Biden risking new wars with Iran ‘diplomacy’ — and our Middle East allies know it

Excerpt

“It’s time to end this forever war” — those were President Biden’s words as he issued the order for U.S. troops to withdraw from Afghanistan. America’s chaotic withdrawal certainly fulfilled a campaign promise, but it was foreign policy malpractice. The poorly executed exit, the rapid Taliban takeover, and Washington’s abandonment of its longtime allies to the fate of jihadist death squads was like blood in the water for cynical autocrats, revisionist powers, and rogue regimes.

Look no further than Ukraine: Vladimir Putin understood that American retrenchment amounted to lack of appetite for confrontation.

Iran also saw opportunity: The clerical regime continues to fleece American diplomats at the nuclear negotiations in Vienna while assisting the Houthi militia’s violent campaign against oil producers Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, further exacerbating the energy crisis that spread across the globe. The recent strike on the compound hosting the American consulate in Erbil demonstrated that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) no longer even bothers to work through Iraqi militias for plausible deniability.

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. A former Pentagon official, he teaches classes on terrorism for the FBI and on security, politics, religion and history for U.S. and NATO military units. He has a Ph.D. in history from Yale University. Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is senior vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies (@FDD); follow him on Twitter @JSchanzer.