The Secretary of State's refusal to explain what occurred at a British airbase is a triumph of muscular diplomacy. Demanding evidence of an event before retaliating is exactly what our enemies want.
The coward left is once again demanding facts. After Secretary of State Marco Rubio went on Fox News to announce that a "very serious" incident had occurred at a Royal Air Force base in England, the usual chorus of entitlement immediately piped up, asking what the incident was, who was responsible, and whether anything had actually happened at all. Let's be honest: demanding details during an unspecified, detail-free crisis is a pedestrian way to view geopolitics.
The sheer gravity of not knowing what took place in Gloucestershire cannot be overstated. Was it a coordinated cyberattack, a targeted drone strike, or a local teenager throwing a lukewarm sausage roll at a B-52? The beauty of Secretary Rubio's statesmanship is that he refuses to burden the American public with the specifics.
I was recently having breakfast at the Mayflower with a source close to leadership at the State Department, and they confirmed my worst fears on background. Something definitely occurred at a time and place, the source told me, looking nervously at a waiter. They assured me that the consequences of that occurrence would be dealt with in a manner consistent with things that have happened.
Just last night, I was sipping a remarkably complex Pinot with the CEO of a major aerospace firm—a man whose company manufactures the very bombers that stage out of Fairford for missions toward Iran. He was practically vibrating with patriotic concern. He told me that if an incident has occurred, then it is imperative we replace every single piece of hardware on that base, just to be safe. You simply cannot put a price tag on recovering from a vague and undefined disruption.
This is the kind of muscular, ambiguous posture the previous administration sorely lacked. When you commit yourself to absolutely no concrete allegations, you retain maximum tactical flexibility.
Naturally, the usual suspects on Capitol Hill are whining about congressional oversight and knowing who the United States is supposed to be mad at. If you need Marco Rubio to draw you a map of exactly which foreign entity did exactly what at an allied staging ground, you frankly do not understand how great power competition works.
Let us examine what we do know. We know, because the Secretary told Fox News, that the incident clearly involved a foreign actor. Do you understand how chilling that is? A foreign actor, operating on a British airbase, in a foreign country. The audacity of non-Americans existing internationally is staggering.
RAF Fairford is a critical staging ground for U.S. bombers. Without it, how are we supposed to project unspecified aerial menace toward Tehran?
The messaging from the State Department has been flawless. By refusing to answer whether anyone was hurt, whether anything was damaged, or whether the foreign actor in question was a state intelligence service or just Colin Firth taking a wrong turn off the A417, Rubio has completely paralyzed our adversaries.
The less we know about the catastrophe, the more terrifying it mathematically becomes.
Pendelton is exactly right. If Rubio were to come out and say, for instance, that a Russian operative severed a fiber-optic cable, we would be limited to being angry about a severed cable.
By keeping the incident entirely within the realm of the imagination, the administration has ingeniously allowed every American to project their own deepest, most visceral fears onto a quiet runway in the Cotswolds.
Perhaps the foreign actor was China, deploying a hypersonic balloon to steal the classified recipe for the mess hall baked beans. Perhaps it was Iran, psychically projecting bad vibes into the cockpit of a B-1B Lancer. The uncertainty is the weapon.
Frankly, it is time the American voter learned to respect the terrifying void of missing information. I am tired of the entitlement of the modern electorate, sitting on their couches, demanding to know if a runway was bombed or if a raccoon simply chewed through a perimeter fence.
When a sitting Secretary of State looks solemnly into a television camera and announces that an incident happened, your job as a patriot is not to ask follow-up questions. Your job is to immediately support a blank-check military appropriation.
The optics of hesitation are fatal. If we wait for a damage assessment, or a culprit, or even a basic noun describing the physical event that transpired, we project weakness to Beijing, Moscow, and whoever currently runs the local parish council in Fairford.
We must strike back with overwhelming, unspecified force. We must authorize the Pentagon to do something, somewhere, to someone, until the message is sent. Only then can we ensure that whatever happened in England never, ever happens again.