‘Obama’s Law’ is bringing destruction and death to most of the Middle East
Edward Luttwak — soldier, strategist, historian, rancher — calls it Obama’s Law: “Iran may attack all, but none may attack Iran.”The Return of Peace Through Strength
The Biden administration has followed Obama’s Law in the same fumbling, shambolic way as an apparently catatonic Joe Biden followed Obama’s cue to leave the stage at a June 15 fundraiser in Los Angeles. The result is Iran on the verge of the bomb, Israel attacked from all sides and chaos and war across the Middle East.
The Biden administration is now trying to prevent full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah – or, rather, continuing to stop Israel from responding fully to the war that Hezbollah launched last October.
Since 2006, according to the State Department, the US has given $2.5 billion to Lebanon’s official army, the Lebanese Armed Forces. The object is to create an “institutional counterweight to Hezbollah”, the real power in the land. The money is supposed to be spent on four areas: sovereignty, border security, internal security and counterterrorism.
A 2022 report by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies found that only in counterterrorism had the LAF developed its capacity. In every other area, Hezbollah had continued to advance its conquest of Lebanon.
As with its subventions to the Palestinians, no one really knows where the money ends up. As with American support of the Palestinians, a policy that is intended to support “moderates” has in effect given diplomatic and financial cover to terrorists.
Hezbollah has ignored UN Resolution 1701, which ordered the demilitarisation of southern Lebanon. The US has looked the other way. Some 80,000 Israelis are refugees in their own country, yet the Biden administration pressures Israel not to respond.
Obama’s Law is also in operation in Gaza. The Biden administration does not want Israel to destroy Hamas. It wants Israel to domesticate Hamas. The administration claims to believe that a genocidal Islamist group will not only accept the existence of a Jewish state; Hamas will also accept a piddling non-state as a pay-off.
This lunacy is nothing more than the logic of the “two-state solution”, played out in reality. The West expects that the Palestinians can be bribed into becoming a shoddy version of Israel, a pluralist, Western-style democracy with the rule of law. Both states can then be integrated into an American-run regional architecture.
This is delusional and dangerous.
Si vis pacem, para bellum is a Latin phrase that emerged in the fourth century that means “If you want peace, prepare for war.” The concept’s origin dates back even further, to the second-century Roman emperor Hadrian, to whom is attributed the axiom, “Peace through strength—or, failing that, peace through threat.”Endangering Israel’s Security – and Our Own
U.S. President George Washington understood this well. “If we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for war,” he told Congress in 1793. The idea was echoed in President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous dictum: “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.” And as a candidate for president, Ronald Reagan borrowed directly from Hadrian when he promised to achieve “peace through strength”—and later delivered on that promise.
In 2017, President Donald Trump brought this ethos back to the White House after the Obama era, during which the United States had a president who felt it necessary to apologize for the alleged sins of American foreign policy and sapped the strength of the U.S. military. That ended when Trump took office. As he proclaimed to the UN General Assembly in September 2020, the United States was “fulfilling its destiny as peacemaker, but it is peace through strength.”
And Trump was a peacemaker—a fact obscured by false portrayals of him but perfectly clear when one looks at the record. Just in the final 16 months of his administration, the United States facilitated the Abraham Accords, bringing peace to Israel and three of its neighbors in the Middle East plus Sudan; Serbia and Kosovo agreed to U.S.-brokered economic normalization; Washington successfully pushed Egypt and key Gulf states to settle their rift with Qatar and end their blockade of the emirate; and the United States entered into an agreement with the Taliban that prevented any American combat deaths in Afghanistan for nearly the entire final year of the Trump administration.
Trump was determined to avoid new wars and endless counterinsurgency operations, and his presidency was the first since that of Jimmy Carter in which the United States did not enter a new war or expand an existing conflict. Trump also ended one war with a rare U.S. victory, wiping out the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) as an organized military force and eliminating its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
But unlike during Carter’s term, under Trump, U.S. adversaries did not exploit Americans’ preference for peace. In the Trump years, Russia did not press further forward after its 2014 invasion of Ukraine, Iran did not dare to directly attack Israel, and North Korea stopped testing nuclear weapons after a combination of diplomatic outreach and a U.S. military show of force. And although China maintained an aggressive posture during Trump’s time in office, its leadership surely noted Trump’s determination to enforce redlines when, for example, he ordered a limited but effective air attack on Syria in 2017, after Bashar al-Assad’s regime used chemical weapons against its own people.
Prior to the Oct. 7 attacks, the Biden administration lacked any sort of realistic perception of the situation in the Middle East. Mere days before the attacks, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters, “The [Middle East] region is quieter than it has been for decades.”
This misperception led the Biden administration to divert critical assets away from terrorist groups like Hamas – ultimately leading to the failure to anticipate or disrupt the events of Oct. 7. In November, senior administration officials admitted that, following 9/11, U.S. intelligence agencies almost completely stopped spying on Hamas and other violent Palestinian groups, believing that Hamas constituted no direct threat to the U.S.
Indeed, Washington deprioritized the Middle East as a whole. After the Biden administration’s takeover, the Central Intelligence Agency decided to reduce the number of civilian intelligence analysts tasked with monitoring the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the aftermath of Oct. 7, more than a dozen current and former U.S. officials, lawmakers, and congressional aides testified that this deprioritization of the Middle East had left the U.S. vulnerable and unable to anticipate the attacks.
The Biden administration also spent significant resources in a misguided attempt to appease Iran – a policy that directly led to the Hamas attacks and regional escalation. Less than a month before the Oct. 7 attacks, the Biden administration announced it would issue a waiver giving Iran access to $6 billion that had been previously blocked by U.S. sanctions.
By unfreezing Iranian assets, the administration presented the world’s largest state sponsor of terror with unprecedented resources, allowing it to direct, fund, arm, and train Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the myriads of other terror groups currently attacking U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. This both enabled Oct. 7 and allowed for increased attacks from groups like the Houthis, an Iranian-armed terrorist group that has been disrupting shipping in the Red Sea, causing shipping delays and increased costs to ordinary consumers.
The Biden administration also provided U.S. adversaries with valuable resources in the form of international aid. For example, the administration reversed Trump’s funding cuts and restored more than $200M in aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), an organization with direct ties to Hamas – as demonstrated by the alleged involvement of 12 UNRWA employees in the Oct. 7 attacks and kidnappings.
President Biden’s approach to national security poses a stark contrast to that of President Trump. Biden reversed nearly all of Trump’s foreign policies, opting to alienate Israel and appease Iran – a policy that has endangered both the U.S. and its allies.
Absent aggressive congressional oversight to assess the Biden administration’s intelligence priorities – and to investigate its handling of the Israel-Palestine conflict, including the recent decision to withhold information and weapons from Israel – the situation will only get worse. Failure to accept responsibility for the national security malpractice – as demonstrated in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and now the Israel-Palestine conflict – will create present and serious consequences for Americans.
Under the Biden administration, rising foreign instability and conflict escalation have become routine. America needs to change course immediately and return to policies that foster peace and stability – both abroad and at home.