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Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, the partners, puppets, and proxies of America's biggest adversaries spent a busy weekend repressing and killing innocent people.

On Saturday, in the Golan Heights, Israeli Druze children were playing soccer when Hezbollah launched a rocket made in Iran and killed 12 of them. On Sunday, Venezuela's communist dictator hijacked an election, promising the suffering people of his country even more brutal days to come.

We live in a world where thuggish repression and terrorist violence are increasingly common. Tragically, the slaughter of innocent children by terrorists is not surprising. Neither, unfortunately, is a stooge of the world's most powerful authoritarian's tightening his own chokehold on power.

But one thing doesn't ever get less shocking or alarming: the continued naivete with which our leaders respond. The Secretary of State says the Biden-Harris administration has ``serious concerns that the result announced does not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people.''

Well, many of us have serious and longstanding concerns that the administration does not know how to credibly change the calculus of America's adversaries. Autocrats don't care about disapproving looks from Western diplomats.

Don't believe me? Ask the mullahs in Tehran how worried they were about stern condemnations of their ongoing nuclear enrichment efforts.

We certainly don't have to wonder whether promises of sanction relief from Washington succeeded in convincing Nicolas Maduro to permit a free and fair election.

``Concern'' is not a strategy. And speeches, for that matter, are not policy, especially when they are not backed by facts and by force.

Last week, President Biden tooted the horn of his own foreign policy and declared proudly that ``the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.'' Well, that was news to America's servicemembers deployed in harm's way.

The very next day, Iran-backed terrorists attacked U.S. personnel in Iraq and in Syria again. For months, at his orders, U.S. Navy destroyers have expended more than $1 billion in high-tech munitions to intercept the Houthis' Iran-made arsenal of missiles and drones in exchange for no measurable increase in deterrence.

It is well and good to insist America is not at war, but a growing list of authoritarians, rogues, and strongmen are at war with us. The President's failure to respond decisively to threats may have let him believe we are not at war, but the same failure has emboldened our adversaries.

Time and again, the Biden-Harris administration has limited support, agonized over perceived risks of escalation, and tried to micromanage the way our friends in Ukraine and Israel actually defend themselves. In Secretary Blinken's first public comment after Hezbollah's most recent strike, he insisted that ``we don't want to see it spread.'' Well, neither did Israel on October 6, before Hamas spread murderous violence into peaceful kibbutzim, in violation of a cease-fire agreement. And neither does Israel now, as its military continues to focus on finishing the job against Hamas and building the pressure necessary to secure a stable peace.

There is simply no question Iran and its proxies are the instigators and aggressors in this conflict. They have planned and prepared this violence for years. And they will escalate, spread, and perpetuate it until it is no longer in their interests to do so.

If the so-called international community wants an end to the war in Gaza and chaos in the region, they can do more than issue statements expressing concern about escalation. It is past time for civilized countries to present Tehran with cold consequences, with heavy pressure on the leaders responsible for the campaign of death and destruction across the Middle East. Instead, Western leaders have repeatedly blamed the victim.

This is the message sent by Democrats who boycotted the joint address to Congress by the democratically elected Prime Minister of Israel. This is the message sent by their presumptive Presidential nominee who, instead of extending a hand of solidarity, pressured a friend and ally to cease military operations to defend itself.

This sort of pressure will please the American left, but restraining Israel also pleases the butchers in Tehran.

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