China is threatening retaliation against the United States because of a visit by Taiwan’s president; Russia kidnapped an American journalist days after shooting down a $32 million American drone; and Brazil is allowing Iran’s warships to port and is now doing business with China strictly on a yuan basis.

In other words, as Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, put it during a hearing this Wednesday, “The threats we face today are more formidable than at any point in the last 20 years.”

How are the State and Defense Departments responding to such threats? Well, the State Department is meeting with Ibram X. Kendi, the well-known critical race theory consultant who demands that government racially discriminate well into the future, for guidance on world affairs.

As for the DOD, it can’t even promise Congress that it won’t hire or promote based on the race of the person in question.

As recent hearings and budget proposals make clear, both State and DOD are doubling down on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). They are requesting several million in additional dollars to focus even more on race and sex—matters completely unrelated to a sound national defense policy, if not inimical to it. DOD’s first DEI budget in FY 2023 was $87 million; this year’s budget submission for FY 2024 was $114 million—more than a 30% increase.

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Don’t expect, however, that the Biden administration will at any moment admit that perception of its foreign policy weakness—to which such a focus on DEI and CRT clearly contribute—has now become provocative.

Asked at the hearing by Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) whether he had any regrets over Biden’s catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin simply said, “I don’t have any regrets.”

“Mr. Austin, that is very telling,” Banks responded.

Indeed, it was just a few months after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan that Russia began amassing large numbers of troops on Ukraine’s border, with results we now know.

As Rogers detailed, the list of threats has grown since the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which the committee chairman termed “disastrous.”

“North Korea is lobbing ICBMs over Japan and threatening us with nuclear annihilation on a near-weekly basis. Iran continues to fund and equip terrorists targeting Americans. Last week, one American died, and seven were wounded when the Ayatollah’s terrorist proxies attacked our bases in Syria,” Rogers noted, before concluding that the “most concerning” worry was the strengthening alliance between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

And yet, under questioning in a Military Personnel Subcommittee hearing on March 23, a senior Pentagon official admitted that the men and women charged with leading us out of these crises could be hired or promoted based on their race. In other words, there’s no way to tell whether they are actually qualified to defend America’s national security interests when those interests are under attack from every direction.

Rep. Banks asked Gil Cisneros, Jr., Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, “Will you personally commit to opposing any effort to promote or recruit service members based on their race or gender? Can you commit to that, at least commit to that personally today?”

Cisneros could not give that assurance. “To solely—to not recruit?” Cisneros protested incredulously that the question was even posed. “I believe we need a diverse pool. It’s important for us to recruit members that are—that are diverse!”

He repeated a phrase that has become the standard answer when a Biden official doesn’t want to admit that they’re hiring based on race: “I believe it’s important to recruit a force that looks like America.”

But Cisneros’s mumbling was Ciceronian compared to what the State Department’s Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice (yes, that position exists), Desirée Cormier Smith, said about her meeting with Kendi.

In a tweet that summarized her meeting with him in Boston, she wrote, “I had a great discussion today w/@DrIbram about the ongoing, global impact of white supremacy & the importance of collective effort across sectors to build a world where racial & ethnic equity & social justice prevail.”

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That Kendi is advising the State Department at such a time speaks volumes about the unseriousness of an administration beset with global problems, or indeed, points to their causes.

Kendi is not usually considered in the same league as Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, or Henry Kissinger when it comes to the art of war or world affairs. He’s best known for having condemned the system State should be promoting: “Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” he said.

He also wrote: “The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

So why is the Biden State Department even meeting with him? When you repeat that “diversity is our strength” often enough, you end up believing it, no matter how glaringly it contradicts any defense policy that relies on a sense of common interests.

Toward the end of the 20th century, JFK adviser Arthur Schlessinger asked us in this century to think of the following problem: “What happens when people of different ethnic origins, speaking different languages and professing different religions, settle in the same geographical locality and live under the same political sovereignty? Unless a common purpose binds them together, tribal antagonisms will drive them apart. In the century darkly ahead, civilization faces a critical question: What is it that holds a nation together?”

That’s not something Cisneros, Cornier Smith, Kendi—or Biden—seem to be considering.