Team Obama-Biden-Harris Does Not Believe In The Possibility Of Victory

Their goal is a managed decline relative to America's enemies

North Korea has reportedly sent ten thousand troops to Ukraine, with the first units due to arrive in Kursk this week. According to military intelligence sources in Kyiv, the first North Korean advisory and training troops have already deserted their position in Kursk, earning a new role as the vanguard in ‘meatwave’ assaults. It is very unlikely that any North Korean soldiers will survive their service in Russia, for the Hermit Kingdom cannot allow them to return with knowledge of the outside world. Those troops are already dead and do not know it. Furthermore, Ukraine estimates that 10,000 Russians have been killed in combat over the last week, so Kim Jong-un’s contribution to the cause represents no more than a seven-day supply of bodies, at best. North Korea has already supplied a mountain of poor-quality artillery ammunition to their Russian ally.

These developments ought to be a sharp rebuke to the blinkered “escalation management” strategy of Western powers, particularly the feckless Biden administration, which refuses to let Ukraine use long-range weapons provided by the US against targets inside Russia while failing to deliver other promised material on time, all the time. But the Biden team is undeterred from their headlong rush to forestall Ukrainian victory. They do not press allies towards action. They do not push for Ukraine to join NATO. “The alliance has not, to date, reached the point where it is prepared to offer membership or an invitation to Ukraine,” U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith tells Politico today. Instead, “our intent is to keep moving them closer to NATO.”

This is reminiscent of the ‘Middle East peace process,’ an endless diplomatic gridlock that never once produced any actual peace. Like Zeno’s paradox, this policy is never supposed to reach its goal. Instead, it is supposed to continue moving in the direction of peace forever, or until the heat-death of the universe, because the current Democratic Party leadership fundamentally does not believe that military victory is desirable or even possible. Continuing the policy of Barack Obama, the Biden administration has over-learned the lessons of Iraq, most notably in their botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, and applied their policy to conflicts everywhere. They have actively accommodated avowed enemies such as Iran, allowing room for Tehran to increase its footprint across the Middle East in pursuit of nuclear peace. Carving out safe spaces for Russia to operate with impunity seems to be their standard operating procedure in all cases. Whatever changes Donald Trump might intend, a Kamala Harris presidency will only bring more of the same.

Yahya Sinwar thought he could leverage the decline of American power to destroy the Israeli state. HAMAS adopted a strategy of hiding behind civilians in order to aggravate the death toll of Israeli action, reasoning that international pressure resulting from civilian casualties would stop the IDF short of destroying them. It was a bad bet. Last week, an Israeli patrol spotted Sinwar and a small security team in Tal al-Sultan, a part of Rafah, and eliminated them without recognizing Sinwar. Only on Thursday morning did the IDF realize they might have bagged their man, who was apparently trying to escape the Israeli net that was closing around him.

Video from a small reconnaissance UAV used to reconnoiter the building where Sinwar tried to hide shows him weakly attempting to throw a stick at the drone in the moments before a tank shell ripped his head open. The video has fueled much cope from HAMAS stans, who frame Sinwar’s final moment as a heroic act of defiance. Iran has indicated that it will continue fighting to the last Gazan. Sinwar, who opposed any peaceful solution to the war he started, “will become a model for the youth and children who will carry forward his path toward the liberation of Palestine. As long as occupation and aggression exist, resistance will endure, for the martyr remains alive and a source of inspiration,” according to Iran’s UN mission. They want the war to continue forever, or until the annihilation of every Jew in Israel.

Arab mediators tell The Wall Street Journal that this was also Sinwar’s plan. He had told political leadership of HAMAS that they should refuse any Israeli cease-fire proposal or hostage negotiation if he died. Confirming Sinwar’s death last Friday, Khalil al-Hayya, deputy chairman of the HAMAS politburo, followed this directive when he declared that the remaining hostages would not be released. Just as Sinwar refused every cease-fire because the Biden administration emboldened him with verbal attacks on Israel, HAMAS is still convinced they can win because the Biden adminstration has learned nothing from their abysmal failures.

