Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro took aim at the Biden administration for their feckless response to the attacks on shipping that continue across the Middle East.
“The cost of shipping has markedly increased,” he noted. “According to a chart from Axios, the average shipping container rates for particular routes have spiked dramatically toward the end of December. That’s when the Houthis started attacking shipping in the Middle East. The cost of shipping from Asia to the Mediterranean areas has jumped wildly.”
“Who bears the cost?” he asked rhetorically. “You bear that cost. We all bear that cost because Joe Biden is allowing the Houthis to basically gum up the works in the Red Sea and in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. Why? Because Democrats keep hoping that if we’re sweet and if we’re nice, then things aren’t going to escalate any further when it’s precisely the opposite tack that gets things to calm down in the Middle East.”
“When you want to calm things in the Middle East, you know what you do? You make clear that if you screw with the United States, things go really badly for you,” he declared, adding, “That’s why everyone in the Middle East was afraid to start up while Donald Trump was president because they thought, ‘This guy is nuts. This guy is crazy. He might just fire a missile at my house.’”
“Meanwhile, we have Joe Biden saying, ‘I don’t know, should we touch the Houthis? Should we not, maybe, should remove an aircraft carrier from the Mediterranean? Why do you think this thing is lasting as long as it is?’” he said.
“So Hezbollah just keeps firing anti-tank missiles into northern Israel,” he pointed out. “Why do you think they’re doing that? If the United States said, ‘Listen, one of those missiles goes awry and it hits an American, you will not exist tomorrow morning” — which is true, it’s actually the reality — the firing would stop tomorrow morning.’”
“But Joe Biden is too cowardly to do any of that,” he posited. “So instead, you have Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm declaring her hope that things are going to calm down, shipping will probably get better, even though Maersk is now saying that they’re going to completely avoid the Red Sea, which, of course, creates a supply chain bottleneck.”
“Hopefully, if it doesn’t escalate further, we’ll be okay,“ Granholm had stated.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILYWIRE+ APP
“Hopefully, if it doesn’t escalate further?” Shapiro said incredulously. “It’s their responsibility to make sure it doesn’t escalate further.”
“And therein lies the problem: They don’t want the responsibility,” he concluded.