Russia and China’s collaborative Alaska flight raises concerns
You’d be forgiven if you thought that a staged scene out of Norman Jewison’s classic comedy “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians are Coming” was playing out high in the skies near Alaska this week.
On Wednesday, the Russians did come — intentionally — just ahead of President Biden’s Oval Office speech explaining why he abruptly stepped down from his re-election campaign against former President Donald Trump.
And the Russians brought Chinese bombers along with them for good measure.
Shortly before Biden’s evening address to the nation, NORAD reported that US and Canadian fighter jets had “intercepted two Russian TU-95 and two PRC H-6 military aircraft operating in the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone.”
Message received, loud and clear: Beijing and Moscow are signaling they believe no one is fully in charge at the White House.
Russia and China are sensing a vacuum at the West Wing as power begins to transition from Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris, now said to be essentially acting as a co-president in all but name.
Biden’s stilted exit speech only reinforced that notion.
And given that the country’s national-security interests in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific are increasingly under kinetic attack, a rudderless White House is not a good thing.
In failing to explain why he couldn’t beat Trump in a rematch, Biden also failed to stand down Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
Instead, they are likely preparing to take advantage of Biden’s Democratic Party-imposed lame-duck status.
Wednesday was emblematic of the strategic openings Biden and Harris are presenting to Moscow and Beijing (as well as their Axis of Evil allies), as they essentially went AWOL in Washington.
Biden set the tone by postponing his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and Harris followed on by electing not to preside over Bibi’s joint address to Congress.
Both were the wrong messages to send to Russia and China — and exactly the wrong kind of strategic greenlighting that it effectively sent to Hamas, Hezbollah and their Iranian sponsors as they wage a widening war against Israel.
Netanyahu’s address to Congress was his first public speech to American lawmakers since Oct. 7.
Forty-five Americans were killed in that terrorist attack. Eight US citizens are still being held hostage by Hamas in the […]
Biden and Harris chose to essentially abandon Washington, leaving it to the pro-Palestinian mob — and in so doing gave an open invitation to our nation’s enemies to trample on US national-security interests in the Mideast and elsewhere.
November politics are endangering Americans, our troops and our allies, while Iran is waging a multi-pronged war against Israel and aggressively working to weaponize its nuclear program.
This cannot continue: Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang will not be deterred unless they know someone is in control at the White House.
At present, that isn’t clear.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and national security adviser Jake Sullivan are gone if Harris wins, according to reports — with Phillip Gordon, the veep’s current national-security chief and a former Obama administration official who helped negotiate the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, widely expected take the leading role.
Since Austin and Sullivan are likely lame ducks, are they already ceding policy decisions to Harris and Gordon?
Or is Biden nominally still in charge?
Likely not.
Strategic ambiguity has its value — up to a point.
We perilously crossed that threshold on Wednesday when Russian and Chinese bombers told us in Alaska that they were seeing through it.
Moscow and Beijing are likely betting no one is really holding the reins at Biden’s unraveling White House — and that’s a dangerous place to be.
Mark Toth writes on national security and foreign policy. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as a military intelligence officer.
