President Donald Trump said yesterday that we are “on the brink of World War III” after a suicide drone killed three American soldiers and injured another 34 in Jordan. “If I had been president, this attack would never have happened, it would never have even had a chance. Just like the Iran-backed Hamas attack on Israel never happened, the Ukraine war never happened. And now there will be peace all over the world,” President Trump said. “Our country cannot survive with Joe Biden as commander in chief.”
Of course, there is an irony in scoring political points over the deaths of military personnel. Yesterday’s US combat death toll was said to be the first in three years under President Joe Biden’s administration. About 45 service members died in the war in Afghanistan under President Donald Trump, a conflict that President Joe Biden ended in 2021.
Americans compare President Trump’s relative success record to President Biden’s three years of increasing instability.
However, Mr. Trump is not necessarily wrong in pointing out that the world has become more unstable under the Biden administration. President Trump wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan, but he did not do so for fear of destabilizing the situation. Biden’s withdrawal was shocking. It appears to have emboldened the West’s enemies, Russia, Iran, and China, and made the world situation more difficult.
President Trump’s approach — what he calls “peace through strength” in capital letters — also included Iran, which the White House blames for the weekend’s attacks. “Thanks to my maximum pressure policy, the Iranian regime was able to barely scrape together $2 in terrorist proxy funding.”
That said, President Trump’s abandonment of the Obama-Biden era nuclear deal has put Iran at a disadvantage, but this is an exaggeration. The Biden administration is attempting a contradictory approach, continuing the Trump-era strategy of isolating Iran while at the same time reviving the Obama-era detente approach. This unfreezes around $6bn (£47bn) of Iranian assets in Qatar, with a further $10bn (£78bn) still in place after the October 7 Hamas atrocities in Israel. has been unfrozen.