Nature abhors a vacuum. Judging by the past week, so does geopolitics.
Hezbollah responded to mixed signals emanating from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States, during which half of Congress applauded his speech while the other half boycotted, by launching a devastating attack on a Druze village in the Golan Heights, killing a dozen children. Israel, evidently concluding it was alone, responded by killing Hamas’s leader literally under the windows of Iran’s new president, along with taking out a senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard commander in Beirut.
It is not only the Middle East where American weakness is leading to unrest. Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro, faced with an overwhelming electoral defeat, released results in which he won reelection. The Biden administration’s response has been muted.
Amid this chaos, one question is driving world politics today: who, if anyone, is currently running the United States of America?
When faced with incontrovertible evidence of Joe Biden’s incapacity, Democrats and their allies in the media were willing to wage a relentless campaign to drive him from their November ticket. Yet Democrats feel that an inability to raise millions from celebrities or mobilize white women to attend Zoom calls presents a more immediate crisis than an inability to prevent war in the Middle East or Nicholas Maduro from plunging his nation into a bloodbath. Having driven Joe Biden from the race amidst charges of senility and accusations that he was taking advice from his son, Hunter, they have been content to leave him in the White House.
The decision to leave Biden, mortally wounded politically, in office, is an act of gross negligence that exceeds even that of Biden’s tenure. Joe Biden’s mismanagement of the withdrawal from Kabul had quantifiable costs. The potential costs of leaving America without an effective president, and the entire world without an effective United States, are incalculable, not least because they represent an open invitation to every despot, opportunist, and terrorist group on the planet to try their luck.
Make no mistake – Biden cannot serve effectively as president for the remainder of his term. This is not a comment on his health. Even if he were physically and mentally fit to carry out the day-to-day tasks of the presidency, the effectiveness of the presidency depends on symbolism and perception as much as reality. America’s friends and foes make their calculations based not on what Joe Biden’s condition is, but on what they perceive it to be.
The events of the past month have established a global perception that Joe Biden is decrepit, mentally absent, and unable to carry out the functions of his office. That impression has been endorsed by his political party, which went to extreme lengths to force him to forgo reelection because they believed he was not fit to give a press conference, much less perform in another debate. It was Democratic sources, not Republican, that spread stories about Biden’s supposed six-hour workday in which the president’s attention span rapidly fades after 4 p.m.
Worst of all, Joe Biden’s Democrat critics enlisted foreign governments and leaders in their campaign to install Kamala Harris, an approach that they would decry as foreign interference if the shoe was on the other foot.
The day after the first presidential debate, European diplomats leaked a series of “worries” to the Wall Street Journal, alleging that Biden regularly skipped meetings and had struggled to follow discussions at an October E.U.-U.S. summit, forcing Secretary Blinken to “intervene and point out which lines he should use.” No less a figure than Donald Tusk, the new Polish Prime Minister who in large part owes his office to the pressure Biden exerted on the previous Law and Justice government, suggested that he knew the debate was likely to go poorly for Biden.
Contrary to what Kamala Harris may think, we can never be unburdened by what has been. Whether it is an endorsement of rioting, calls to defund the police, or suggestions that the man leading the United States of America cannot follow simple talking points or remain awake during meetings, what has been said cannot be unsaid when it is no longer convenient. European leaders came out and said that Biden should be replaced as the Democrat candidate because he was unable to perform the job of president. Now, with Biden having conceded the point by dropping out of the race, it is impossible to pretend he has credibility as president.
Joe Biden’s behavior since dropping out of the race has compounded these problems. He only briefly met Netanyahu during the prime minister’s visit, then allowed his vice president to hold a press conference in which she attempted to establish distance with his policies by attacking Netanyahu, a line echoed by leading members of the president’s own party.
As a political strategy, this is likely to prove too clever by half. As Biden has discovered on the few occasions he has tried it, attacking Netanyahu rhetorically without backing it up with substantive policy changes alienates everyone while making him look weak. Efforts to make policy changes, such as pressuring for a ceasefire, run aground on the reality that Hamas has no interest in a ceasefire.
Geopolitically, however, the strategy directly undermines America’s position by raising the question of who is in charge of U.S. policy. Any benefit Harris, Schumer or any other Democrat receives from attacking Netanyahu is directly correlated with the degree to which they break with Joe Biden’s policy.
That in turn, establishes that whatever Joe Biden’s policy is, it will change in January, in turn raising questions among not just Israel but its enemies about why anyone should pay attention to anything Biden or his team say. The result of Democrats trying to run two different policies with two different teams, that of the now-lame duck administration still charged with implementing policy, and that of the slate they are presenting to a domestic electorate in November, has the result of canceling out each other, and leaving the U.S. with no policy whatsoever.
The escalation in the Middle East in recent days can best be understood in the context of every major actor – Israel, Hamas, Iran – concluding that not only is there currently no U.S. policy, but there is unlikely to be one until January. That means Hezbollah has no reason to fear escalation, as Iran has no fear that a lame-duck Biden administration will hold them responsible when Democrats are obsessed with restoring Harris’s relations with the left at home.
Israel, in turn, knows that the absence of American deterrence regionally requires Jerusalem to make up for it on its own, even if it involves an escalation of the conflict.
This global situation is only likely to get worse. The optimal short-term electoral strategy for the Democratic Party domestically is entirely at odds with the approach that maximizes American influence abroad, and there is no reason to believe that Democrat politicians, who have prioritized their own power at home above all else, will alter their behavior.
The ideal domestic strategy remains to allow Biden to take the blame for whatever concessions to reality are needed, say by treating Iran as a rogue state, Maduro as a dictator, or Hamas as terrorists, while members of Congress reap the domestic benefits of trashing Netanyahu and boycotting his speech. Harris, in turn, would then gravitate between the two, winking at left-wing voters that she agrees with the younger Democrat members of Congress while reassuring donors she is actually in sync with the “adults.”
Maybe Harris means what she tells the donors. Maybe she plans to betray them for the left-wing base. More likely she has yet to decide. But the world will not wait. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but our enemies relish it. They will continue seeking to fill the gap left by the Democrat’s coup against Biden, while our allies increasingly will look to their own defense. We can only hope there is a world order left to save in January.
Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.
