Iran’s Test of Biden Is an Existential Threat to His Presidency

By Noah Rothman

Monday, January 29, 2024

 

In his latest analysis for the New York Times, David Sanger vaulted off the news of an attack on an American outpost in Jordan by an Iranian proxy militia — killing three U.S. service personnel and injuring more than 30 — to fret about the obligations that attack imposed on the commander in chief of the armed forces.

 

Sanger speculates ruefully about the options before Joe Biden, all of which “range from the unsatisfying to the highly risky” — eventualities Biden has done his best to avoid. Indeed, that avoidance raised the stakes of Iran’s post-10/7 campaign of provocation. The president is now compelled to favor an approach on the “risky” end of the spectrum if his goal is to “restore deterrence” by compelling Tehran to back down. But retaliating against Iran for sponsoring American bloodshed is a low-reward proposition for Biden, Sanger seems to suggest, because Iran has cleverly covered its tracks.

 

While striking Iranian assets directly has “undeniable political appeal, especially at the start of an election year,” Sanger conceded, “it is not yet clear who, exactly, Mr. Biden aims to deter.” After all, there’s “no evidence” that Iran “calls the shots” that its proxy forces eventually take. Iran’s cultivation of terrorist proxies throughout the region is not without a “downside” or two. Among them is the fact that “Tehran will be blamed for everything the militias do, even acts the Iranians believe are too provocative.”

 

Sanger is correct that there is little conclusive evidence that Iran has given the “green light” for any of the attacks its surrogates have executed on and since 10/7 (although the proposition does not entirely lack substantiating evidence). Nevertheless, in the author’s estimation, Iran has boxed Biden into a fraught set of circumstances. “In the middle of an election, with two wars underway, he needs to put Iran’s sponsorship of attacks on Americans out of business — without starting another war,” Sanger concludes.

 

This is reflective of the logic that led the administration to ill-advisedly broadcast its prohibitive fear of antagonizing Iran. As the American dead and wounded suggest, that strategy is a failure. It must be abandoned. Biden is now obliged to respond dramatically to this deadly attack on U.S. forces. If he does, he would not be “starting another war.” He would be reimposing sobriety on an adversarial rogue state that has been engaged in an unreciprocated war against the U.S. and its allies for months.

 

Sanger’s copy is weighed down with his fear of the risks, both the geopolitical and conventionally political, that Biden courts if he finally gets serious about the aggression Americans in uniform have faced for months. But Sanger devotes little attention to the risks of inaction — or a response that is so transparently calibrated as to fail to communicate anything to Iran other than that it can continue to test American resolve.

 

It might come as a surprise to the New York Times, but Joe Biden’s handling of the Middle East is deeply unpopular not only among radical college leftists who want nothing more than for the president to throw Israel to the wolves. Pick your national-security crisis — from Russian revanchism to Chinese irridentism to Israel’s war against Hamas: Biden trails Donald Trump by ten or more points when voters are asked whom they trust more to handle those crises. The president practiced dithering for weeks on end as drones and rockets rained down on U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria and while the Houthi terrorist sect violently closed off the Bab el-Mandeb Strait to commerce. That probably did little to convince voters that Biden was up to the challenges America faces abroad. He is behind the eight ball and needs to start acting like it.

 

Inside the bubble in which Biden’s political career is slowly suffocating, executing a kinetic operation against Iranian assets risks further alienating Democratic base voters while weakening his pitch to swing voters that his administration is less chaotic than his predecessor’s. Outside the bubble, Americans are confronted with chaos every day — often in new and terrifying ways. The White House is right to surmise that core Democratic voting blocs will look upon a determinative retaliatory strike on Iranian assets with skepticism and apprehension. That’s not how the critical mass of voters whom Biden will need to attract in November are likely to see it. At least, that’s not how they viewed the decapitation strike that neutralized Qasem Soleimani in early 2020 following a series of similar Iran-sponsored attacks on U.S. service personnel.

 

Americans don’t like seeing men and women in uniform killed in combat. They do like to see those who are responsible for those attacks — both those who pull the trigger and those who train and fund their killers — punished. The president must repair his image with those voters today before their declining confidence in the president’s ability to keep Americans safe hardens into an utter lack of faith. The political risks to Biden if a justified retaliatory strike triggers a regional conflagration must be weighed against the risks that he courts with his conspicuous commitment to narrow, tailored, and oddly belated responses to Iranian aggression.

 

An old cynical maxim maintains that voters don’t care about foreign policy unless and until one of two things occurs: either a crisis abroad humiliates the United States, or a hot conflict begins sending Americans home in caskets. The ongoing region-wide conflict with Iran has now achieved both of those conditions. The same circumstances confronted Biden following his slapdash withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, a disaster from which Biden’s job-approval ratings never recovered. Iran’s actions and Biden’s response to them will either wipe that bitter memory away or remind voters of it at the most politically inopportune moment. The president faces not just a test of America’s resolve but the viability of his presidency, whether his credulous allies know it or not.