According to President Joe Biden, the end of Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny in Syria was made possible by his administration’s foreign policy. Speaking from the White House on Sunday in a televised address, he said, “For years the main backers of Assad have been Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia, but over the last week their support collapsed, all three of them, because all three of them are far weaker today than they were when I took office.”
Try not to laugh.
Biden attributes the woes that have befallen this alleged “Axis of Resistance” to “the blows Ukraine [and] Israel have delivered upon their own self-defense with unflagging support of the United States.”
This isn’t just a deceptive telling of recent history. Biden has it backward. While it’s true that Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia are weaker today than they were when Biden was inaugurated as president, it’s not because Biden had the foresight to unleash the Jewish state against America’s enemies in the Middle East. It’s because Israel defied Biden’s efforts to restrain it. Syria has toppled its tyrant in spite of the Biden administration, not because of it.
When Israel took the very steps that have weakened Iran and its proxies, it was greeted by threats and disapproval from Washington. On September 24, at the UN General Assembly, Biden pleaded for Israel to accept a diplomatic solution. “Since October 7, we have also been determined to prevent a wider war that engulfs the entire region,” he said. This was three days before Israeli air strikes killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
In May, Biden threatened to hold up vital arms shipments to Israel if it invaded the last stronghold of Hamas in Rafah. But Israel ignored the advice of its most crucial ally. Instead it went forward with the strikes that decapitated Hezbollah, it killed Yahya Sinwar in Rafah, and this fall, it proved that its jets can fly over Tehran without breaking a sweat. As a result, the vaunted Axis of Resistance has been relegated to an axis of subsistence.
Biden’s approach to Israel’s war has been to prevent regional escalation. That may sound sensible on the surface, but it has meant trying to limit Israel’s war to a purely defensive one against Iran’s proxies—one at a time—while preventing Israel from taking the fight to Iran, the patron of those proxies. The folly of this policy has been exposed in recent months, but particularly in the last few days with the fall of Assad. It goes back to a fundamental miscalculation that Iran and its allies were not going to be removed by force. This mistake goes back to Biden’s old boss, Barack Obama: Iran is here to stay; there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
This conventional wisdom boiled down to respecting Iran’s regional ambitions. Instead of trying to roll back the militias funded, trained, and directed by the Islamic Republic’s powerful Revolutionary Guard, Obama instead tried to manage the conflict. Like Biden, he wanted to avoid escalation.
As Obama told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in 2016, “The competition between the Saudis and the Iranians—which has helped to feed proxy wars and chaos in Syria and Iraq and Yemen—requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace.”
To be sure, the Obama doctrine did not formally accept Iran’s cynical meddling in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon. But Obama was unwilling to do anything about Iran’s imperialism. For example, after Assad violated his 2013 redline, Obama punted. He asked Congress for a formal authorization to use the force he promised he would use if Assad deployed chemical weapons. In the end, the U.S. did nothing. In less than two years, Russia’s air force was in Syria bombing the rebels America said it was supporting.
Despite Iran and Russia’s interventions on behalf of the tyrant he had committed to toppling, Obama continued nuclear negotiations with Iran. Those talks produced an agreement whereby Iran offered a time-limited pause on its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of UN sanctions and pallets of cash to free detained U.S. citizens.
This was a great deal for Iran’s regime. But it was a terrible deal for the Iranian people. In the first year of the nuclear agreement, the regime executed nearly a thousand prisoners, the highest number since 1989. It was also a horrible deal for Syria’s rebels, who faced Hezbollah fighters and Russian bombs. Saudi Arabia now stared down a well-armed, Tehran-backed Houthi insurgency in Yemen that would later attack its oil fields. And the extra cash Iran obtained from the nuclear deal allowed it to lavish Hezbollah in Lebanon with so much funding and weaponry that the terror militia became more powerful than the Lebanese state itself. That left Israel surrounded by a “ring of fire”: Iran-backed militias intent on its destruction in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria.
As president, Donald Trump challenged the Obama doctrine. Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018. On the second day of 2020, Trump ordered the air strike that killed Qasem Suleimani, the Iranian general and architect of Iran’s strategy of building up regional proxies throughout the Middle East.
But after Biden won the 2020 election, the old Obama approach returned. One of the first priorities of Biden’s new administration was to restore the nuclear bargain that Trump tried to scuttle. And Iran’s proxies continued to become emboldened. No worries. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan boasted last year, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” Oops—eight days after Sullivan made those remarks at the Atlantic Festival, Hamas launched its October 7 pogrom.
A year later, thanks to Israel’s robust response, Hamas and Hezbollah are hobbled. Their leadership is largely eliminated, and Assad’s regime has fallen. Obama’s wisdom, in retrospect, looks foolish. It turns out that Iran was not here to stay. It turns out that another regional power—Israel—was able to extinguish much of Iran’s vaunted ring of fire, despite the warnings, arm-twisting, and weapon-shipment delays from the Biden administration. The Saudis, the Syrian people, the Lebanese, and the Israelis had a choice all along. They did not have to “share” the region with a regime intent on dominating it.
So it’s also worth tallying the price of Obama’s strategic patience. The most conservative estimates say that more than 300,000 people perished in Syria’s civil war; others put that figure at closer to 600,000. This says nothing of the 14 million refugees forced to flee Syria after Iran and Russia saved the country’s brutal tyrant. Outside groups estimate that nearly 400,000 people have died as a result of the war in Yemen, a war started by Iran’s Houthi proxies. Lebanon today is nearly a failed state because Hezbollah was the most powerful militia in the country after Iran’s years of intervention. In the meantime, Israel suffered the horror of October 7 and Gazans suffered the war Hamas initiated.
How much of this bloodshed could have been spared if Obama hadn’t clung to the fantasy of a Saudi-Iranian cold peace? It wasn’t just Obama. It was a Washington foreign policy establishment that persuaded itself of the futility of fighting a regime dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state. Israel could not afford that illusion. In decapitating Iran’s proxies and destroying its air defenses, Israel paved the way for the toppling of the cruelest tyrant of the twenty-first century. It also demonstrated the fragility of Iran’s imperium and Obama’s delusions about that imperium.
Biden’s empty boast about Assad’s demise is a punch line. But his foreign policy was not an anomaly. He channeled the Obama-era conventional wisdom that captured a generation of Washington’s foreign policy elites. Their assumptions about Iran now lay bare and exposed for the world to see as the region realigns. And yet they remain in their perches on Congressional committees, at the best think tanks, and in the top op-ed pages. So it’s worth asking: What else might they be wrong about?
Eli Lake is a columnist for The Free Press.