“The failure of the Carter administration’s foreign policy is now clear to everyone except its architects, and even they must entertain private doubts,” opens “Dictatorships & Double Standards,” Jeane Kirkpatrick’s seminal Commentary essay of 1979. Substitute “Carter” for “Biden-Harris,” and her lede is as true today as it was forty-five years ago. Biden and Harris inherited peace and stability and, in under four years, have created war and chaos. The world is in a much more precarious state with them at the helm.
One reason for this is their fundamental misunderstanding of international crises. Biden and Harris have made de-escalation a pillar of their foreign policy. The word appears often in their public statements. As the vice president put it in a recent X post, their administration has been furiously “working to de-escalate regional tensions and prevent further conflict.” The idea is to limit conflicts before they spiral out of control. Countries really don’t want to fight one another per this line of thinking. If they try hard enough to lessen tensions, they won’t come to blows. There should always be an off-ramp from the escalatory highway. War is invariably a failure of de-escalation, the Biden-Harris administration believes. De-escalating, not winning, is the objective.
Their foreign policy is based on a fallacy. What Biden, Harris, and their subordinates don’t get is that de-escalation doesn’t de-escalate. It escalates. When the administration invests so much in “de-escalation”—which means appeasing adversaries, proscribing the United States’ own intervention in conflicts, and proscribing the behavior of its wartime allies—the bad guys try to get away with even more. This has been so time and again throughout the Biden-Harris presidency.
Even when the administration correctly deduces which countries are the source of global instability, it puts astonishingly little pressure on them to stop their depredations. Whatever pleas the administration makes in foreign capitals fall on deaf ears. In its search for de-escalation at any price, the Biden-Harris administration is giving malign actors carte blanche to go ahead with their ambitions. Its de-escalatory campaign does not check their aggression. Rather, it emboldens it. Only the willingness to impose costs would make them think twice.
That leaves wartime allies as the real recipients of the administration’s de-escalatory barbs. For all the talk about the administration’s commitment to international alliances, it has made a point of denying allies victory. It has criticized their conduct of defensive wars, declined to send them weapons, and told the world what it would not do in support of their war efforts, all in the name of de-escalation. Because they want to stay in Washington’s good graces, these countries can’t simply ignore what it says. The administration’s push for de-escalation works on allies in that they heed the United States’ leverage over them. This creates a pattern: the administration keeps hounding allies not to escalate without applying proportionate pressure on adversaries. De-escalation fails because the bad actors have no incentive not to escalate.
Nowhere is the de-escalation delusion more on display than in the Middle East. The region is riven by a struggle between an anti-American axis led by Iran and America’s democratic partner, Israel. The Iranian mullahs want to dominate the Middle East and see Israel and the United States as the principal obstacles to their doing so. Although the Iran-Israel shadow war predates the Biden-Harris administration, the latter has exacerbated the former, not least through its quixotic quest for de-escalation.
Even before October 7, the administration was extremely soft on Iran. Biden and Harris ran in the 2020 campaign on kickstarting a new nuclear deal with Iran. Once in office, they resumed talks without any concessions from Tehran, dispatching now-disgraced Special Envoy Robert Malley to get a deal done. The administration revoked the Iranian-backed Houthis’ Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist designations in February 2021 (only to reimpose the latter designation three years later amid their attacks on global shipping). Most egregiously, the administration waived billions of dollars worth of sanctions on Iran and let its oil exports swell. It expected that Iran, in return, would moderate its destabilizing activities. This was all part of the administration’s de-escalatory strategy. Show goodwill to the Iranians, and they will reciprocate.
Coinciding with the administration’s coddling of Iran was its spurning of Israel. In the administration’s view, supporting the trigger-happy Israelis could very well precipitate regional war. That’s why it has sought daylight in the relationship. In May 2021, the administration pressured Israel to accept a cease-fire, ending a brief war with Hamas. It sent a $235 million aid package to the Palestinians, $150 million of which went to UNRWA, whose employees were later found to have participated in the October 7 attacks. It also reportedly unfroze over $360 million for the Palestinian Authority in contravention of counter-terrorism law. Biden also declined to invite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House until July 2024 in a flagrant diplomatic snub. Besides these anti-Israel measures, the administration privately urged the Israelis not to take military action against Iran’s nuclear program. There needed to be de-escalation no matter what.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, himself a high priest of the de-escalation church, espoused its tenets even before this latest war. He outlined the administration’s “goal of regional integration and de-escalation” at AIPAC’s policy summit in June 2023. As for the two-state solution, which Blinken called “vital,” he advocated “de-escalation” as well as no “unilateral measures that increase tensions” in an implicit criticism of so-called Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Yet Yahya Sinwar and Hamas undertook the unilateral measure of all unilateral measures in launching their surprise attack on October 7. Washington’s desire for de-escalation had the reverse effect.
October 7 temporarily snapped the administration out of its stupor. It got its response mostly right in the attack’s immediate aftermath. It sent two carrier battle groups to the Mediterranean as a deterrent to Iran. Biden had a one-word message—“don’t”—for the Iranians lest they attack Israel in its moment of vulnerability. “The United States has Israel’s back,” he said on October 10. His administration rightly feared a regional conflagration and deployed the hard power needed to prevent one.
But the administration’s support for Israel lasted little more than a few weeks. “How Israel does this matters,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on November 2, just a few days after the IDF began major offensive operations in Gaza. What followed were increasingly critical statements of Israel. Biden called the IDF’s campaign in Gaza “indiscriminate” and “over the top.” On March 3, Harris decried “the immense scale of suffering in Gaza.” Blinken, two months later, noted the “horrible loss of life of innocent civilians” and practically blamed Israel for all the damage in Gaza. This harsh rhetoric served a purpose. The administration was forcing the Israelis into accepting a permanent cease-fire. It wanted an end to the fighting, much more than an Israeli victory.
If the administration were honest about the war, it would lay the blame wholly at the feet of Hamas and Iran. It doesn’t do anything of the sort. Biden, who reportedly has called Netanyahu a “bad f–king guy,” has leveled many more verbal broadsides against the Israelis than Hamas. His State of the Union address was perhaps the most anti-Israel speech ever given by a U.S. president and implied that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza was Israel’s fault. Harris has done the same in calling for an end to the fighting. “Now is the time to get a cease-fire deal,” she said on the campaign stump to anti-Israel protesters. Every time she and other administration officials do this, they imply that Israel is to blame for the breakdown in negotiations. They’re loath to put any pressure on Hamas, the party responsible for the war.
All the while, the de-escalation dream has persisted. “It remains a central locus of our strategy… [to] get on a path of diplomacy and de-escalation,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said of the Middle East crisis in January. The administration had little to show for its efforts. After the temporary November 2023 ceasefire, which Hamas accepted because the IDF was pummeling it into oblivion, the administration failed to broker a second one. Sinwar recognized the subsequent U.S. pressure on Israel and rejected subsequent proposals. The administration also failed to de-escalate other Middle Eastern crises. The Houthis, whose assaults have all but eradicated container shipping in the Red Sea, have now attacked Israel directly. Hezbollah has attacked the Golan Heights and other places in northern Israel.
Most of all, Iran is emboldened to strike. In April, it launched an unprecedented drone and missile assault against Israel in what could only be called an act of war. Yet the administration’s response to Iran’s escalation was to call on Israel to de-escalate. “Take the win,” Biden reportedly told Israel after the attack. In the administration’s view, taking the win meant not retaliating against the mullahs. How can a country win on the battlefield without hitting its enemy?