It’s the Attacks on U.S. Soldiers and Interests, Stupid

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

 

As one U.S. official bloodlessly told Politico Pentagon reporter Lara Seligman on Wednesday, the two who died and the six who were injured on a ship in the Red Sea by a Houthi missile “speaks to how the Houthis are terrorizing international commercial shipping.” That’s one way to put it. Another would be that the ongoing, sophisticated campaign of violence and piracy being waged by an Iranian proxy speaks not only to the terror sect’s resolve but Joe Biden’s lack thereof.

 

It wasn’t until early January, following months of sustained attacks on international shipping and allied naval assets off the coast of Yemen that the Biden administration finally summoned the requisite gumption to take the fight to the Houthis. Since then, the U.S. has conducted periodic airstrikes on Houthi targets, both in response to the terror sect’s aggression and preemptively. Biden’s goal of “deterring Houthi attacks in the Red Sea” has not been achieved. Indeed, the flurry of intensifying activity out of Houthi-controlled Yemen suggests the organization lacks neither the weapons it needs to disrupt shipping in the Gulf of Aden nor the willingness to court reprisals from the U.S. and its allies.

 

The Houthis’ all but unchecked terror campaign in the Red Sea coincided with an eruption of attacks on U.S. troops occupying positions in Iraq and Syria by Iran-controlled Shiite militias. The dozens and dozens of assaults on Americans in the Middle East culminated in one especially successful attack on a U.S.-occupied Jordanian outpost in late January, killing three service personnel and wounding 34 more. That and other similar attacks compelled the Biden administration to mount calibrated, retaliatory assaults on the responsible Shiite militias. That seems to have satisfied the Biden administration.

 

“Iran has made a concerted effort to rein in militias in Iraq and Syria after the United States retaliated with a series of airstrikes,” the New York Times reported in late February. That report restates what has already been established — that elements within the Iranian regime desperately fear a direct confrontation with the United States — and became keen to de-escalate tensions once the Biden administration threatened direct retaliation against Iranian assets. If Tehran is pulling back on the reins that restrain their proxy forces in Iraq and Syria, they have loosened them on the Houthis. Both the Biden administration and the Iranian regime seem committed to the fiction that these are all distinct theaters of combat featuring entirely autonomous combatants. But that is not true.

 

There is a political dimension to this misconception — one that becomes hard to ignore when surveying the trajectory of the upcoming presidential election. The head-to-head polls testing a rematch between Biden and Donald Trump were largely static from November 2022 until the late fall of last year, with both candidates polling roughly even. It was only after October that Trump began to carve out for himself a statistically significant lead in the polls. Democrats are apt to attribute Biden’s troubles to disquiet among Democrats, who have soured on both Israel and Biden’s support for its post-10/7 war against Hamas. But the October 7 massacre didn’t just inaugurate that war; it was the event that precipitated Iran’s region-wide campaign against the West and its allies.

 

Hamas, the Houthis, and the Shiite militias all embarked on their terroristic campaign in October, to which Joe Biden responded lackadaisically. His administration explicitly broadcasts its fear that too robust a reprisal risks the prospect of “escalation” in the Middle East. Why wouldn’t Americans recoil at a commander in chief who appears willing to tolerate attacks on U.S. soldiers and assaults on expressions of American hegemony, such as its guarantee of maritime security, if the alternative involves punishing a longtime American foe like Iran?

 

The American press has little time and energy for that. The only foreign-policy crisis that registers with the media is the one involving Israel and the profound discomfort its campaign to neutralize Hamas has imposed on the center-left intelligentsia. But at the same time, no one can seem to figure out why voters believe Biden looks “weak” relative to Trump. It must be the border crisis, about which he seems incapable of doing much; persistently high prices, which Biden cannot address save his distaste for the snack makers who are making you pay more for fewer potato chips; his age-related enfeeblement that seems to be getting worse by the hour. It’s all that, but it’s more. Biden looks “weak” because he is weak — he projects weakness and invites attacks from our enemies as a result.

 

American voters are not apt to focus on foreign policy when talking to pollsters, but foreign policy matters. Joe Biden’s job-approval rating sank underwater with his botched and bloody withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, and it never recovered. Biden’s head-to-head polls against Trump crossed into dangerously negative territory with the onset of Iran’s proxy war against the United States and its partners. That, too, may soon become set in stone.