Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sure can pick winners in their quest to cut deals in foreign policy.

After freeing notorious Russian arms trafficking kingpin Viktor Bout in exchange for U.S. basketball player Brittney Griner, who had been sentenced to a draconian prison term in Russia on a minor drug violation, which was about the most lopsided trade imaginable, we can see what kind of deal that was from this pair of gullible fools who gave away the store.

Bout is back in business, selling arms to the Yemeni Houthi rebels, who literally at war with the U.S. Navy.

According to the Wall Street Journal, which ran this exclusive on its front page:

Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death,” walked out of a U.S. jail almost two years ago in a trade with Moscow for U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner. Now he is back in business, trying to broker the sale of small arms to Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants.

The 57-year-old, whose life reportedly inspired the 2005 Hollywood movie, “Lord of War,” starring Nicolas Cage, spent decades selling Soviet-made weapons in Africa, South America and the Middle East before being arrested in 2008 in a U.S. law-enforcement sting operation.

Since his release, Bout has joined a pro-Kremlin far-right party and won a seat in a local assembly in 2023, seemingly turning the page on his days as an arms broker. But when Houthi emissaries went to Moscow in August to negotiate the purchase of $10 million worth of automatic weapons, they encountered a familiar face: the mustachioed Bout, according to a European security official and other people familiar with the matter.

So the monster is out and about, supplying the crazed and radical Houthis as his "client," making lots of money for himself to boot.

The U.S. Navy has been handed the dirty job of stopping this high-seas lunacy, or at least protecting global shipping lanes in the Red Sea region as the Houthi terrorists blow up tanker after tanker in sustained warfare.

The Houthis, in fact, are a pawn of Iran, claiming they're out to halt global shipping through terrorism in the interest of halting Israel's war on Hamas. Now we can see that they're also a pawn of Russia, as there's no possibility that Bout could be doing any of this malevolent activity without President Vladimir Putin's exclusive knowledge and permission.

The Associated Press's headline from June stated that as a result of this warfare:

US Navy faces its most intense combat since World War II against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels

Houthi warfare against the U.S. Navy puts our troops in directly in the line of fire and endangers our servicemembers, and at this point, raises the possibility of conflict with Russia, now that Bout has gotten involved. The Journal reports that the deal they have learned about involved small arms sales to start:

The first two deliveries will be mostly AK-74s, an upgraded version of the AK-47 assault rifle. But during the trip, Houthi representatives also discussed other weapons the Russian side might potentially sell, including Kornet antitank missiles and antiaircraft weapons, according to the European official and other people familiar with the matter.

The deliveries could start as early as October to the port of Hodeidah under the cover of food supplies, where Russia has already carried out several grain deliveries, they said.

But that's just the camel's nose under the tent. The arms sales could easily get bigger and more lethal as lines of communication are set up and Bout and the Houthis become trusted business partners. That's very bad news for the U.S. Navy, which will bear the brunt of this unholy alliance. There's is nothing in the world that Putin would like more than to destroy U.S. Naval dominance on the high seas. The Houthis would look like just the thing for it for the Russian dictator.

All because Joe and Kamala were utterly feckless at the designs and games of Putin, making a bad exchange of prisoners for short-term political purposes at the expense of U.S. security, and then claiming at the time that Bout's release would be of no danger to U.S. interests.

Now we learn different. The Navy gets the job of cleaning up after this idiocy, and blood and treasure may be next as Putin may extend the operation to even bigger and more lethal arms sales that could degrade or destroy our Naval capabilities, as well as kill our sailors.

Tell us again about how competent this crew is on defending U.S. interests? The only thing that comes to mind now is Bob Gates's dictum, that Joe Biden has been "wrong on nearly every foreign policy and national security issue over the last four decades." That's Joe Biden for us, and vice president, Kamala Harris, is even stupider than he is.

Chalk this up to another Biden-Harris foreign policy disaster, one that's every bit as bad as their disastrous Afghanistan pullout, and bound to lead to a chain reaction of even more disasters.

Image: Screen shot from OnDemandNews, via YouTube