The Real Problem With Joe Biden's Age Is That He Doesn't Like Change
Overcaution and conservative action just invite more trouble
Joe Biden is a terrible ally. His first instinct in every theater of conflict is to carve out a safe space for the enemies of America’s allies and then micromanage the allied power.
Ukraine is not allowed to operate inside of Russian territory, or to use American weapons beyond the international boundary. This strategic handicap does not make the world safer. Quite the opposite.
Israel prepares to move into Rafah, the final stronghold of HAMAS, to complete the destruction of that organization as a military force, so Biden chides the IDF for being “over the top” in Gaza.
Iran kills and wounds Americans in Jordan, so Biden responds by killing zero Iranians in a flurry of airstrikes on Iran’s proxy in Iraq, landing zero blows inside Iran, to the absolute joy of the regime.
Biden’s National Security Council spokesman calls this a “tiered approach” to “degrade” Iranian power. Nuance fails to impress America’s enemies, though. Houthi attacks on shipping continue because Tehran is not deterred by this soft touch. They are emboldened. It plays right into their strategy of instability.
Faced with a superior foe, Iran’s strategic culture prefers indirect confrontation. “Tehran typically tests adversaries to see what it can get away with,” Ali Parchami notes in the Routledge Handbook of Strategic Culture. The regime “engages in covert or proxy activities to preserve deniability and avoid becoming decisively engaged.”
It relies on incremental action and indirection to create ambiguity regarding its intentions and to make its enemies uncertain about how to respond. And it arranges its activities in time and space — pacing them temporally and spacing them geographically — so that adversaries do not feel pressed to respond.
As I explained in my recent review of the Handbook, Parchami identifies the key cultural value of Tehran as revisionism (mazloumiat), a reordering of the world in which the oppressed rise up against their oppressors. Globally, leftist movements mistake this religious fervor for some sort of socialist revolution when it is the explicit appeal of Tehran to Muslims worldwide for holy war.
Iran has built a “constituency” outside of Iran responsive to this call. HAMAS and Hezbollah and Houthis and the Assad regime are all constituents to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). “This goes beyond the desire to project influence,” Parchami says, because “an overseas constituency yields some legitimacy to the regime’s pretension that it is a transnational polity dedicated to all Muslims.”
In other words, Iran has the proxies to fight for them abroad so that they are not “decisively engaged” at home. Joe Biden is happy to engage the proxies, and wants to avoid the same outcome, though for different reasons. Domestic politics is one, but mainly, I think it is old age. I think he just doesn’t want the world to change.
Our ability to cope with changed circumstances diminishes with old age. We fall behind on trends and current social cues. We grow disappointed with change, and lose our illusion that all change is inherently positive. Openness to new experiences generally decreases. This is why older voters have a reputation for being more conservative. Biden is not a conservative in the political sense. However, he is old, and his administration has been reluctant to cope with change.
Iran policy exemplifies this problem:
Frenetic American policy has transformed this crisis into a cause. At first, the enrichment program was a powerful bargaining tool for the regime. The JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) had critics within the regime who denounced it as “capitulation” to the west. After Donald Trump abrogated the agreement, “a perpetual sense of victimization and outrage” resulting from western sanctions empowered hardliners to elect Ebrahim Raisi, “a man with close links to the Supreme Leader and the security services,” as president of the Islamic Republic. His “elevation has been accompanied by a system-wide purge of experienced technocrats,” replacing expertise with “a younger cadre of ideologues whose sole qualification appears to be personal allegiance to the current Supreme Leader.” As a result, Iran’s leadership “may lack even the most basic diplomatic skills necessary to engage in realistic and constructive international negotiations.” The enrichment program has become a sacred value and less of a bargaining chip.
Biden’s efforts to revive the JCPOA through transactional diplomacy, such as releasing frozen oil revenue, have backfired. Rob Malley, the point man for the Obama administration’s Iran policy as well as its attempted continuation under Biden, lost his security clearance last April for reasons that remain murky. The most likely explanation is email “overshare” of classified documents, possibly through Iran “experts” with ties to Tehran.
Regime newspapers exposed Malley, burning their best diplomatic bridge with the United States. Biden is not going to win them back through polite engagement or exchange, and it has taken this long for his White House to figure that out. They still don’t know what to do about it.
