In the parochial world of Washington politics — a superficial environment in which consultants for hire to aspiring bureaucrats liken themselves to fictional mobsters and horse-race coverage suffices as a substitute for any focus on the issues driving that race — nothing much is happening. It’s August, after all. But the world beyond America’s borders is a more active place than Monday’s sleepy political headlines suggest.
For example, Americans outside the Acela corridor awoke to the news that Russia had executed overnight the largest attack on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure in months — “battering the country’s already weakened energy grid,” Barron’s reported, and threatening Ukraine’s civilian population with another unendurable winter. The Polish government maintains that one of the estimated 200 Russian drones and missiles fired at Ukraine penetrated NATO airspace.
Elsewhere, as Israel continues to brace for a direct Iranian response to what the Washington Post casually deems its “brazen” assassination of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, the Israeli Air Force mounted a preemptive strike on the Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah’s capabilities. “The Israeli military said roughly 100 of its fighter jets bombed more than 270 targets in southern Lebanon,” the New York Times reported. Hezbollah says it fired over 300 rockets at Israeli targets, but Israeli sources maintain they sustained no or “very little damage” as a result.
All of America’s deployed carrier groups are active in the Middle East in an attempt to deter Iran from executing attacks on U.S. and Israeli targets that risk sparking a broader war. That means “none in the Pacific,” Fox News correspondent Lucas Tomlinson observed. There, several Chinese Coast Guard vessels and warships surrounded a Filipino fishing vessel, ramming it and pelting its crew with water cannons. This dangerous and provocative behavior has become increasingly commonplace amid China’s efforts to take de facto control of territory it claims in the South China Sea.
All it takes is one miscalculation to transform these tense regions into flashpoints that threaten to drag great powers into what are still, for now, conflicts limited to their respective theaters. Despite the growing risk to the U.S. strategic position abroad, the president is keeping a conspicuously low profile.
“President Biden began his second consecutive week of vacation Monday with nothing on his public schedule for the next seven days,” the New York Post reported. “The president will remain at the [Delaware] shore at least through Friday, according to a public schedule released by the White House.”
The Democratic Party’s political prospects now depend on creating the general perception that the White House is unoccupied. The vice president is running a campaign predicated on the implied premise that she represents a change from the unpopular president she served for the last three and a half years. Anything that reminds Americans that Joe Biden still occupies the Oval Office — in theory, at least — runs counter to that objective. So Biden will keep his head down, even amid the rapid deterioration of the threat environment abroad, lest he compel the press to cover his ongoing presidency.
