by Victor Davis Hanson
Somehow the United States ended up this summer with no engaged president and an absent vice president who avoids the missing president and is frantically repudiating everything she co-owned the last three years.
The world was already confused over how President Joe Biden was apparently declared by unnamed Democratic insiders and donors unfit and unable to continue as their presidential candidate — as if he were a dethroned Third-World usurper.
It further wondered how those who staged his removal had no problem allowing him, in his debilitated state, to continue as America’s commander-in-chief until January 20, 2025. They demonstrated their priorities that focus on retaining power, not the welfare of the nation or the will of over 14 million Biden primary voters.
Vice President Kamala Harris, until Biden’s forced abdication, was judged by these same backroom fixers as too incompetent to ever be commander-in-chief and thus for three years a good reason why Biden apparently was not forced out earlier.
Now nominal Vice President Harris is on the campaign trail nonstop, while Biden has taken the most vacation time off and worked the shortest workweek in presidential memory.
The world again wonders who is in charge, what they believe, who is a friend, and who is an enemy. Harris is busy trying to get elected on three premises: disowning her prior co-ownership of what was mostly a disastrous Biden term and certainly no recommendation for reelection; reinventing her affluent radical past and present as moderate and working-class; and keeping absolutely silent about any detailed agenda or policy plan for governance as president.
Our rivals and opponents abroad cannot decide which is better for their own anti-American agendas — a derelict and absent Biden-Harris or dealing with a cognitively challenged Biden and a linguistically loopy Harris?
So, again, who or what now governs America?
Is it Biden again at the beach or closing up shop at noon for his nap and early bedtime?
Or is it Vice President Harris, far from the White House, out campaigning and confused over who she really is or wants to be, what, if anything, she plans on doing if elected president, and how to avoid any unscripted moment?
Or are our real rulers the stealth cabal of Democratic grandees and billionaire donors who arranged the Biden presidency by forcing out his 2020 primary rivals, staged the conspiratorial silence about his real disabilities for well over three years, ambushed him, and forced him off the Democratic ticket, and are now frantically reinventing Kamala Harris as capable and centrist when just a few months ago they had written her off as incompetent and a hopeless wannabe California radical?
As a result, a confused but also encouraged world of enemies watches the listless United States and wonders whether to try something stupid.
In this widening vacuum, lots of foreign opportunists, outright enemies, and nihilists are seizing the day — on the assurance that Biden is not a lame duck, but a lame, lame duck, and Harris is a near functionary in search of an identity and an idea.
The Houthis, a ragtag cabal of terrorists who hijacked Yemen after shaking off a few prior Biden “precision” retaliatory strikes, now “own” the Red Sea. They just hit a Greek-flagged oil tanker that is now adrift and polluting the Red Sea. It serves as their warning for commercial ships to keep clear of their mare nostrum.
The Houthis expect neither a Western nor an American response to ensure safe transit in and out of the southern Mediterranean by the world’s commercial fleet. Apparently, they believe that they are so backward, and their drones are so cheap and simple that the top-heavy U.S. cannot afford to hit their ad hoc launches with sophisticated, multimillion-dollar, and often misapplied weapons. And they are probably right.
Indeed, under Biden-Harris, the world has now lost free and safe transit in the Red Sea, the Black Sea, the South China Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Will the Caribbean or mid-Atlantic be next? The military is short thousands of troops, the merchant marines idling ships.
Our NATO enemy/“ally” Turkey — when it is not threatening to send missiles against fellow NATO member Greece, bragging about once again ethnic cleansing Armenians, leveling more warnings to Cyprus, bombing the Kurds, colluding with the Russians and Chinese, trying to veto Finnish and Swedish NATO membership, or claiming US nuclear weapons based in Turkey are virtually its own — apparently has created such an anti-American climate that its pro-Erdogan street thugs feel they can beat up visiting American sailors, docking at Izmir to help aid the Turkish navy.
Not a peep follows from the White House. If it had, President Recep Erdogan would have leveled one of his accustomed unhinged responses.
Hamas just murdered more of its Israeli hostages, among them an American citizen.
Now non-candidate Biden is apparently still more worried about 250,000 Muslim voters in Michigan (who profess more solidarity with Hamas than lament the murder of a fellow citizen) than US interests in the Middle East. He customarily and matter-of-factly issued one of his empty editorials before returning to form by performance art blasting Israel.
