provide Ukraine, only to eventually cave to Kyiv’s solicitations and expose his hesitation as dithering. Now, hamstrung by his initial misgivings, Biden is lobbying Ukraine against executing attacks on Russian energy infrastructure for fear that it might put modest upward pressure on global oil and gas prices. In service to the narrow objective of winning reelection, the president has subordinated the much more important and politically salient objective of meting out a lasting humiliation to Moscow on Ukraine’s battlefields.
This same myopic logic is now being applied to Iran following Tehran’s status-quo-altering direct attack on Israel. Iran’s volley of 350 drones and rockets toward Israel inaugurated a new stage of the conflict that began on October 7, one in which the United States and its allies are directly engaged and which has produced American fatalities. Biden needs to see deterrence restored. But punishing Iran himself or even supporting Israeli retaliation conflicts with the president’s wants.
That’s the impression Washington Post economics reporter Jeff Stein’s latest dispatch gives its readers. Sure, it would be nice if Biden could dole out a comeuppance to Iran for its attack on Israel that would impose costs on the Islamic Republic sufficient to give it pause before it executes similar attacks in the future. But achieving that will be tricky.
Biden is not wholly without tools at his disposal to punish Iran. Additional sanctions on the Iranian oil trade, for example, are bound to impact the Chinese, who, Stein noted, have “provided a financial lifeline for Tehran.” They sure have, to the tune of roughly $88 billion in payments as the primary purchaser of Iranian crude-oil exports. And yet, the “experts” warn that imposing additional sanctions on Iranian markets and enforcing secondary sanctions on Chinese buyers and banks “carries its own risks.” Foremost among them is the prospect of “tighter supply” in the global energy market, which “could cause oil prices to spike globally,” “leading to higher gas prices ahead of the 2024 presidential election.”
As energy-industry consultant Bob McNally told Stein, Biden “can’t afford to sanction Iran’s oil.” Sure, the White House “could do some symbolic stuff, to go after a little trader here or there, but that’s likely about it.”
What a shame. Oh well. I suppose we’ll have to simply roll over and accept that brazen acts of war against America and its partners from the most active member of the emerging anti-American axis are just a new fact of life to which we must become accustomed. What’s the alternative? That Joe Biden should risk his presidency in the defense of permanent American interests abroad? Now that’s crazy.
Notwithstanding Stein’s reporting, the Biden administration is not doing nothing in response to the Iranian attack. Late Tuesday, the White House announced its intention to pursue a vague series of new sanctions against Iran’s various military enterprises, “including its missile and drone program.” It’s difficult to assess the efficacy of these sanctions without additional details, but they will likely be designed to close at least some of the avenues through which Iran has bolstered its missile-development and trade programs following the expiry of U.N. Security Council restrictions on Iranian drones and rockets.
With the sunset of those sanctions, which were enacted as part of the Obama-era Iranian nuclear accords, last year, the Biden administration imposed unilateral restrictions on some foreign individuals and entities with ties to the Iranian missile program. But otherwise, it maintained, its hands were tied. And yet, the JCPOA was not without contingencies in the event of Iranian duplicity, the foremost of which was a provision allowing sanctions to “snap back” into place if Tehran failed to honor the terms of the deal.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers urged the Biden administration to trigger this provision last year before the U.N. embargo on Iran’s missile and drone program expired, but their advice went unheeded. The White House will be hemmed in by opposition to stricter sanctions from permanent Security Council members Russia and China, but it would serve America’s interests — what Biden needs — to put these powers on the defensive. The opposition of the anti-Western bloc to the “snap back” provision didn’t stop the Trump administration from pursuing exactly that in the fall of 2020.
An effort to restore the conventional-arms embargoes on Iran that expired respectively in 2020 and 2023 would force Biden to confront Iran’s enablers at the United Nations and elsewhere, and it would expose something the White House has been loath to admit: that the JCPOA is dead and gone. But it would also communicate to the voting public that the White House takes the threat posed by Tehran and its boosters in Moscow and Beijing seriously.
That’s not what Biden wants. What he wants is for the general impression that conditions are improving to take hold among voters. He wants placidity abroad and prosperity at home. What president wouldn’t? But in his effort to avoid overly committing to foreign entanglements, Biden has invited the very conditions that may yet deprive him of the reelection victory — a goal to which he seems willing to sacrifice so many American interests.
Today, Biden appears unequal to the challenges America faces abroad, not because he cannot meet them but because he doesn’t trust the country to support him if he tries to. The president lacks faith in the American public, and that sentiment is increasingly mutual. Voters need a president committed to the advancement of U.S. interests abroad. They may not want that president to be erratic, emotionally unstable, and prohibitively consumed with his own legal peril. But as almost every functional adult understands, you can’t always get what you want.