On the menu today: The good news is that President Biden, freshly returned from Israel, gave a good speech from the Oval Office, laying out why it is in America’s interest to stand in support of Israel and Ukraine. The bad news is that he barely mentioned Iran, and the threat of Hamas is intertwined with the strengthened hand of the mullahs in Tehran, which is a result of the policies he himself has enacted over the past two and a half years. Apparently, U.S. officials are “rattled” by the proliferating overseas crises. Meanwhile, Bloomberg finds some eye-popping numbers in some state polling examining a Biden vs. Trump rematch, and we conclude with an important note about next week’s newsletters.
The Biden Administration Is Wrong on Iran
As far as Joe Biden speeches go, last night’s address to the nation might have been the best of his presidency. But Biden had a simple, straightforward, and popular message to send — Israel and Ukraine good, Putin and Hamas bad. We must stand up to tyrants. If terrorist groups don’t get smacked down, hard, after they commit atrocities, they just keep committing more atrocities. There was nothing in Biden’s speech last night that would have been out of place in a George W. Bush speech.
(I can hear it now: “Uniparty! Washington uniparty!” Eh, I really don’t mind having two parties that emphasize the need for the United States to stand up against terrorists and tyrants. It’s a big improvement from all the times we’ve had only one.)
But Biden’s speech, emphasizing the need to stand with Israel, made just two brief, passing references to Iran. Israel’s enemy Hamas is a proxy of Iran, and Biden’s Iran policy is a mess. Missing from the speech was any recognition or acknowledgement that more than two years of increasingly desperate efforts to restart the Iran nuclear talks, and growing piles of concessions, were a mistake.
For the past two years, at least two of the people advising Biden’s Iran envoy were actually secretly working for the Iranian government, as Semafor reported:
The scope and scale of the IEI project has emerged in a large cache of Iranian government correspondence and emails reported for the first time by Semafor and Iran International. The officials, working under the moderate President Hassan Rouhani, congratulated themselves on the impact of the initiative. At least two of the people on the Foreign Ministry’s list were, or became, top aides to Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s special envoy on Iran, who was placed on leave this June following the suspension of his security clearance. A third was hired by the think tank Malley ran just as he left for the State Department.
As mentioned earlier this week, Malley is the guy who, in a 2009 documentary, insisted Hamas has “their own rationality. That’s the one thing to understand, these are not — none of them are crazies.”
One of the first things Biden did in office was repealing certain sanctions against Iran; then, in February 2022, he restored another Iran sanctions waiver; and then, this past February, his State Department waived sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting channel, the regime’s chief propaganda outlet. And then there is the $6 billion in Iranian money we just unfroze, money which, as Andy McCarthy observes, is still under the control of Qatar; the U.S. government no longer has any direct control over the transfer or use of those funds.
Yesterday, the Pentagon announced, “U.S. forces in the Middle East have come under threat by attack drones at least five times in three days and on Thursday intercepted numerous weapons launched by militants in Yemen.” It feels like every two-bit Islamist terrorist, gang, and faction in the entire Middle East, almost all of whom have some tie to or support from Iran, wants to take a shot at Israel right now — and if they can’t reach Israel, then they’ll take a shot at us.
For nearly three years, Biden and his team have acted like restoring the Iran nuclear deal was a preeminent objective, and some combination of concessions and incentives would bring Tehran back to the table and lead to some grand diplomatic breakthrough. That policy has failed. Period. It is time to start over, sanction the living daylights out of the regime in every way possible, and squeeze the Iranian economy until it pops like a grape, reducing the money that Tehran can send to groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
Regarding that still strangely underreported hostage crisis, my colleague Mark Wright observed last night, “The Biden administration acts like we don’t have any leverage over our ‘friends’ the Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks, and other governments that can speak to Hamas.” I suspect that the Biden administration is finding that it doesn’t have much leverage over the Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks, and other governments that can speak to Hamas. Remember, candidate Biden talked about how he was going to make the Saudis “pariahs,” and then ended up fist-bumping Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh. I suspect many foreign leaders of non-allied nations see Biden as a chump, a man they can cross, ignore, or blow off with little consequence.
Last night Biden also talked about how important it was to support Ukraine, but as this newsletter has laid out, on one weapons system after another — Patriot missile batteries, Abrams tanks, F-16s, and ATACMS — Biden dithers for months before sending Ukraine the weapons systems it requested months or sometimes a year earlier.
If you want Ukraine to win the war, help Ukraine to win the war. Don’t do it halfway or in fits and starts. Biden seems oblivious to how his message about the urgency of aiding Ukraine is undermined by the lethargic pace of his own decision-making.
Axios’s morning newsletter describes the highest levels of the U.S. government as “rattled” by the events of recent weeks: “Never before have we talked to so many top government officials who, in private, are so worried about so many overseas conflicts at once. . . . We don’t like to sound dire. But to sound a siren of clinical, clear-eyed realism: U.S. officials say this confluence of crises poses epic concern and historic danger.”
Earlier this month, I laid out how the United States faces, for lack of a better term, a “Coalition of the Devils”: Russia, China, Iran, and we can throw in a half-dozen to a dozen other hostile states and factions — North Korea, Syria, the Taliban, Hamas, Venezuela. (Biden’s lifting sanctions on Venezuela, too.) Matt Continetti’s right: We’re witnessing a “vast international effort to overturn the American-led post–World War II international system.” You can’t get tough on Hamas while trying to reestablish diplomatic relations with Iran, or confront Vladimir Putin while trying to “thaw relations” with Xi Jinping. The other guys are playing for keeps, and they hate our guts. And we’re heading into all of this with a much, much weaker defense-industrial base than we need.
In a fitting symbol of a world in chaos, yesterday, the U.S. State Department issued a travel warning for . . . the entire planet: “Due to increased tensions in various locations around the world, the potential for terrorist attacks, demonstrations or violent actions against U.S. citizens and interests, the Department of State advises U.S. citizens overseas to exercise increased caution. Stay alert in locations frequented by tourists.” Thanks, guys, that really narrows it down.
These overseas crises are not providing Biden much of a rally-around-the-flag effect in polling, although as CNN puts it this morning, “Biden is speaking to his strengths on Thursday night when discussing either Israel or Ukraine. He’s much better off politically talking about these issues than pretty much anything else.” That’s a gentle way of saying that most Americans disapprove of the job Biden is doing on the economy, inflation, gas prices, the border, crime, and many other domestic issues.
Under the radar: The latest batch of state polls by Bloomberg News and Morning Consult find that in a hypothetical (but increasingly likely) 2024 matchup of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Trump is winning in most places, and it isn’t all that close. The president is ahead by three points in Nevada, and Michigan is tied. Trump leads Pennsylvania by one percentage point, Wisconsin by two points, North Carolina by four points, Arizona by four points, and Georgia by five points. (More evidence that the electability argument is not going to do much for Ron DeSantis.)
ADDENDUM: As those who listened to yesterday’s edition of the Three Martini Lunch podcast know, I will be traveling abroad next week. Old operational-security habits make me reluctant to ever publicly say where I’m going until I get there, but let me assure you it isn’t Ukraine again, it isn’t Israel, and it isn’t the Gaza Strip. But it is a place that is in the news regularly. Because of the time change, it is possible that next week’s Morning Jolt won’t be that much of a morning publication.
Trust me, where I’m going, it’s safe. Or, you know, safe-ish.