The danger lies in the growing global perception of weakness and incompetence in the Biden administration, combined with claims of the politicized weakening of the FBI, CIA, State Department and Defense Department. This has crystallized in Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s unsure Anchorage meeting with the Chinese, Biden’s wooden Geneva summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the colossal failure of the Afghan withdrawal, which may devolve into a humiliating hostage crisis for America, and the budget- and inflation-based defunding of Defense. In addition, the fully-politicized Intelligence and Armed Services Committees on Capitol Hill add to the danger. Our enemies may decide that now is the time to move.

It would be a huge miscalculation…

The one powerful factor holding back such miscalculations has been coherent U.S. foreign policy and resolve, combined with pragmatists in Moscow and Beijing. But in the past six months, the world’s confidence in the U.S. leadership has begun to slip. An agonizing hostage crisis would make it even more dangerous. Added to that is the potential that a stubborn and wounded U.S. administration might overreact to try to show its strength. The U.S. has devastating counter-measures for all enemy strategies, and an enemy underestimating that power, combined with a White House trying to prove itself, could be disastrous.