By Noah Rothman
Thursday, September 19, 2024
Of all the straightforward questions Kamala
Harris dodged in her debate with Donald Trump, and there were many, the one
focused on her muddled outlook toward the war in the Gaza Strip might have been
the starkest. If there is “not a deal in the making” and President Joe Biden
has been unable to “break through the stalemate,” ABC News anchor Linsey Davis
asked Harris, how would she secure a cease-fire between Israel and the terror
group Hamas?
Davis might as well have been interrogating an inanimate
object. “What we know is that this war must end,” Harris replied, “and the way
it will end is we need a cease-fire deal, and we need the hostages out.” If the
vice president had ever thought about Hamas’s rejection of five distinct peace
overtures from the Biden administration and its counterparts, she kept her
conclusions to herself. Instead, Harris pitched Americans on the notion that
there will be a cease-fire only because there must be a cease-fire. And when
that goal is somehow achieved, “we must have a two-state solution where we can
rebuild Gaza.” Those shibboleths appeared to satisfy ABC’s moderators, but
anyone who’s following the conflict in any detail was probably less impressed.
Turning to another war, Russia’s campaign of conquest and
subjugation of Ukraine, ABC anchor David Muir pressed Donald Trump to clarify
his views. “You have said you would solve this war in 24 hours. . . . How
exactly would you do that?” he asked, adding, “Do you want Ukraine to win this
war?” The simple yes-or-no question produced neither. Instead, Trump replied
with a meandering tirade that had something to do with the “fake numbers”
around Europe’s collective contributions to Ukraine’s defense. Nevertheless, he
recommitted to his pledge to put an end to the war in Europe “before I even
become president” by simply sitting down with Russia’s and Ukraine’s leaders
and hammering out a deal. Much like Harris, Trump supposes that there will be a
deal only because there must be a deal. After all, he warned, “you have
millions of people dead, and it’s only getting worse, and it could lead to
World War III.”
Unnervingly enough, one or the other of these people will
be elected to serve as commander in chief of the armed forces, but neither of
them seems willing to acknowledge the world as it is, preferring instead one
that their imaginations have conjured.
***
Hamas will not consent to its own destruction
and submit itself to Israeli justice. Moreover, it has no interest in a
“two-state solution.” It does not seek to exist in cooperative harmony with the
Palestinian factions that govern the West Bank, much less with Israel. Consequently,
there will be no permanent cease-fire in the Gaza Strip until Hamas is
neutralized, because Hamas’s destruction is the objective desired by the
Israeli people.
This is all rather inconvenient. Sure, it is in America’s
strategic interests to see this State Department–designated terrorist group
defeated — an outcome that would take one of Iran’s most lethal pieces off the
geopolitical chessboard. But the far-left fringes of the Democratic Party’s
base are besotted with the notion that Israel is an apartheid state, a
human-rights abuser, and the enemy of civilizational norms. Harris dares not
acknowledge the realities that have brought the Middle East to the brink lest
she offend that faction and risk its ire. So she retreats into the unreality
she and they prefer.
Trump faces a parallel situation. A vocal but
unrepresentative contingent of right-leaning activists have convinced
themselves that the victim of Vladimir Putin’s war was asking for it. Ukraine’s
selfish desire to throw off the Russian yoke and integrate economically with
Europe was too provocative, they tell themselves. Ukraine’s NATO-accession
plan, which stalled out at the Bucharest Summit in April 2008, somehow
represented an intolerable threat to Russian national security, they maintain.
What was Moscow to do but stage a second invasion of Ukraine, slaughter its
people, abscond with and reeducate its children, and erase the Ukrainian
language from the face of the earth? Really, who wouldn’t?
Ukraine, too, is America’s partner. Indeed, its desire to
fold itself into the American-led world order is what the Kremlin seeks to
prevent. It is reasonable to expect presidential aspirants to value and
preserve that order against external threats — even to build on it, as both
Trump and Biden did by presiding over the admittance of four new NATO members
(none of which provoked Putin to arms) in the space of eight years. That
proposition might appeal to most voters, but it is anathema to the fringes that
have hijacked American politics.
