Khairallah Khairallah

The Joe Biden White House can only be described as a confused administration that is still seeking its place in the world. This administration has baffled the rest of the world as several foreign powers, including Russia and Iran, began to challenge it. China preferred fence-sitting as it waits for the right hour to bare its claws.

The current US administration faces several tests in many places at once. Its first is in America itself. The US congressional elections, which are only nine months away, will decide the future of the administration and the direction of the current White House team. Congressional elections could result in the Democrats losing their majority in both houses of Congress.

If the Biden administration suffers such a setback, it will become a lame duck.

The US domestic situation seems to depend largely on the Biden’s achieving internal and external successes during the next few months. There is the economic front at home while there are the Ukraine and Iran fronts abroad. Beyond that, the administration will have to demonstrate it is indeed capable of confronting what it has called the “China peril.”

The domestic and foreign fronts are connected for the Biden White House which has sent all the wrong signals at the wrong time. Consider the way it withdrew from Afghanistan last summer.

After Washington’s chaotic exit from Kabul, it became inevitable that Russia and its President Vladimir Putin would view the US administration in a different light. Even before that, Iran discovered that it did not have to take the Biden administration seriously, not least after Washington decided to remove the Houthis from its terrorism list. The administration devoutly believed that this move would usher in progress towards a political settlement in Yemen. Everything that followed ran completely counter to US expectations and reflected the administration's naiveté. The Houthis (Ansar Allah group), who are but an Iranian proxy, resorted to greater violence without triggering a serious response from the US. The administration was just happy that the Houthis' drone and missile assault against the UAE did not affect the Vienna talks over Iran's nuclear programme.

It was only natural that Putin should seize the opportunity to assert that Russia should be treated as a partner in determining Europe's future and that Ukraine should not be part of NATO. Putin in fact won the Ukraine war before he even fought it.

The Russian president knows that the Biden administration ultimately needs to look for compromises. Iran also knows this. It has exploited very well its assets in the region, its sectarian militias, as a bargaining chip. It has used them in Iraq, where it disrupted the political process by blocking the recognition of the results of the last parliamentary elections. It has used them in Syria, where it has pursued the path of demographic re-engineering. It has used them in Lebanon, which, thanks to Hezbollah, it has turned into an Iranian colony.

Does the Biden administration have the means to respond to the challenges it currently faces? Nothing could be less certain. The present US administration seems more than willing to accept that a new world has emerged. In order to protect his domestic position, Biden will be ready for all kinds of bad settlements with Russia and Iran and with China at a later date.

The current administration will not discover, until it is too late, that it knows nothing about China, Russia, Iran, the Gulf nor indeed the Middle East in particular. In essence, it does not know how to deal with its allies, who had once believed that they could rely on the US if they were faced with any threat.

Most importantly, America under Biden is a continuation of the US under Barack Obama. This administration does not know that distancing itself from the Trump administration is not a coherent policy as much as it is an invitation to the Russian, Chinese and Iranians to challenge America with a high degree of contempt.

The US victory in the Cold War three decades ago, is entirely a thing of the past. Now the US is under an administration with confused policies. These shambolic principles reach the point of failing to realise that the “Islamic Republic” is not a charitable organisation and that Putin is, after all, nothing more than a KGB officer whose sole concern is to prove that the Soviet Union is not dead but that it could spring back to life some day.

Above all, the US administration refuses to take into account the concerns of its allies in the Middle East and their legitimate entitlement to answers as to how they should respond to the Iranian expansionist project, with all the challenges and risks this entails.

*Khairallah Khairallah is a Lebanese writer - thearabweekly
*This article expresses the opinion of its author and does not necessarily represent The Nation Press website