Woke Crescent: Like Obama, Biden bends the arc of the Left toward Islamism.

The Obama worldview is simple. The Muslim world is engaged in a multilateral civil war. Radically incompatible visions of Islamic faith, culture, and society are vying to define modern Islam. Because there’s no way to contain a convulsion involving more than a fifth of the globe, it’s incumbent upon all outsiders to find Islamic allies. That much is hard to dispute.

The problem comes in the allies that Western progressives have selected. Under progressive “intersectionality,” the authentic, and thus most worthy, voices of any non-Western group must be those that are angriest, most aggrieved, and most anti-Western; anything else represents a degrading sellout to centuries of imperial impositions. In today’s Islamic world, the voices that progressives deem authentic therefore belong to the Islamists—angry, intolerant, anti-liberal, anti-Western, antisemitic Muslim supremacists.

Islamist organizations vary widely on both strategy and tactics. The MB, now over 80 years old, is a tightly disciplined organization capable of taking a long view, pushing incremental advancement, and working through existing institutions. Most of the more spectacularly violent Sunni Islamist groups—including Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the PLO—trace their founding to impetuous Brothers who split with the MB because of their preference for action and notoriety.

Similarly, the Shiite Islamists running Iran have managed to temper their own revolutionary instincts enough to run a country and a movement simultaneously for more than 40 years—a feat requiring a certain amount of restraint, plausible deniability, and long-term thinking.

To woke progressives like those staffing the Obama and Biden administrations, these disciplined (though decidedly not moderate) Islamists are ideal Muslim allies. Biden’s abdication in Afghanistan arose because he decided that the Taliban had matured to the point that it too could demonstrate the sort of disciplined Islamism necessary to join the international community. His withdrawal did more than extricate the U.S. from a situation that had confounded Trump, Obama, and Bush—it signaled to Iran that the U.S. stood behind disciplined Islamists.