Daniel J. Samet
“The failure of the Carter administration’s foreign policy is now clear to everyone except its architects, and even they must entertain private doubts,” opens “Dictatorships & Double Standards,” Jeane Kirkpatrick’s seminal Commentary essay of 1979. Substitute “Carter” for “Biden-Harris,” and her lede is as true today as it was forty-five years ago. Biden and Harris inherited peace and stability and, in under four years, have created war and chaos. The world is in a much more precarious state with them at the helm.
One reason for this is their fundamental misunderstanding of international crises. Biden and Harris have made de-escalation a pillar of their foreign policy. The word appears often in their public statements. As the vice president put it in a recent X post, their administration has been furiously “working to de-escalate regional tensions and prevent further conflict.” The idea is to limit conflicts before they spiral out of control. Countries really don’t want to fight one another per this line of thinking. If they try hard enough to lessen tensions, they won’t come to blows. There should always be an off-ramp from the escalatory highway. War is invariably a failure of de-escalation, the Biden-Harris administration believes. De-escalating, not winning, is the objective.
Their foreign policy is based on a fallacy. What Biden, Harris, and their subordinates don’t get is that de-escalation doesn’t de-escalate. It escalates. When the administration invests so much in “de-escalation”—which means appeasing adversaries, proscribing the United States’ own intervention in conflicts, and proscribing the behavior of its wartime allies—the bad guys try to get away with even more. This has been so time and again throughout the Biden-Harris presidency.
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