Our friend Frank Gaffney’s “Secure Freedom Minute” is a must-read (or listen) hot take on the day’s top threats to America’s national security, and Monday’s episode was an important reminder that alleged President Joe Biden is about to make what could be a consequential trip to the Middle East.
Most conservatives will take a look at the agenda for the trip and think, “I wonder what Biden will screw-up? Will he get the King’s name right or commit some gaffe that offends Muslims, or Jews or everyone in the Middle East?”
However, Mr. Gaffney reminds us that Biden’s trip is very intentional, and the policy failures and creation of unintended consequences that many conservatives and center-right voters see as blunders or screw-ups are not errors – they are intentional parts of what many conservative national security thinkers and analysts have come to see as an aggressive “wrecking operation” intended to destroy the national security structures erected to keep Iran and its Islamist allies at bay.
As Mr. Gaffney wrote:
Joe Biden takes his wrecking operation to the Mideast this week. Wonder what harm he can do? Think Afghanistan on steroids.
My colleague, David Wurmser, has just published a brilliant analysis of the dangers arising from Biden’s diminishing of Arab perceptions of the United States as the “strong horse.”
Dr. Wurmser correctly argues that the Israelis must do whatever they can to fill the vacuum thus created.
Instead, they are submitting to Biden, even giving him their country’s highest award. Not since Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize has a distinction been less deserved.
No good can come from Biden’s three priorities: protecting Iran from Israeli preemption; resuscitating Palestinian ambitions; and encouraging Saudi oil production, not ours.
In an analysis for the Jewish Policy Center, Dr. Wurmser reiterates the view we share with Mr. Gaffney that what’s going on at the Biden White House is not a gaffe or error, rather it is, the “willful abdication by the United States of its regional position that is implied by Washington’s desperation to reach a [Iran nuclear] deal at almost any cost.”
As evidence of the Biden wrecking operation in action in the Middle East Dr. Wurmser cites the recent performance by U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken at the Sde Boker Arab - Israeli Summit.
In Dr. Wurmser’s analysis:
Bringing in the United States changed the summit’s dynamics and transformed that part of the summit into a catastrophe. The Biden team was empowered to reassert its primary goals of trying to maintain rapidly dissipating American control over regional allies; sabotaging the operational cooperation emerging among regional partners on an effective strategy of confrontation and even war against Iran; and reasserting America’s obsession with the Palestinian issue.
The statement by Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the summit not only captured those aims perfectly, but also humiliated the Israeli host and registered a partisan dig at the previous administration by putting forward the idea that the Abraham Accords were neither significant nor real peace. Blinken said the “agreements are not a substitute for progress between Palestinians and Israelis.”
In Dr. Wurmser’s analysis – and we agree – Biden is wrecking the security structures created by the Abraham Accords to resurrect two anti-American, anti-Israeli causes; Obama’s Iran nuclear weapons deal and the territorial aspirations of the radical anti-American “Palestinians.”
The one thing that can stave-off the collapse of American power in the Middle East says Dr. Wurmser is an American administration that regains its senses and returns to leadership and the protection of its regional allies.
We agree with Dr. Wurmser, that what is required for friendly stability in the Middle East is American leadership, but what’s going on now is no gaffe or blunder caused by Biden losing his senses: It is a carefully planned wrecking operation by pro-Iranian interests in the White House to advance the interests of our enemy Iran and its vision of a nuclear-armed global Islamist empire.
Frank Gaffney
Secure Freedom Minute
Biden Middle East trip
National Security
Iran
Israel
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken
Sde Boker Arab - Israeli Summit
Palestinians
Obama Iran deal