Biden’s Foreign Policy Just Isn’t Working – And It’s Not Deterring Anybody

At one point during the first Trump administration¹, I gave up (or at least cut back) on complaining about what he was doing both because it was becoming too time consuming and because the Democratic alternatives weren’t any better.  Well, I think I am just about there on Joe Biden’s foreign policy.  It’s bad, and I have no reason to think Trump 2.0 would be any better.

It has now been four days since an Iran proxy group killed three U.S. soldiers with a drone attack on a base we have in Jordan.  It may be that the Biden administration already has an appropriate response in process, and we don’t know about it yet.  I hope so.²  Because, if we want these attacks to stop, we need to respond in a really big way.  Iranian proxies, and others, have been attacking us for months.  Before Sunday, we were able to knock the drones or missiles down or they only injured people, they didn’t kill them.  So we didn’t respond (at least very much).  We just said: (i) if you kill any of our people (as opposed to merely injuring them), we’ll respond; (ii) we don’t want to escalate or to widen the war/conflict/tensions; and (iii) we don’t want World War III.  Which apparently didn’t scare anybody and probably encouraged some groups to keep attacking us  - because they did.

The point is the Biden administration has failed at deterrence.  We didn’t deter Russia from attacking Ukraine.  We haven’t deterred all of these attacks in the Middle East.  It took a couple of years to convince Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to approve Sweden’s entry into NATO and we still haven’t gotten Hungary’s Viktor Orban to agree.  Part of this may be because of the way we left Afghanistan.  Part of it may be the way the Biden administration has been trying to be nice to Iran.  And part of it are the points in the prior paragraph.

Obviously, we don’t want wars to widen and we don’t want World War III, but if that is all you talk about, then every bully and wannabe bully will know they can push you around quite a bit without you responding.  Which means that, when³ you ultimately decide somebody has gone too far and you have to respond , the response will have to be bigger than if you had been strong and believable earlier on.  

Trust, and deterrence, are easy to lose, and hard to get back.  That is where the Biden administration is today.
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¹ How’s that for a scary thought?
² According to a report from the BBC that I saw just as I was finalizing this post, “[t]he US approves plan for strikes over a number of days on Iranian targets in Iraq and Syria”.  I hope it is enough and it works.
³ Or “if”, as the case may be.