Presidents and other public figures always run the risk that one unscripted sentence or sound bite will end up defining their reputation for centuries to come — Marie Antoinette’s moment involved a tactless evocation of baked goods.

For many, President Biden’s moment arrived when he denigrated one of America’s best television reporters. The White House’s derisiveness toward the press comes as no surprise. On the international stage, Mr. Biden’s hard-edged cynicism has morphed into a kind of incompetence that is kiloparsecs away from Realpolitik. Alarms are ringing overseas. 

Did the president really need to bring his addict son Hunter with him on an extended official visit to Ireland? No. Does he think the national interest is served in prevaricating about his family’s financial links to Communist China? Do President Biden and Secretary Blinken think they can count on a country like Saudi Arabia to reliably prospect for peace in the Middle East and canvass the international community for an end to the war in Ukraine?

Apparently, they do, but the administration’s foreign policy follies are almost guaranteed to backfire — and Israel as much as America could feel the burn. 

The CIA concluded that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the assassination in Turkey in 2018 of a Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. About the only nation in that part of the world, or anywhere for that matter, with a more abysmal reputation for human rights than Saudi Arabia is Iran, with Communist China a sad runner-up. So why would Washington give sanction to Saudi Arabia hosting a high-profile two-day parley on Ukraine?

Riyadh, of course, has of late been up to some innovative  “sportswashing” with the Saudi-owned LIV Golf’s merger with the PGA Tour. The Jeddah meeting was little more than an attempt at peacewashing. America is not a combatant in the Russo-Ukrainian war, though Mr. Biden’s ineptness is bringing us closer to the edge than some realize. But why not have a two-day parley at Boston or San Francisco? Is such a possibility beyond the realm of Mr. Biden’s imagination?

The parley’s participants agreed that any peace agreement should be based on respect for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine and the supremacy of the United Nations Charter. Representatives of more than 30 countries had to fly to Saudi Arabia to get that?  It is the kind of painfully obvious stuff that could have been sent by Secretary Blinken’s assistant via group email. 

Everybody lost time on this one, Ukraine included.

The backslap to Saudi Arabia is not only undercutting America’s own credibility, which is of course a kind of low-cost gift to Moscow and Beijing, but a danger to America’s only democratic friend in the Middle East, the State of Israel.

Often good relations between nations start at the top, and it is no secret that there is no love lost between Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu. Although a possible normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia could be good, in the near term such a development could play more to Washington’s avantage than Jerusalem’s. 

Israeli tourism in Dubai is booming. Israel is said to be eyeing a future rail link to Saudi Arabia. All that is happening on the back of the Abraham Accords and the assumption they will expand to the glittering cities and desolate sands of Arabia. The word on the street, though, is that Mr. Biden is not about to let that happen without Israel first ceding ground on the Iranian nuclear juggernaut. 

Sanctions against the hardline Iranian regime in place under President Trump are, on President Biden’s watch, now in danger of incipient erosion. 

The biggest headache America got from Tehran happened in late 1979, when the regime showed its true colors by taking 52 Americans hostage for more than a year. Israelis have no choice but to live with Iranian threats on a daily basis. The biggest destabilizing force in the Middle East was then and still is Iran. 

Mr. Biden’s game is not lost on Jerusalem. The Saudis and Iranians are each ruthless in their own way. For neither is a peaceful and prosperous Israel a priority. 

Elsewhere the Biden administration shows a disturbing tendency to antagonize allies. Consider the case of  Hungary,  a member of the North Atlantic Treaty.  Under the leadership of Prime Minister Orbán, Hungary has taken a largely contrarian stance on the Ukraine war. Even if Mr. Orbán is not in President Putin’s pocket, his comments create the optics that he is. 

This month Washington cut the validity of our electronic system for travel authorization for Hungarian passport holders traveling to America to one year from two. The security concerns that Mr. Biden’s man at Budapest, David Pressman, cited do not hold up to any kind of real scrutiny — though some mistake a seductive Hungarian accent for a kind of threat. Hungary’s interior minister accused the White House of “taking revenge on Hungarians with the new visa waiver limit.”

Hungary is one of the few countries in Europe to push back against the  LGBTQ agenda that more or less started in America. Then there is Cyprus. As the Sun has previously reported, this month, a Republican of Texas, Congressman Pete Sessions, paid a visit to the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. That Mr. Sessions journeyed to a rogue state recognized by no other country apart from Turkey was strange, regardless of whether he went in an unofficial capacity. The trip raised eyebrows in Greece, one of our most valuable strategic partners, and inflamed anti-American sentiment in the internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus.

After the visit, Turkey feels more emboldened in pressing for a two-state solution to the long-simmering Cyprus problem. That is in defiance of international mediation efforts to reunify Cyprus and flies in the face of UN resolutions calling for the withdrawal of foreign (i.e., Turkish) military personnel from the island. It comes as Turkey seeks to bolster its force posture on the island by reportedly building a new naval base in the illegally annexed northern third of the island. 

Losing friends in smaller countries like Cyprus and Hungary and Israel might just seem like the cost of doing business to some left-leaning Washington insiders. Mr. Biden may be more prone to feathering his own nest than solidifying alliances. Careful, though — when America sheds friendships, count on our enemies to be taking notes.