This week, NBC News reported that the Biden administration has ammunition ready to ship to Ukraine immediately if legislation gets through the US House of Representatives, including more ATACMS missiles with longer range. As much as Ukrainians will appreciate the missiles now, they would have been even more welcome during the 2023 counteroffensive, when Ukraine needed to suppress Russian air power and hit Russian ammunition dumps beyond the range of regular HIMARS rockets and strike transportation infrastructure in Crimea.
By the time Biden gave Ukraine a handful of short-range ATACMS last October, Kyiv had spent over a year requesting them. Like the F-16s, which will finally make it to Ukraine this summer, the Biden administration dithered and wrung their hands over the delivery of this essential part of the combined arms kit because the Russians wouldn’t like it, the Ukrainians might use it on Russian territory, and Russia might retaliate, and who wants a bigger war than Ukraine? These fears have proven baseless, over and over again.
Winston Churchill famously observed that Americans will only do the right thing once they have tried everything else. One can hope that President Biden has learned from his mistake and means to do the right thing. Even if he has, it is still not clear that his administration is awake to the needs at hand, yet. For example, the Department of Defense has yet to set up long-term sustainment for key weapon systems that have already been sent to Ukraine.
Why, it is almost as if Biden and his administration are failing to imagine a real Ukrainian victory at all, for some reason, as though the prospect of a defeated Russia is too daunting to consider. Visiting Washington recently, military historian Phillips O’Brien was suprised by “the remaining strength of the anti-escalation/we don’t want Russia to catastrophically lose faction.”
I heard stories of important weapons systems that could help Ukraine being stopped because of bipartisan reluctance to allow Ukraine to have the capability to strike at range (both Crimea and into Russia). There was regular talk that as long as Ukraine kept most of its territory, that would be fine by US interests, etc. Even more surprising, there was a good deal of talk of just how terrible it would be if Russia had a political collapse—that this would be a worse prospect for the USA than Ukraine winning the war and liberating all of its own territory.
The bipartisan plan, then, would be to support Ukraine just enough that they do not lose, which is not the same thing as winning. Winning would require the courage and imagination to reverse decades of deliberate neglect of the defense industrial base so that Ukraine can be supplied at greater scale than Russian forces. “Old” Europe has dawdled and procrastinated about this necessary change, too. Winning would require taking the risk of change in Russia, which can never change without getting worse, goes the logic.
Gaza is the most obvious example of Joe Biden’s reluctance to change in a changing world. By trying to stave off Israeli victory with a six-week cease-fire, Team Biden hopes to inspire a more transactional attitude in HAMAS. This is of course a fool’s errand, but it is consistent with Biden’s foreign policy experience as well as attitudes built up over decades in the State Department. American strategic culture produced a “peace process” in the Middle East with the Oslo Accords in 1993, but precious little actual peace in the three decades since then.
The prospect of a post-HAMAS world terrifies Team Biden. They are still muttering about two-state solutions, perhaps bringing the Palestinian Authority into Gaza, when neither option stands a chance of success. No one in the Washington establishment, let alone Joe Biden, seems able to let go of the “two state solution.” But there is no more “peace process” in Gaza. There never really was a “peace process” in Gaza. Everyone should stop trying to revive a “peace process” in Gaza because it is never going to happen.
In order to create a new Gaza that will never perpetrate another 7 October, someone must impose ironfisted security, radically alter the education of Gazan children away from Islamist nihilism, and provide for the economic recovery of the strip. Neither Biden nor Washington is able to imagine Israel being that someone. They cannot imagine anyone other than Mahmoud Abbas, President of the State of Palestine, being that someone — and he is seven years older than Joe Biden.
Blind to what our enemies hold sacred, America always imagines her enemies will sell the things they hold sacred. Anonymous Pentagon officials criticize allies and then claim credit for their successes. Frustratingly slow to appreciate new realities, always wishing for a return to the splendid isolation of some mythical past that was “normal,” the American establishment is an octegenarian who hates change.
Embodying the very system he nominally leads, this president is an avatar of American strategic culture. Cognitive decline does not account for his behavior. It is the the way of an old man set in his habits, hating the way the world has changed.