Failure in Ukraine could have severe consequences. A
cessation of hostilities that leaves Moscow in control of the industrial
regions in eastern Ukraine would leave the country more dependent on the West
and more vulnerable to future Russian attacks. It would unnerve America’s NATO
allies on the alliance’s frontier, some of whom would prepare to defend their
own borders with or without America’s support or even input. But just as Harris
dares not offend the sensibilities of some of the most aberrant elements of the
American political landscape by backing Israel’s mission, Trump prefers to
dance with the eccentrics who brung him.
Harris and Trump are beholden to remarkably similar
fictions. “He’s got nuclear weapons,” Trump said of Putin in the last
presidential debate. “Nobody ever thinks about that. And eventually, uh, maybe
he’ll use them.” A paralyzing fear of Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling is
precisely what led the Biden administration to mishandle the crisis Moscow
inaugurated in February 2022. “There was a moment in the fall of 2022 when I
think there was a genuine risk of the potential use of tactical nuclear
weapons,” CIA director William Burns confessed at a recent event alongside the
U.K.’s intelligence chief. Indeed, throughout the course of Russia’s war,
Biden-administration officials cited a variety of inviolable Russian red lines
that they had wholly imagined. The U.S. couldn’t possibly supply Ukraine with
long-range rocket and artillery systems, tanks and half-tracks, fixed-wing
aircraft, or cluster munitions. How would Russia respond? Only when Ukraine’s
position deteriorated did Biden relent. And when he did, he found that Russia’s
threats were a hollow scare tactic.
Even today, the Biden White House hems and haws when
asked to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S. ordnance on targets inside
Russia from which Moscow stages its invasion. Russian territory is sacrosanct,
they had long assumed. But when Ukraine invaded Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod
Oblasts, Putin downplayed the incursions lest he unnerve his domestic
constituents. Somehow, that failed to produce a eureka moment for either the
Biden White House or its chief Republican critic. Only when Russia finally began
to retake its own territory did Biden see the value of lifting restrictions on
Ukraine’s use of U.S. weapons platforms — which is to say, too late.
To his credit, Trump is far more clear-eyed than Harris
has been about Israel’s virtues as a reliable U.S. partner. That might have
something to do with the Abraham Accords: the normalization of diplomatic
relations between Israel and its Sunni Arab neighbors, which succeeded only by
the Trump administration’s cleverly pushing the intractable Palestinian issue
to the back burner. The outbreak of war arrested the tempo of those agreements,
and they will not resume in the absence of an Israeli victory over its
Iran-backed adversary. After all, what were the Abraham Accords but a regional
security framework designed to check Iran and the terrorist groups in orbit
around the Islamic republic? Why would Israel’s Arab neighbors proceed toward
normalization with Israel if Jerusalem isn’t the strong horse they thought it
was?
Harris and her fellow Democrats seem to prefer a world in
which Iran can be bribed and cajoled into abandoning its nuclear ambitions, and
its genocidal terrorist proxies tamed by integrating them into the community of
responsible state and non-state actors. Honestly, it sounds like a lovely
dream. But when deterrence has broken down, it is not restored by the offering
of carrots alone. Sticks come first. If Harris is blind to that reality, it’s a
truth to which Trump, too, is allergic.
Trump is the first to tout his justified and laudable
decision to order the 2020 air strike that eliminated Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani. But that successful attack was preceded
by long stretches of dithering and inaction from the president in the face of
naked Iranian aggression.
In the months preceding that operation, Iran had pirated
foreign-flagged vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. It had engaged in
“sophisticated and coordinated” strikes on oil tankers. It had downed a
multimillion-dollar American surveillance drone over international waters. And
it had executed a daring direct attack on Saudi soil, targeting two major
petroleum-processing facilities. Trump absorbed it all. Why? “In the days
leading up to this moment, he had talked with Tucker Carlson, the Fox News
host, who reminded him that he had come to office to get out of endless wars,
not start a new one,” the New York Times reported at the time. Trump
blinked, and Iran took its cues. Soon enough, Tehran-backed Shiite militias
began targeting U.S. positions in Iraq with rocket and artillery fire, and one
of those attacks resulted in the death of a U.S. contractor. To this, Trump
finally responded, albeit only against those militias. Predictably, Iran was
not deterred. In short order, Tehran orchestrated a mob attack on the American
embassy in Baghdad in which well-armed rioters breached the outer perimeter.
