One Year After Oct. 7, American Voters Face Stark Foreign Policy Choice | Opinion

Within minutes of Hamas jihadists breaching the Israeli border on Oct. 7, 2023, and commencing the largest slaughter of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, Western leftists and other defenders of the genocidal Palestinian-Arab cause rallied around a talking point: “This did not occur in a vacuum.” The claim, blithely offered by armchair revolutionaries without even acknowledging the many hundreds of butchered babies, sadistically tortured families, raped women, and young music festivalgoers taken hostage, was that Israel had somehow impelled the horrific rampage on its own civilians. Those with a functioning moral compass recognize this as obvious terror apologia.

Reflecting back one year later on the Hamas massacre and the current Middle East imbroglio in which Israel is now fighting a seven-front war, however, I wonder whether the terrorist apologists may have had a point. That is not to suggest that these moral monsters were in any way whatsoever correct to justify, defend, or praise a pogrom so barbaric that it would have made Heinrich Himmler blush. But the mini-jihadists were correct to suggest there was a broader geopolitical context to the massacre—just a totally different one than what they had in mind. The actually relevant context was the weak, failed, and Iran-emboldening foreign policy of former President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris.

As Americans get ready to select our next commander-in-chief, the stark contrast between the failed foreign policy of successive Democratic administrations and the successful foreign policy of the interregnum Republican administration, that of former and perhaps future President Donald Trump, is instructive.

The basic Obama-Biden-Harris foreign policy doctrine is simple: Reward America’s enemies and punish America’s friends. Obama famously sought to create “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, America’s most dependable and national interest-aligned Middle East ally. He removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office—a symbolic slap in the face to the United Kingdom, with which America has (had?) a “special relationship.” He emboldened the Islamist fanatics in Tehran, bamboozling a skeptical American public with his wretched nuclear accord and even secretly sending $400 million in wooden pallets of cash to the mullahs. The Biden-Harris administration has doubled down on every count: It has been the most anti-Israel administration since Israel’s founding in 1948, it has lavished the mullahs with billions in ransom payments and sanction waivers, and it has continued the Obama-Biden administration’s mollycoddling of America’s Chinese Communist Party civilizational archfoe.

The results of the Obama-Biden-Harris foreign policy doctrine have been catastrophic. Across both Democratic administrations, we have witnessed unprecedented Islamist fanaticism and murderous jihadism across the Middle East, Russian President Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine twice (in both 2014 and 2022), a Chinese military that feels free to brazenly intimidate core American allies like Japan and the Philippines, and the emergence more generally of a breathtaking Chinese global footprint—from the sprawling Eurasian “Belt and Road Initiative” to Beijing’s menacing military presence in our own hemisphere. This is an abominable track record.

The basic Trump foreign policy doctrine is equally simple, but the opposite: Reward America’s friends and punish America’s enemies. Trump was by far the most pro-Israel president in American history: He moved the U.S. Embassy to its rightful home in Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, defunded anti-Israel UN bodies, and much more. Trump was also, by just as far, the most anti-Iran president since the Islamic Revolution overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979. His secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, bankrupted the mullahs, isolating and sanctioning them for all their malign activities. He restored America’s warm relations with the nationalist, non-Islamist Sunni Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. He was, notwithstanding Russia collusion hoax-induced hysteria to the contrary, very tough on Putin. He became the first president since Richard Nixon’s fateful 1972 visit to Beijing to fundamentally reorient U.S.-China relations—for the better.

The results of the Trump foreign policy doctrine were tremendous. The Iranian regime was contained and, due to oil export sanctions, near the brink of insolvency. There was transformative, generational Middle East peace in the form of the Abraham Accords between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. European nations paid their fair share toward NATO, and Putin was kept at bay. American relations with Japan and India thrived, while Chinese President Xi Jinping was restrained.

The contrast could not possibly be clearer.

I saw Trump speak Monday evening in Doral, Florida, on the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre. Trump emphasized that the massacre would never have happened if he were president. He is correct on that score. And to that extent, it is thus true that the pogrom “did not occur in a vacuum.”

The American people could not ask for a clearer electoral contrast. Choose wisely.

Josh Hammer is Newsweek senior editor-at-large, host of “The Josh Hammer Show” and “America on Trial with Josh Hammer,” a syndicated columnist, senior counsel for the Article III Project, and a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation. Subscribe here for “The Josh Hammer Report,” a Newsweek newsletter, as well as Josh Hammer’s Subtext text message group. X: @josh_hammer.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.