His faculties notwithstanding, there is still only one commander in chief at a time. President Biden needs to start acting like it.
Politico’s Laura Seligman and Alexander Ward produced what, by rights, should be a bombshell report on Wednesday.
Their sources in the Pentagon are vexed by the growing recklessness displayed by Iranian-proxy militia groups as they rain rockets and drones down on U.S. and Israeli assets throughout the region, and they’re annoyed by the Biden administration’s lethargic response to those attacks. Over the weekend, an “hourslong assault” on commercial shipping in the Red Sea in which the USS Carney took part represented a significant “escalation,” as reported by the Associated Press. Accordingly, the Pentagon has drawn up plans for a potential response, but the president has not seen those plans. Why? Because the functionaries subordinate to the president are afraid of what Joe Biden might do with them.
Per Politico:
In multiple high-level meetings this week, the Pentagon has neither briefed President Joe Biden on options to strike Houthi targets nor recommended that he do so, two of the officials said. All were granted anonymity to detail sensitive internal deliberations. . . . Senior officials across the government are also worried that a major strike on Houthi positions could derail progress on another Middle East conflict: U.S. and U.N.-led efforts to broker another cease-fire between Saudi forces and the militants in Yemen, according to a fifth U.S. official and a lawmaker.
What a dereliction. The sovereign assets of the United States and the soldiers who support America’s missions overseas are under attack. The free transit of global maritime trade is threatened and, with it, American hegemony that preserves the post–Cold War status quo. But public servants subordinate to the president are apparently more apprehensive about what could happen if the president responds to those attacks than what could befall Americans abroad if he does not. And what outcome has them so trepidatious? Apparently, the terrifying prospect that an item on progressives’ policy wish list might go unfulfilled.
Left-wing politicians, ex–Obama officials, and progressive ideologues have long lobbied influential Democrats against supporting Saudi Arabia in its long-running conflict with the Iran-backed militia occupying Yemen. “In addition to making a war with Iran more likely, the conflict in Yemen is also imperiling tens of millions of the most vulnerable people on earth through disease, starvation, and violence,” read a 2019 missive authored by Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Ben Rhodes, among others, in an effort to convince Congress to cut off Riyadh.
Their objections were sufficient to convince Biden to freeze arms sales to Saudi Arabia and revoke the Houthis’ designation as a foreign terrorist organization — two of several slights toward the kingdom that contributed to its drift into China’s arms. Now, with ample evidence that the Houthi militia is not only violent and terroristic but aggressively anti-American (as if more evidence were necessary), the utopians under Biden aren’t revising their opinion of the Houthis. Rather, their biggest concern is that Biden might expose their naïveté amid a volley of guided munition strikes on Yemeni targets.
Joe Biden isn’t the most effective manager, and his presidency is circling the drain. But it’s also true that the president has been profoundly ill served by his subordinates, few of whom seem to recognize that they are only public servants. They leak to the press. They lead him into legal and political cul-de-sacs. They write open letters protesting his leadership. And now, they want to deprive the president of military options designed to keep American soldiers safe lest his response to kinetic attacks on Americans makes them look bad.
Maybe Biden is simply incapable of retaking command of his own administration. But the president’s faculties notwithstanding, there is still only one commander in chief at a time. Biden needs to start acting like it.