Remember that $230 million ‘humanitarian pier’ that the Americans moored off the coast of Gaza? It was announced with great fanfare in Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in March. But earlier this month, the White House quietly mothballed the project. It had not been built to withstand inclement weather, you see, so sections of the causeway broke off and washed up among the sunbathers on Tel Aviv’s Frishman Beach. During the first week in which the pier had been operational, three-quarters of the aid it delivered had been stolen by unspecified Palestinians on the way to a UN warehouse.

Who would have thought that the administration responsible for the chaotic Afghan withdrawal would botch this project too? But if the pier succeeded in one way, it was in providing us with a metaphor for much of Joe Biden’s foreign policy.

Biden’s appeasement of Iran has led the regime to become more powerful than ever. It is now just a week or two from producing enough fissile material for a bomb, as Antony Blinken confessed in Aspen last week, and has learned that it can attack Israel with huge force and expect the free world to restrict itself to defence. He failed to deter Russia from invading Ukraine, and his limited support for Kyiv has locked the country in a cycle of degradation. The war in Gaza – which could have been over long ago had the White House shown some leadership – wears on. Across the world, autocracies, terrorists and troublemakers have learned to see the United States as a gorgon identifying as a runt.

Israel has moved Biden’s........

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