"The Biden record on national-security policy gives plenty of basis for criticism. A normal opposition party would have been investigating why the administration was caught so unprepared by the collapse of the Afghan military in 2021. U.S. military assistance to Kyiv was dangerously stingy in the year before Russia’s invasion in February 2022, as Adrian Karatnycky’s forthcoming history of contemporary Ukraine details. Since the invasion, the Biden administration has hesitated on many occasions to provide potentially decisive weapons for fear of aggravating Moscow. When the White House eventually got over those qualms, the fears were each time exposed as groundless. Yet the lesson was never learned for the next round. And now, in the Red Sea, the Biden administration has so far refrained from decisive action to deter the attacks on international shipping by Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen. Some Republicans—those still willing to act as members of a normal opposition party—have indeed criticized the Biden administration for being too tardy or too timid against this threat or that. In October, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, rightly accused the president of “prolonging” the war in Ukraine by offering only half measures."