In Biden’s world, our closest and only democratic ally in the Middle East is at fault because it will not, this election year, give constant concessions to the murderous Hamas clique. Biden-Harris forget that Hamas started the current war by butchering 1,200 Israelis at a time of peace, scrambled back to its subterranean labyrinth with over 250 hostages, hid their terrorist killers under schools, hospitals, and mosques, murdered any who were about to be rescued by Israeli forces, and promised to kill more if rescue attempts continue.
The Biden-Harris messaging seems simple: pro-Western, civilized, and consensually governed nations are rational and so listen to the U.S. and therefore should be leveraged and often punished for rationality; anti-American, medieval, and theocratic terrorist cabals do not and therefore should be appeased and exempted from criticism or retaliation given their lawlessness.
Normally, when asked about foreign threats to harm Americans or their interests, Biden gives one of his accustomed blowhard, one-word threats, “Don’t!” That empty and tired banality is now interpreted abroad as zero consequences will follow when you harm America. As a general rule, an animated Biden is far more likely to threaten to beat up or go after Trump than Hamas or Iran.
Harris has been mum — other than her usual on the one hand/on the other hand vacuity. Her vice presidential candidate running mate, the usually frenetic and loquacious Tim Walz, when asked directly about the murder of an American hostage, similarly goes mum — and simply waved off the question and turned away. Walz seems as terrified as Harris of any unrehearsed utterance, as if he knows only his silence masks his foolery.
Brazil, as was warned by many, is heading toward full-scale Latin American communism of the Venezuela/Nicaragua/Cuba sort. It is now waging a censorship war against Elon Musk with the tacit approval of the Biden-Harris consortium — for the crime of turning the former useful Twitter leftwing and censored megaphone into a global free speech pavilion.
Ukraine has now been inside Mother Russia for weeks, which is strategically understandable but geo-strategically dangerous against a nuclear hyperpower run by a ruthless dictator. Biden has no clue what the U.S. is doing other than supplying enough arms to Ukraine not to lose but more than enough to trigger a wider theater war. Ask Biden and Harris what the U.S. strategy is on Ukraine, and one will mumble incomprehensibly, the other, if unguarded, plunge into a circular word salad about the “art of diplomacy” or “democratic fragility.”
Iran is more afraid of an Israeli response than U.S. threats.
Or is it worse than that? Does the theocracy now rely on Biden-Harris to restrain any Israeli retaliation for the tens of thousands of rockets launched by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran against the Jewish state.?
All Biden-Harris had to do was continue the Trump protocol of warning Iran to stay out of the conflict. Instead, it de facto greenlighted the Iranian supply chain to Hamas and Hezbollah and turned all of them loose to murder.
In truth, US foreign policy toward Iran is the resumption of the Obama-era embrace of the supposed underdog Shiite/Persian counterweight to Gulf moderates and democratic Israel. Biden-Harris cares not a whit whether Iran goes nuclear and might even in their warped Ben-Rhodes/Barack Obama-era imbecility tacitly support such nuclearization to “rein in” the Jewish state.
Mexico’s outgoing “president,” Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has now unabashedly also gone full communist. As he preps the way for his even harder-left successor, Obrador is seeking to destroy what is left of Mexico’s democracy.
AMLO, remember, bragged of the tens of millions of illegal aliens that Mexico drove out and into the U.S. — especially given the $60 billion in remittances they send to prop up an otherwise failed narco-state. In retirement, he will brag that he was the first Mexican president to destroy the U.S. border.
He even urged all Mexican-American expatriates to vote anti-Republican. For the next few months, he will cooperate with the US to slow down the influx northward in order to allow Harris-Biden to claim they are for pre-November 5 election-cycle “border security.” And thereby help Harris get elected and welcome in another 10 million illegal aliens.
In his delusions, AMLO — who proved one of the truly dangerous anti-Americans on the world stage — thinks he is winning phase two of the 19th-century Mexican War. In fact, all he is proving is that millions of Mexicans want out of his country and only romanticize it when they are safely and permanently distant from its numerous failed paradigms.
In sum, there really is no President Biden or Vice President Harris. The former is non compos mentis and failing ever more rapidly. The latter has no clue who she is or what she should do. The cabal that engineered their respective exits and entrances cares more about retaining power than using it for American interests.
So, we are in perilous times.
All of our enemies and even former neutrals are coming out of the woodwork. They are convinced that the next two months offer one-time advantages — unless Harris is elected and thus can extend their opportunities for four more years of what Americans see as a chaotic decline, but the world abroad views as a rare and ripe opportunity.
– – –
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004.
