Biden is losing World War III

President Joe Biden has become the James Buchanan of the 21st century.

Buchanan, the nation’s 15th president, widely considered history’s worst, sought to mollify everyone, yet in the end pleased no one. Under his rule, the nation drifted ever-closer to secession and Civil War.

More than a century and a half later, the world is devolving into a global ideological World War III. Russia, China and their proxies are actively attacking U.S. interests. 

Yet Biden’s National Security Strategy remains rooted in fighting “something less than two simultaneous or overlapping major conflicts,” according to a January Congressional Research Service report entitled “Great Power Competition: Implications for Defense.”

The report notes that, in 2018, the Trump administration was confronted with an Obama-era decision of “building a force not around the demands of two regional conflicts with rogue states, but around the requirements of winning a high-intensity conflict with a single, top-tier competitor — a war with China over Taiwan, for instance, or a clash with Russia in the Baltic region.”

But in reality, our nation is being confronted with three wars: the war in Ukraine, the war in the Middle East, and the looming war over Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Actually, make that three and a half wars, if you include the war of influence we are losing in the Sahel region of Africa as U.S. forces abandon bases in Niger.

Biden, seemingly caught in the vice grip of November electoral calculus, is refusing even to acknowledge that we are already in World War III, let alone take the necessary measures to win it. As a result, our nation’s military, weapons and munitions production capacity, and its ability to engage with the cyberwarfare and disinformation emanating from Moscow and Beijing, are all woefully lacking. All require an immediate remedy.

Biden, like Buchanan, is facing a Fort Sumter moment in history. 

In 1860, Buchanan, fearing escalation, refused to sufficiently reinforce the strategic fort guarding the entrance to Charleston Harbor. Although such a move likely would not have changed the trajectory of the war, it would have drawn a much-needed red line for the Southern secessionists.

Instead, Buchanan did the bare minimum, just as the Biden administration is now doing in Ukraine, the Indo-Pacific and in the Middle East. Defending U.S. allies is not enough, just as minimally defending Fort Sumter proved futile.

“Defending” must no longer be the watchword of the day in Biden’s White House, but “winning.” Winning this increasingly kinetic global ideological war is our only way forward if liberal democracy is to prevail against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s shared vision of a so-called multipolar world, militarily and economically dominated by Russia and China and anchored by BRICS.

Biden’s escalation fears must also end. As evidenced by Oct 7., Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Iran’s April 13 attacks on Israel and now the Bastogne-like battle for the Kharkiv Oblast, fears of escalation have only led to vacuums being filled by our nation’s enemies — and the enemies of our allies in Eastern Europe and the Mideast.

Simply put, the more Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, argues for de-escalation, the more our enemies use those windows to escalate. 

Israel is a case study in the madness of Biden’s Buchanan-like approach to handling the nation’s foreign policy. Initially, Biden was strongly supportive of Jerusalem’s right to put an end to Hamas as a military threat to Israel. In the wake of anti-Israel Palestinian protests on U.S. campuses throughout the country and in particular in New York City, Biden’s resolve dissipated. The unity coalition government of Israel, in an existential war with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, soon found itself under friendly fire originating from Washington, D.C. 

Defending Michigan’s 15 electoral votes seemingly became more important than safeguarding Israel, destroying Hamas, or alone extricating the eight American hostages still held by Hamas’s military chief, Yahya Sinwar, in Gaza. Lest we forget, 45 American citizens were brutally slaughtered by Hamas on Oct. 7.

On Monday, Biden’s abyss deepened. The United Nations admitted it had overestimated the number of women and children killed in Gaza by nearly 100 percent, implying that Israel has achieved a lower civilian casualty rate than the U.S. did during the Iraq War. Even so, Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, announced he was seeking arrest warrants for alleged war crimes in Gaza by Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

There was no mention whatsoever of Hamas’s continued use of Palestinian civilians as human shields, nor any of their Russian and Iranian sponsors, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 

Ebrahim Raisi, the Iranian president killed in a helicopter crash, was never indicted by the ICC, despite being known as the “Butcher of Tehran” for ordering the deaths of tens of thousands of Iranians.

Biden has lost the plot — or maybe he is incapable of grasping it. Russia and China are destroying the post–World War II global order and the institutions that once safeguarded it — including the UN Security Council and now, indirectly, the ICC.

Instead of rallying the nation to fight and win this ever-widening global concerted assault on liberty, Biden and his politicos are sacrificing American national security in an attempt to win in November. 

World War III is upon us, and our nation is exposed. Fort Sumter stands symbolically empty. The country’s armed forces are overtaxed, facing potentially three wars at once and preparing for only one.

Instead of channeling Abraham Lincoln and his resolve to win, Biden is imitating Buchanan, derelict in his duty as leader of the free world. 

Mark Toth writes on national security and foreign policy. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer and led the U.S. European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012 to 2014.