In Tel Aviv, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told reporters yesterday that he had threatened to withhold military aid unless Israel allows more humanitarian aid into Gaza so that HAMAS can continue to steal it. He rationalized the IDF’s military achievements as a reason to stop succeeding at military victory. “Now is the time to turn those successes into an enduring strategic success,” Blinken said as if the Israelis were the unwilling party, here. “And there are really two things left to do, get the hostages home and bring the war to an end with an understanding of what will follow.” This is not a realistic plan for peace. It is a plan for another endless ‘peace process.’ It is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

If anything, Israeli operations against Hezbollah have been even more successful than the war on HAMAS. Along with the pager and radio bombs, as well as hits on Hezbollah financing, a series of decapitation strikes has left the organization without a formal leader. Israel has “changed the rules of the game,” Kyle Orton writes. While targeting leadership rarely ends any war, “decapitation this thorough and rapid has few precedents. Recovering from the loss of decades of practical experience and competence in so many areas is not possible in a few months or even years. Replacing someone with the charismatic authority of [Hassan] Nasrallah may not be possible at all.” To make it happen, Israeli intelligence studied Hezbollah in detail and thoroughly penetrated the security of the organization as well as its Iranian sponsors for the last eighteen years.

The Biden administration’s response to all this Israeli success in Lebanon is also “incoherent,” Orton says politely.

The U.S. is reportedly trying to capitalise on the weakness of Hezbollah after Israel mauled the group to install a president in Beirut — a post vacant for two years — who is not Suleiman Frangieh, the candidate insisted upon by Nasrallah. A focus on rearranging the faces in the Lebanese government, such as it is, is strange, though it does conform to the long-term U.S. policy based on a fantastical theory of how Hezbollah’s hold on all actual power in Lebanon can be loosened. But the U.S. is combining this focus with a call for a ceasefire, which would alleviate the pressure on Hezbollah, removing any incentive for Hezbollah to make even cosmetic concessions. Shortening Israel’s window for action in Lebanon seems like the only potential tangible outcome of this American diplomacy.

War is bad, in the view of Team Biden, and especially bad whenever American allies take any step closer to actual victory. Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan prefer ‘peace,’ which they confuse with status quo ante, to war. In their eyes, the best outcome that military force can ever achieve is as little victory as possible, and certainly not defeat of an enemy.

Regarding Hezbollah, the status quo ante is UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon. While this international ‘peacekeeping’ force has utterly failed to implement the 2006 UN Resolution 1701, which was supposed to remove Hezbollah from the Israeli border region, it has served very well as a human shield against Israeli action since it first arrived in 1978. “In recent weeks, IDF soldiers have been uncovering and destroying terror bases built under UNIFIL's nose, in clear violation of its mandate,” Ariel Bulshtein explains at Israel Hayom. “But this is only half the problem. The other half, equally ugly and dangerous, surfaced when the IDF finally began dismantling what Hezbollah had developed under UNIFIL's protection.”

Anne Bayefsky, Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and President of Human Rights Voices, gave Israel Hayom this blistering quote:

The Biden–Harris team is using the United Nations as a weapon, as a sword of Damocles hanging over Israel's head. They dangle the specter of withholding a veto from an anti–Israel Security Council attack — just as their Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, did. For almost four years, the Biden–Harris foreign policy has been to legitimize UN bodies, including UNRWA and the Human Rights Council, thereby undermining any prospect of accountability for shameful UN bias and antisemitism. Biden–Harris officials produce throw–away lines on 'reform' and 'change,' while throwing hundreds of millions of dollars on the unreformed and unchanged.

Hezbollah prisoners have told the IDF that the organization has bribed UNIFIL personnel to look the other way while they built fighting positions and tunnels just a stone’s throw from UNIFIL locations, even taking control of security cameras for their own purposes. Despite earnest entreaties from the IDF, UNIFIL refuses to evacuate their positions. “Israel suspects that UNIFIL's insistence on staying is partly an attempt to obscure its ongoing failure to prevent Hezbollah's arms buildup and blatant violations of Resolution 1701,” and “Hezbollah has been launching missiles and rockets at Israel from sites adjacent to UNIFIL positions, with some projectiles landing close to their outposts.”

