By Rick Manning
Joe Biden’s presidency started with a series of blunders ranging from creating the current illegal immigrant crisis through his immediate rollback of former President Donald Trump’s successful border security policies to rejoining the Paris Climate Accords and revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. But perhaps the most dangerous policy change Biden made was his decision to remove the Houthi rebels in Yemen from the U.S. foreign terrorist list, as that group now threatens much of the world’s supply chain through missile attacks on cargo shipping using the Suez Canal.
The Houthis are Iranian proxies who control land within Yemen that sits near the Gulf of Aden (southern) entrance to the Red Sea which the Suez Canal connects to the Mediterranean. Completed in 1869, the Suez Canal has been one of the most important trade and naval routes for more than 150 years, yet Biden’s choice to open cash flows for the Houthi rebels has put it in jeopardy.
And it wasn’t only the decision to end the Houthis’ terrorist designation (which the Biden administration partially restored in the past two weeks) but early in his administration, Biden also dropped U.S. financial sanctions against Iran, allowing the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism to gain access to more than $100 billion in oil and other revenues.
Biden’s disastrous Iran-favoring Middle East policy also authorized Iran to access another $6 billion in assets weeks before their Hamas proxies’ attack on Israeli civilians resulted in 1,200 deaths on October 7. Subsequently as many as 20,000 people have died as a direct result of the attack with military action in Gaza likely for the foreseeable future.
Cargo ships carrying Saudi oil and containers of Chinese and Indian made goods use Suez Canal route to get their products to Europe and the Americas. Many of those cargo transport companies, like the shipping colossus Maersk, are choosing to avoid the short-cut and go around Africa to move goods around the globe.
When former President Trump identified the Houthis as a “foreign terrorist group” denying them access to capital around the world, many Boomers and Gen Xers immediately wondered what happened to the Blowfish.
It wasn’t until we got the current mindless blowhard in the White House that we discovered that the Houthis were no joke as they had the capacity to shut down one of the major chokepoints for trade in the world.
Of course, the current occupant of the White House’s Iranian appeasement policy has also resulted in the Iranian navy seeking to disrupt cargo traffic at the Straits of Hormuz through which a great deal of Middle Eastern oil flows.
Unfortunately, Biden’s Iranian and its terrorist proxies’ partnership may go down in history as his biggest blunder of all. This is likely true even with the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal which left $80 billion of U.S. military equipment in the hands of the Taliban terrorists who are shipping it around the world, Biden’s green agenda which is seeking to systematically convert our nation’s automobile fleet to electric vehicles which don’t work in cold weather, his attack on expanding the electricity generation, and his open borders immigration policy.
Joe Biden’s presidential wreckage will be difficult to fix, but creating the capacity for an Islamo-fascist Iran to effectively blockade the export of much of the Middle Eastern oil upon which the world depends puts us at the brink of a war which could possibly be more destructive than World War II.
World War I was started by a Serbian killing the Archduke of Austria. World War II became more likely by the Hitler enabling British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policies which emboldened Hitler to advance his plans to take Europe as his own. Let’s hope World War III is not started due to an American president’s enabling a terrorist regime and its proxies to run amok in the world’s powder keg.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
