[Craving even more FPM content? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more. Click here to sign up.]

Addressing the UN General Assembly last Tuesday, President Biden said, “Hezbollah, unprovoked, joined the Oct. 7 attack launching rockets into Israel.” This banal statement at least wasn’t qualified with a scolding of Israel like those that Biden and his foreign policy crew have indulged in for nearly a year.

Equally useless, but more fantastical was the follow-up statement: “a diplomatic solution is still possible” and “remains the only path to lasting security.” The West, especially the U.S., has been on a diplomatic snipe hunt for a deal with Hamas to release their dwindling number of hostages, including seven Americans.

Yet, as the Journal points out, “Israel gave those months over to diplomacy on its northern front, even as Hezbollah fired 8,500 rockets and forced 60,000 Israelis from their homes. But the U.S.-led talks went nowhere as Mr. Biden pressed Israel not to hit Hezbollah too hard and allowed billions of dollars in oil revenue to flow to the terrorists’ masters in Iran.” But what should we expect when foreign policy naifs like Biden et al. are seeking an honest deal with terrorists who for decades have rejected any number of “deals,” and blatantly violate every one they’ve signed?

But the lessons of history and the common sense one should learn from experience, cannot penetrate the fog of foreign policy delusions, especially when electoral and ideological self-interests are at work. Biden’s failures with Hamas and Hezbollah are just a few of many on his watch.

As Walter Russell Mead catalogues: “No administration in American history has been as committed to Middle East diplomacy as this one. Yet have an administration’s diplomats ever had less success? Mr. Biden tried and failed to get Iran back into a nuclear agreement with the U.S. He tried and failed to get a new Israeli-Palestinian dialogue on track. He tried and failed to stop the civil war in Sudan. He tried and failed to get Saudi Arabia to open formal diplomatic relations with Israel. He tried to settle the war in Yemen through diplomacy, and when that failed and the Houthis began attacking shipping in the Red Sea, the ever-undaunted president sought a diplomatic solution to that problem too. He failed again.”

But despite that roll of dishonor, Biden wasn’t finished with his “rules-based order” fever dreams: “My fellow leaders, I truly believe we’re at another inflection point in world history,” Mr. Biden said. “Will we stand behind the principles that unite us? Will we stand firm against aggression?” Without mind-concentrating action, such globalist, “rules-based order” boilerplate means weakness to our enemies and bluster followed by inaction. And such pantomimes are despicable when deployed to camouflage the betrayal of an important international friend and ally who has faced inhuman, genocidal aggression for decades.

Such dangerous blunders are unconscionable, given the lessons of history that warn against relying too much on the power of diplomatic engagement to resolve conflicts that originate in passionate beliefs and foundational principle. The Middle East, especially the conflict between Israel and Palestinian Arabs, gives us more than a century of such monitory failures.

Take the 1993 Oslo Accord. This pact included Israel’s surrendering territory in Judea and Samaria to the control of Palestinian Arabs. A year later the Palestinian Authority was created as the controlling authority that still governs parts of the so-called West Bank. These developments, which came with billions in Western aid, were supposed to be the foundations of an eventual Palestinian state.

But it didn’t take the Oslo Accord long to became the Oslo War, as Middle East historian Efraim Karsh called it. Rather than a Palestinian state and peace with Israel, the lasting legacy of the Oslo Accord is a reminder of the failures of “diplomatic engagement” based on wishful thinking. Terror attacks between 1994-1999 totaled 215, roughly equal to the pre-Oslo number. Terrorism continued to escalate in subsequent years. In 2000, “According to first-hand accounts,” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak “offered Palestinians an ambitious peace package which included far-reaching concessions on Jerusalem, borders, settlements, refugees and other issues.”

Proving once again Israeli diplomat Abba Eban’s observation that the Palestinians “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” PA president––and head of the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization–– Yasser Arafat instead launched the so-called Second Intifada, which in five years slaughtered over a thousand Israelis. The killing didn’t start to abate until Israel walled off Judea and Samaria from Israeli territory.

