RUTHFULLY YOURS

In February 2021, after less than a month at the helm in Washington, D.C., the Biden-Harris State Department revoked the Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation for Ansrallah, more commonly known as the Houthis, a belligerent, armed militant group operating out of Yemen. The message was clear: Even if your group is defined by targeting innocent people, the Biden-Harris White House will bestow the same legitimacy upon you as any nation-state by granting you a seat at the negotiating table.

Nearly four years later, we have intelligence reporting that indicates that Russia is providing Houthi terrorists with real-time targeting data to strike commercial ships in the Red Sea. A major U.S. adversary is providing known terrorists with intelligence to wreak havoc upon international commerce — what went wrong?

Much has transpired since the start of the Biden-Harris administration, and any objective observer will note that the world is far less safe — with the potential of a great-power conflict at the highest point since 1939. Our adversaries such as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are working closer together than ever before and appear far more willing to undertake acts of aggression.

Many point to the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 as the catalyst for how the Biden-Harris foreign-policy agenda would play out. The chaotic withdrawal, which culminated in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members, was the result of reckless planning and a refusal to listen to the concerns of the secretary of defense, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and the U.S. Central Command commander, who we now know pleaded with Biden and Harris to reverse course. By pursuing their naked political objective of leaving Afghanistan before the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Biden-Harris White House stranded American citizens and Afghan allies on the ground. Russia and China, no doubt, took note of the incompetence displayed by U.S. leaders.

Less than six months later, Vladimir Putin initiated Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, starting the largest land war in Europe in nearly 80 years. In the weeks leading up to the invasion, when it was clear Russian aggression was imminent, the Biden-Harris White House slow-walked military aid to Ukraine, negating any sense of hard deterrence out of an imagined fear of escalation. Putin dispensed with U.S. diplomatic overtures, sensing weakness after the debacle in Afghanistan. More than two and a half years later, and with more than a million lives lost, the conflict still continues.

With 2023 came the third major global crisis of the Biden-Harris administration: the barbaric attacks of October 7, perpetrated by Hamas terrorists, financed and trained by Iran, which left 1,200 innocent Israelis dead. Prior to this, in a bid to revive the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal and the fundamentally flawed notion of a “Middle East reset,” the Biden-Harris White House pursued its policy of lax sanctions enforcement on the ayatollah’s regime. Overall, Iranian oil revenue in 2023 stood at $53 billion under Biden-Harris, up 231 percent from the 16 billion in revenue it saw in 2020, the final year of the Trump administration. Money is fungible, and it’s clear that Iran was better able to fund Hamas’s bloodthirsty rampage on October 7; the release of $6 billion in frozen assets to Iran in September of 2023 speaks to the Biden-Harris White House’s naïveté.

To make matters worse, the subsequent attacks by the Houthis on cargo ships have led to a 90 percent decline in international shipping through the Red Sea. This escalation of Mideast hostilities is what finally led the Biden-Harris State Department to redesignate the Houthis as an FTO in early 2024.

All the while, China has continued to encroach on the South China Sea and threaten its neighbor, Taiwan. The Biden-Harris White House has failed to enforce red lines pertaining to China and Russia’s “no limits” partnership, through which China has become a major provider of economic and military support to the latter. As part of its 2021 Strategic Partnership Plan with Iran, there’s strong evidence that China has provided both economic support and has supplied satellite technology for Iran’s ballistic-missile program.

China’s actions in support of Russia and Iran exemplify the concerning trend that will define the Biden-Harris era: Bad actors are working closer together because they have learned they must not fear U.S. retaliation. We know that Iran has provided drones to Russia in Ukraine, and there are reports of Russia providing military equipment for Iranian-backed Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border. The Pentagon has confirmed that some 3,000 North Korean troops are now on the ground in Russia to support the Kremlin’s war effort. Chinese imports of Russian oil hit a record high this year, allowing Putin to continue to fund his war despite U.S. sanctions. Close cooperation between our adversaries has become the norm under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Our major adversaries are working together to sow chaos and discord on multiple fronts. These authoritarian regimes wish to undermine global commerce, peace, and security. Their goal is to divide and weaken the West. And with Vice President Kamala Harris’s inability to articulate how she would carve a new path as the 47th president of the United States, another four years of failed leadership could prove costly.