Only then did Trump get serious about the danger posed by Iran, and only after
the Soleimani strike did Iran draw down its attacks on U.S. interests.
This saga should have imparted some lessons about how
authoritarian revisionists respond when confronted by Western military power.
It seems they went unlearned.
***
The next president will inherit a Middle East
defined once again by an undeterred Iran. American soldiers are defending
themselves against a campaign of attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria.
Three U.S. service personnel died in a January attack on an outpost in Jordan.
The American naval assets parked off the coast of Yemen are under constant
assault by the Iran-backed Houthi terrorist sect, which “has turned into the
most intense running sea battle the Navy has faced since World War II,”
according to the Associated Press. U.S. naval assets are patrolling off the
coast of Lebanon, bottling up the well-armed Hezbollah terrorist group that
Israel will have to disarm or else functionally cede the territory in its
north, which Israeli citizens evacuated after the October 7 massacre.
The next president will also be bequeathed a war on the
European continent to which NATO states have responded by boosting their
military presence along the alliance’s periphery. At summits in Madrid and
Vilnius, the alliance agreed to scale up its multinational battle groups to
brigade size and augment integrated regional-defense plans. NATO’s European and
North American members have already committed vast sums of capital and prestige
to Ukraine’s defense — investments that cannot be simply withdrawn. They will
either generate a return or they will be lost.
The distinctions the Trump and Harris campaigns are wont
to emphasize between Russia and Iran have proven no obstacle to these
countries’ close coordination. On at least two occasions in the lead-up to
October 7, 2023, the Kremlin welcomed high-level delegations from Hamas for
consultations. Moscow has maintained warm relations with Iran’s proxies for
years, but that relationship was operationalized amid Russia’s all-out effort
to save Tehran’s cat’s-paw, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, from his own people’s wrath.
Russia contributes to Iran’s objectives in the Middle East, and Iran repays the
favor by transferring drones, helicopters, radar systems, and ballistic
missiles for use on Ukraine’s battlefields.
Meanwhile, China, which has embarked on an increasingly
reckless campaign of naval adventurism targeting Philippine merchant vessels in
the South China Sea, provides both Iran and Russia with weapons and dual-use
materials and conducts joint military exercises with their armies and navies.
Last year, a flotilla of Chinese and Russian vessels unnerved American war
planners by descending on Alaska’s Aleutian Islands in a menacing formation —
an approach that compelled the U.S. to dispatch four destroyers and a P-8
Poseidon surveillance aircraft.
China is sending all the signals that preceded Russia’s
and Iran’s escalatory behavior, but neither Trump nor Harris is especially
receptive to them. One relies on the magic of trade barriers and tariffs to
tame the Chinese dragon. The other promises to cut Beijing off from access to
U.S. technology — which might further incentivize China to lash out — while
doing little to expand America’s blue-water fleet and failing to arm to the
teeth our front-line partners in the Pacific.
With two hot wars on as many continents and a third
looming on the horizon, these are sobering times. And yet, owing mostly to
their parochial political ends, the Republican and Democratic presidential
campaigns prefer to draw immaterial contrasts between America’s adversaries and
to pick and choose which American interests they plan to defend.
Kamala Harris cannot say that she wants America’s most
stalwart ally in the Middle East to win its war against Iran-backed terrorists.
Donald Trump will not say that he wants a Western-facing country, which is
being dismembered by one of America’s oldest enemies, to win its righteous war
of self-defense. Both campaigns pay lip service to the need to confront China
without leveling with the American people about what it will take to achieve
our objectives. These may be serious times, but they have not generated
commensurate seriousness in our politics. Pray that it doesn’t take an epochal
disaster for America to come to its senses.
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