On “60 Minutes” in October, President Biden was asked if the United States was going to struggle to support two wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Biden responded by saying: “No. We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history — not in the world, in the history of the world. The history of the world. We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.”
Just a few days later, reality intervened when a shipment of American artillery shells destined for Ukraine was rerouted to Israel. This followed a decision by the Biden administration in early 2023 to ship 300,000 artillery shells from a U.S. stockpile in Israel that traditionally had been used to resupply the Jewish state in times of crisis. More recently, a Ukrainian official told ABC News that since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas War, deliveries of NATO-standard artillery ammunition and other munitions have plummeted by more than 30 percent. On top of all this, a multibillion-dollar backlog of arms orders to Taiwan persists as China continues to take actions that indicate it is preparing to forcibly seize control of the island nation.
Even the most powerful nation in the history of the world cannot run the world without facing tradeoffs. But with the Biden administration dug in and unresponsive to criticism in a manner that evokes the Bush administration and Iraq in 2004, change will need to be forced on it.
The Biden
