EDITORIAL: Actions, not words, needed to reassure U.S. allies

The most soaring rhetoric in the world rings hollow when one knows it won’t be backed up by action. Both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris recently demonstrated that.

Start with Ms. Harris, who visited Singapore and Vietnam this week. The trip was supposed to reassure the two nations that the United States would stand with them against China’s increasingly aggressive regional activities. The trip had a political benefit for Ms. Harris as well. As Mr. Biden bungled the Afghanistan withdrawal, she would get to dodge responsibility for the administration’s failures. Undoubtedly, her handlers hoped this mission would help her look presidential.

She said the right things, including directly addressing China.

“Beijing’s actions continue to undermine the rules-based order and threaten the sovereignty of nations,” she said in a Singapore speech. “The United States stands with our allies and partners in the face of these threats.”

The promise to stand with our allies might sound familiar. For weeks, Mr. Biden has claimed that American citizens and Afghans who helped the U.S. will be able to leave.

“The United States stands by its commitment that we’ve made to these people, and it includes other vulnerable Afghans, such as women leaders and journalists,” Mr. Biden said last Friday.

Earlier this week, Mr. Biden broke that promise by pledging to end evacuations by Aug. 31. Many non-White House sources, including Democrats in Congress, readily acknowledged that would leave thousands of American citizens and green-card holders behind. That doesn’t included tens of thousands of Afghans who once helped the United States.

Mr. Biden is willing to abandon many of them to the murderous Taliban regime. The United States even gave the Taliban the names of some of our citizens and Afghan allies, supposedly to help them get through Taliban checkpoints. A more fitting description of such information is “kill list.”

Standing with America in Afghanistan didn’t work out so well. On Thursday, it got worse. A suicide bomber struck the airport killing at least 13 U.S. service members. It was the deadliest attack against the U.S. military in more than a decade.

“We will hunt you down and make you pay,” Mr. Biden vowed in a Thursday speech. Given the past month, those words seem like a performative vow for justice, not a promise backed by the mightiest military in the history of the world.

If the president is too timid to strike back at terrorists who kill U.S. troops, what does that say about the administration’s promises to stand with our allies in Southeast Asia?