Just like UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which has become a de facto arm of HAMAS in Gaza, UNIFIL has been thoroughly incorporated into Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance.’ The Biden administration does not seem to mind at all. No one in the White House criticizes UNRWA or UNIFIL. All their criticism is reserved for Israel, a situation that raises disturbing questions about what is actually going on in Democratic administrations lately.

Is it a coincidence, for example, that ‘someone’ leaked US intelligence reports on Israeli plans for retaliatory strikes against Iran after the recent salvo of ballistic missiles from Tehran, or was this intentional? “Israel is concerned the leak could help Iran predict certain patterns of attack,” The Times reports. Tel Aviv “has been forced to develop an alternative plan, one that requires detailed war gaming before any order is given,” delaying retaliation. Biden, who consistently opposes Israeli offensive actions at every turn, has refused to participate in any strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities or oil infrastructure in particular. Indeed, all the hand-wringing concern over the leak that has been expressed by American officials, including Biden, could perhaps be too much of a protest. It is hardly inconceivable that the leak was a deliberate ploy to delay Israeli retaliation until after the US election, now twelve days away. This explanation will become more tenable if the FBI does not turn up a suspect in their investigation of the leak.

Election Day is clearly playing a central role in Biden administration thinking. They worry that war with Iran, or escalation in Russia’s war on Ukraine, could have an effect on Kamala Harris. A spike in gasoline prices from a strike on Iran’s oil facilities might swing some voters in a close election; this was also their concern when Ukraine began destroying Russian oil and fuel facilities. No one in the White House is able to imagine how a victorious war with Iran, or Ukrainian victories on the battlefield, might actually play well with voters. Americans love a winner, but the very possibility of winning is dismissed out of hand in this administration. To be fair, the US Navy’s underwhelming performance against Houthi rebels in the Red Sea points to how unprepared American forces have become in the age of strategic drift, for even the Pentagon is infused with pessimism about its own ability to win wars.

However, this historical trend away from Israel has been underway for much longer than the 2024 election race or the last year of hostilities. We have another, more disturbing explanation: three successive Democratic nominees fundamentally disagree with Machiavelli that it is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot have both. All of them assume that American power must decline in order for the world to have peace.

According the the dogmas of the left, the biggest barrier to the world loving America is our support for the Israeli state. If only we would hold Benjamin Netanyahu at arm’s length, criticize Israel at every opportunity, swallow whole every lie told by Israel’s enemies, and give them room to operate against both Israel and American power, then the world would love us, goes the thinking. Obama and Biden have certainly gone out of their way to convince Iran to love America again, even hiring on that basis. As Dr. John Schindler explains, their administrations “have been positively swiss-cheesed with well-placed Friends of Tehran holding top jobs.”

At the heart of this dubious affair lurks Rob Malley, the academic-cum-bureaucrat who made the 2015 Iran Deal, formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, happen for President Barack Obama, then was brought back by Team Biden to resurrect JCPOA after President Trump killed it. Malley failed to accomplish that, but he did wind up at the center of a spy scandal which the Biden White House has struggled mightily to suppress.

“Malley was a mentor for a generation of Democratic foreign policy cadres with an interest in Iran and the Middle East,” Schindler continues. Among them is Phil Gordon, National Security Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris, who is likely to fill that role if she is elected president. “Gordon’s been tight with Malley for years plus he possesses longstanding ties to known Tehran fronts like the National Iranian American Council.” In Schindler’s view, “Team Obama-Biden-Harris has allowed our government to be penetrated at the highest levels by agents of Iran and related Islamist groups, enemies of America and the West.” He doubts the leaker will ever be identified.

Risk aversion has allowed Iran to build up its proxy forces across the region. Risk aversion has prolonged the war in Ukraine and now it is prolonging the war in Gaza and Lebanon. The fundamental flaw in this “escalation management” strategy is that wars only become more intense and destructive the longer they are delayed or continue. Rather than reducing the stakes, the direction of Democratic presidential policy towards America’s enemies keeps raising them. Avoidance is not a sound strategy for peace. It is in fact a recipe for bigger, bloodier, and more expensive wars.