What’s Left of Biden Admin’s Foreign Policy?

Police officer walks near a destroyed police station in Sderot, Israel, on Oct. 8, 2023. (Amir Levy/Getty Images)

Commentary

As I write this, more than 700 Israelis lie dead from the brutal surprise attack launched from the Gaza Strip by the Iranian-funded terror group Hamas last week.

Thousands of rockets were launched against multiple targets, some as far north as Tel Aviv.

Hundreds of Palestinian terrorists arrived by paraglider, in trucks, by motorcycle, and in other vehicles.

Thousands have been injured; more than a hundred (including children and the elderly) have been kidnapped and dragged back to the Gaza Strip to an uncertain fate.

Those numbers will surely climb as Israel, now in a state of war, retaliates.

The Palestinian Blitzkrieg undertaken by Hamas, which quickly made inroads as far as 15 miles from the Gaza border into Israel, claimed another important casualty far from its primary base of operation.

I mean the foreign policy of the Biden administration, which is now just as much a smoldering ruin as the bombed-out buildings.

At the end of September, Jake Sullivan, an eager Russian collusion fabricator during the Trump administration and now President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, said that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

Then there was the bulletin, issued hours after the attack began by the U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs, a diplomatic post opened by the Biden administration when it resumed with the Palestinian government soon after taking office.

“We unequivocally condemn the attack of Hamas terrorists and the loss of life that has incurred,” the post on X, formerly known as Twitter, reads. “We urge all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing.”

“All sides”?

The post quickly disappeared in the face of widespread ridicule and outrage.

Then there was speculation about where the weapons came from.

A Hamas spokesman gave thanks to Iran for its support of the attack: perhaps the rockets, the cash, the guns.

Iran does seem flush these days.

How did that happen?

On Sept. 11, President Biden celebrated his newfound friendship with Iran by releasing $6 billion in frozen funds.

That can buy a lot of guns and ammunition.

President Biden went on to condemn the attack by Hamas.

But a headline from the satire website Babylon Bee went viral: “White House Issues Condemnation Of Attack Biden Funded.”

And then they twisted the knife in the body of the story.

“'The Biden Administration denounces the terrible atrocities being committed with the six billion dollars President Biden gave Hamas [via Iran],’ said Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken. ‘We are deeply saddened by the deaths caused by every missile purchased with money from the Biden administration.’”

Ouch.

Donald Trump was of the same mind, although, characteristically, he phrased his outrage more directly.

“Can you believe that Crooked Joe Biden is giving $6 Billion to the terrorist regime in Iran?” he wrote on Truth Social when the deal was announced.

“That money [will] be used for terrorism all over the Middle East, and, indeed, the World. ... To pay for hostages will lead to kidnapping, ransom, and blackmail against Americans across the globe. I freed many dozens of our people from various unfriendly countries and never paid a dime!”

The situation in Israel is obviously fluid, and many questions remain.

High on the list of questions concerns the gigantic intelligence failure, in the United States as well as in Israel, that allowed such a large, coordinated attack to be planned and deployed without getting picked up.

We pay billions of dollars to our intelligence services.

These days they seem more interested in claiming that Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” was a Russian plant than in exposing our real enemies.

Mark Levin cut to the chase and summed up the situation with his customary aplomb.

“Trump cut off funds to the Palestinians,” he wrote, “unleashed unprecedented peace initiatives in the Abraham Accords, killed the Iran deal, was starving the Iranian regime of resources with crushing sanctions, and Biden not only reversed it all, including funding the Palestinians and Iran, but undermined Netanyahu at every turn, refused to meet with him, demanded that Israel make more concessions to the Palestinians.”

True, all true.

As is Mr. Levin’s concluding observation: “Appeasement and worse has consequences.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.