Have you seen this video of President Biden?
Biden seems unsure not only of what he’s doing or, indeed, even where he is or why. And this is in the middle of the day when, presumably, he is at his most alert.
Which is to say this is the time of day when our enemies specifically do NOT get up to no good. That’s why we have the political campaign convention of the 3 AM phone call… because that’s when bad shit happens… at 3 AM.
So imagine that the Chinese decide one day, at 3 AM, to sieze Taiwan. Remember, the Chinese are already there. Sure, we have a token Naval force in the area, but it is separated from its command, control, and supply chain by thousands of miles and several time zones. The Chinese can throw a rock and hit Taiwan with it. In other words, if the Chinese decided to strike hard and fast and with surprise, they could likely control Taiwan in a matter of minutes. And there wouldn’t be a damned thing we could do about it. There is no world in which we are going to land an expeditionary force on the beaches of Taiwan to oust an entrenched Chinese adversary. Not in this lifetime. Fer crissakes, we can’t even defeat a poorly-armed 6th-Century apocalyptic cult in the middle of the freaking desert that literally wants to die.
But leave that reality aside for the moment. OK so the Chinese have taken Taiwain… it’s 3 AM in Washington DC and Biden gets the call. Except Biden is seventy-four years old, suffering badly from cognitive decline, and he’s dead asleep. In a dangerous world where seconds count, how long does it take to get Biden conscious enough to understand what’s happening, much less to get his degraded brain actively engaged on a possible response.
Look, I don’t believe that there would be anything we could do if the Chinese decided to sieze Taiwain, but no one in this Administration would ever admit that. They want you to believe that Biden has everything under control. So these concerns I’m raising only require taking the adminstration’s claims of total and complete competence at face value. If you’re gonna watch the movie, you gotta buy a ticket.
I think the real answer to my question is that a repsonse would be decided upon and set in motion long before that first knock on Biden’s bedroom door at 3 AM. The real concern would not be “how quickly can we get Biden engaged on this crisis?” but “How long is it going to take us to get Biden in good enough physical shape to address the Nation on TV so that he can read on the teleprompter what we’ve already done on his behalf?”
Yeah that’s right. I think that when the rubber meets the road, both Biden and Harris are essentially out of the decision loop. And the thing is, I’m not sure that makes me feel any better.