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While President Joe Biden secured the release of 10 hostages in Venezuela on Dec. 20, American hostages are being held in other areas of the world. In addition to Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan being held in Russia, eight American hostages are still believed to be held captive in Gaza. Hostage crises like these have prompted the State Department to appoint a Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs to bolster efforts to bring those held captive home.
Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten argues that it is America’s — and specifically Biden’s — weak response to attacks by Iran and its proxies that have created an environment conducive to the taking of American hostages in the first place.
Appeasement begets aggression. That’s a cruel lesson that has a way of blowing up in our face, literally, again and again. If the sophisticates in Washington, D.C. refuse to learn it, then Americans are doomed to suffer the consequences.
The Biden administration has made appeasing America’s enemies the linchpin of its national security and foreign policy, rather than endeavoring to make America the world’s dominant economic and military power, and applying overwhelming force, in limited situations, as a deterrent to our enemies.
The end result is a world today in total and utter chaos. We’ve talked about the appeasement agenda in context of the White House’s efforts to promote Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of jihad, to the Middle East strong horse, bending over backward for the mellocracy in pursuit of Iran Deal 2.0; showering tens of billions of dollars on that regime and protecting or laying off its proxies, including Shia militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza — interrupted only by the Oct. 7 attack. And, in fact, since that attack, these very Iranian forces have staged dozens of attacks on U.S. forces in the region — attacks that have largely gone unanswered.