But why would anyone trust Arafat as an honest negotiating partner in the first place? As Efraim Karsh continues, “PLO chairman Yasser Arafat was a diehard man of war who made violence, dislocation, and mayhem the defining characteristics of his career. In 1970, he nearly brought about the destruction of Jordan. Five years later, he helped trigger the horrendous Lebanese civil war, one of the bloodiest conflicts in modern Middle Eastern history, which raged for more than a decade and claimed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. In 1990-91, he supported the brutalization of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, at an exorbitant cost to the Palestinians living there, thousands of whom were murdered in revenge attacks while hundreds of thousands more were expelled after Kuwait’s liberation. In between these disasters, Arafat made the Palestinian national movement synonymous with violence and turned the PLO into one of the world’s most murderous terror organizations with the overarching goal of bringing about Israel’s demise.”

Only willful blindness, desperation, naiveté, or rank political opportunism can explain such stupidity. What’s worse, the sorry saga of the Munich conference in 1938 should’ve been the only lesson in the dangers of feckless diplomacy we needed. Just five years of Hitler in power had acquainted France and England with his aggressive evil: The dissolution of labor unions, the antisemitic Nuremberg race laws, the political prisoners, the jam-packed Party Rallies, the remilitarizing of the Rhineland, the withdrawal from the League of Nations, the invasion and occupation of Austria, and of course Hitler’s documentation of his malign ambitions more than a decade earlier in Mein Kampf.

British ambassadors to Germany, moreover, reported accurately Hitler’s aims and his fanatic support from the German people. Sir Horace Rumbold reported to Whitehall after Hitler’s election in 1933 about the Fuhrer’s ideology: “Pacifism is the deadliest sin. . . . Will and determination are of the highest order. Only brute force can ensure the survival of the race,” which requires that “the new Reich must gather within its fold all the scattered German elements in Europe,” and the young “educated to the maximum of aggressiveness,” and the German people instilled with “courage and passionate hatred.”

How could anyone believe that diplomacy, negotiation, or the “meeting of minds” necessary for a legitimate agreement could work with such a fanatic and his followers?

As well as ignoring history, the West’s idealistic foreign policy predicated on “diplomatic engagement” and the “rules-based international order” has committed one of the cardinal sins of diplomacy set out by historian of Soviet terror and genocide Robert Conquest: “The central point is less that people misunderstand other people, or that cultures misunderstand other cultures, than that they have no notion that this may be the case. They assume that the light of their own parochial common sense is enough. And they frame policies based on illusions. Yet how profound is this difference between political psychologies and between the motivations of different political traditions, and how deep-set and how persistent these attitudes are!”

Such blindness to the variety and complexity of human diversity leads, Conquest writes, to the “crucial problem of making the intellectual and imaginative effort not to project our ideas of common sense or natural motivation onto the products of totally different cultures.”

Finally, this failure of imagination that Conquest warns against has vitiated the West’s relations with the Muslim world since the creation of Israel. In the postwar period, the West misread the Iranian Revolution as an anticolonial movement for national self-determination, human rights, and freedom. In fact, it was a religious revolution sparked by the Shah’s Westernizing reforms, which the revolution’s leader the Ayatollah Khomeini called agents carrying out the “abolition of the laws of Islam.”

This mistake has debased our response to Iran’s aggression against us, from the hostage crisis of 1979, to today’s violence fomented by Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Our default reaction, with few exceptions, has prioritized “diplomatic engagement” and feckless negotiations carried on in bad faith by Iran’s clerical leaders.

And the most dangerous of these diplomatic farces has been the “Iran nuclear deal” that brought Iran––through nearly a blood-stained decade of violations and terrorism––to the brink of possessing nuclear weapons. Yet despite that feckless history––which Donald Trump stopped, but and the Biden administration resumed with his cringing appeasement of Iran––the Dems’ foreign policy operatives continue to keep the deal on life-support. But the diplomacy serves another purpose: to camouflage our betrayal of Israel, the primary target of Iran’s nuclear ambitions to conduct a second Holocaust and dominate the regions.

Biden’s claim that “a diplomatic solution is still possible” and “remains the only path to lasting security” is sheer folly when dealing with a regime that is motivated by a spiritual imperative. Only force that neutralizes the threat can create “lasting peace” for Israel, our other allies in the region, and our own country. Israel knows this eternal truth of conflict, and gave the West an object-lesson in deterrence last week when it decapitated Hezbollah’s leadership, including head honcho Hassan Nasrallah, and concentrated the mullah’s minds as well.

Joe Biden and his foreign policy advisors need to learn this lesson too, and stop urging Israel to show “restraint” and “de-escalation,” as the Wall Street Journal put it. Such browbeating of an ally fighting for its life is nothing but shameless betrayal.