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Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, in a matter of weeks, President Biden will hand off his authority to a new Commander in Chief, and his administration will submit its stewardship of U.S. foreign and national security policy to the judgment of posterity.

Already, the contours of history are coming into focus. On this administration's watch--and, frequently, at its tacit invitation--the gravest threats to America, our allies, and our global interests have grown and aligned more closely.

Senior administration officials insist that the exact opposite is true and that they are preparing to hand off a world that is safer and more stable than they found it. This sort of spin isn't surprising; it is just profoundly untrue. And nowhere is the administration's revisionist gaslighting more blatant or bizarre than in its account of events in the Middle East.

Yesterday's collapse of the Assad regime in Syria was a stunning close to a half a century of authoritarian rule and 13 years of senseless slaughter, torture, and innocent suffering. Bashar Assad is an agent of Iran, an ally of Russia, and a butcher whose hands are stained with so much innocent blood that the death toll defies precise counting.

The destination of this butcher's flight from Damascus over the weekend is telling. Fellow dictators still find a warm welcome in Putin's Moscow, and, I might add, so do unrepentant traitors like Edward Snowden.

It is quite clear that the recent lightning success of Syrian rebel groups is due, in part, to the distraction of the Assad regime's essential patrons. For more than a decade, assistance from Russia and Iran has shored up the twin pillars of Assad's rule: oppression and fear. But today, Russian attention and resources are tied up in a protracted war of aggression over in Ukraine, and Iran is busy propping up a network of terrorist proxies that Israel has dealt savage blows.

If you ask the Biden administration, this was all part of the plan. The President himself said as much yesterday. He noted that the Assad regime's strongest backers--Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah--are weaker today than they were 4 years ago, as if to suggest that it was his administration's policy that made these events possible. But my colleagues--and, for that matter, America's allies and partners--know a lot better than that. We know that, to the extent that our adversaries are weaker today than they were when the President took office, it is in spite of his chronic hesitation and half measures in the conduct of American foreign policy.

Ukraine has blunted Russian military power, in spite of this administration's unfounded fear of escalation and repeated withholding of lethal assistance. Israel has put Iran and its proxies on the back foot, in spite--in spite--of this administration's repeated efforts to dictate the terms of Israel's military operations and its ongoing freeze on the transfers of essential precision munitions.

If the Assad regime's brutality was an abiding concern for the President or if the ongoing plight of the Syrian people factored meaningfully into his administration's policy, then his National Security Advisor's description of the Middle East, last fall, as ``quieter than it has been for decades'' is even more incongruous than the horrors of October 7 already made it.

If the President now intends to claim credit for bringing a potential end to Syria's grinding civil war, it begs the question why, as Vice President, he agreed with President Obama's decision not to enforce his self-imposed redline on Assad's use of chemical weapons.

The last Democratic administration's approach to Syria helped Russia displace American influence and helped Iran turn it into its staging ground for its terrorist proxies' war on Israel. The current Democratic administration's scolding and hectoring of the Jewish State has made defending against this war more difficult.

The Commander in Chief's record will speak for itself. History will reflect that, if this administration wanted to heed the urging of leaders of both parties in Congress and deliver the sort of lethal capabilities and permissions Ukraine needed to defend against Russian aggression at the speed of relevance, it was fully empowered to do so.

And had this President even once expressed a willingness to take a serious bipartisan approach to the Middle East's primary agents of chaos in Tehran--and its proxies and vassals from Yemen to Syria--it would have found willing partners on this side of the aisle. I made this much crystal clear from the first days of his administration.

At best, the Biden administration has been an impassive observer. At worst, it restrained America's friends from defending themselves and hampered the otherwise transformational success of Israel's operation against the enemies who actually started the war.

In spite of the administration's fixation on deescalation, Israel decimated Hezbollah, the crown jewel of Iran's terror web. While the administration obsessed over the illusion of returning to the stable status quo, Israel actually turned the tables on Iran and its proxies.

Today, there is no longer such a status quo in Syria. After years of war stoked by Russia and Iran, the prospects of a beleaguered Syrian people are certainly complicated and uncertain. But the fall of the Assad regime is an opportunity for our partners in the Middle East to chart a new future and to press the advantage earned by Israel's decisive operations and uproot Iran's remaining influence throughout the region.

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