On Thursday, the United States and its allies secured a deal with Russia in order to return some 16 people, including multiple Americans, from the Russians. The Russians have basically taken several Americans hostage over the course of the last several years, and the United States traded a bunch of murderers as terrorists and spies for these hostages.

This is being treated as a massive win for the Biden administration by the media and the Biden administration itself. In return for Evan Gershkovich and former Marine Paul Whelan, Russia retrieved eight people, including a convicted murderer who shot dead a former Chechen rebel leader in Berlin, a Russian agent accused of helping give sensitive American electronics and ammunition to Russia, a man involved in what American authorities called “an elaborate hack-to-trade scheme that netted approximately $93 million through securities trades based on confidential corporate information stolen from US computer networks,” and four other convicted spies.

Republican Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement, “I remain concerned that continuing to trade innocent Americans for actual Russian criminals held in the U.S. and elsewhere sends a dangerous message to Putin that only encourages further hostage-taking by his regime.”

It’s great that we’re getting back our people; that is a wonderful and good thing.

But the treatment of this as a massive triumph by the Biden administration betrays an enormous amount about the way that Americans think about foreign policy, particularly on the Left and in the hallowed precincts of the State Department. The West has become accustomed to looking at foreign policy as though the best foreign policy ends in trading murderers and spies for innocent people. That is the best-case outcome.

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That is an extension of a generalized world view that the best foreign policy for America is to lose slowly and with the least possible cost, not to actually push to victory. It’s part and parcel of a broader worldview that says, for example, that Afghanistan was a triumph, which is something Joe Biden and Kamala Harris said, despite the fact that pulling out of Afghanistan left 13 American service people to be killed, hundreds of Americans behind, tens of thousands of American allies to be slaughtered by the Taliban, and millions of women to be dragged back into basements so they can’t go to school.

According to Biden, his State Department team, and Harris, that was a triumph. To them, the best form of foreign policy involves losing very, very slowly and with the least amount of cost; the worst foreign policy is where you win.

This is not unique to Biden or Harris. This has been an essential element of American foreign policy strategy on the Left for decades. It’s why America has not won a full-scale victorious war since World War II. It’s been a long time in America since we won a full-scale victorious war because we’re always fighting to stasis; we’re always looking for a way out.

What this did was incentivize Vladimir Putin to take more Americans hostage.

The West has been sucked into the morass of never winning victories and treating what are, by any standard of the imagination, losses as victories.

Two things can be true here: It is incredibly good that Americans are coming home, and it is a diplomatic loss to trade murderers for innocents.

Diplomacy is a tactic. It is not a strategy. The foreign policy establishment is constantly suggesting that diplomacy is in and of itself a strategy, that talking is a strategy.

Talking is a means to an end. Sometimes it’s useful; sometimes it’s not.

When you treat diplomacy as the strategy, what you end up with are bad deals and lost wars.

Which is the name of the game when it comes to Joe Biden.

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Harrison Butker, kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, is in the media’s target once again after his condemnation of the Paris Olympics’s opening ceremony. This year, the Olympics decided to celebrate drag queens by lining them across a long table with one woman in the center wearing a halo-like head dress. The scene presented a warped portrayal of Da Vinci’s painting “Last Supper,”  replacing Christ and His apostles with LGBTQ performers.

Butker reacted to the scene by quoting the Bible, posting on X, “Be not deceived, God is not mocked…”

Butker first made headlines for his political views back in May when he addressed the graduates of Benedictine College, the tiny liberal arts school I call home. Then, people from around the world swarmed social media to defend the poor, oppressed young women like me who were subjected to Butker’s misogynistic presumptions.

How could he assume that “the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world?” What an out-of-touch statement to say to a group of modern women.

But he was right.

Most female students at Benedictine, me included, care more about our potential families than our job prospects. Of course, this doesn’t mean that none of us will work. It doesn’t even mean that we will all go on to get married. My friends work hard on their academics and would make great employees. They just care more about falling in love and having children. What’s so bad about that?

As I head back to school this month, I’ve been thinking more about Butker’s commencement speech, especially as he has come under fire once again for his criticism of the Paris Olympics.

What I think most people are missing about Butker is the part of his speech that received far less media attention: his words to the graduating men.

Butker criticized absent fathers, challenged my male classmates to “do hard things,” and spoke to his own vocation as a husband and a father—not an athlete. His speech didn’t pit men and women in a power struggle against one another, the way feminists so often do. Nor did it diminish our differences and meld us into one unseemly mass of humanity, as was on display at the Paris Olympics.

Instead, Butker encouraged my classmates and me to love one another. That may be seen as radical or extreme, and I suppose it is. But it is also exciting.

My friends and I aren’t afraid of the prospect of being wives and mothers, we’re thrilled. And our male counterparts are eager to serve us in turn and devote their full strength to their family.

All that to say, Benedictine’s young women don’t need strangers on X to save us from the patriarchy. Considering that the alternative is men at the Olympics donning over-sexualized feminine stereotypes like a costume, the patriarchy looks pretty swell.

This school year, my friends and I are looking forward to quietly defying the idea that “womanhood” no longer has anything to do with being wives or mothers. Our lives are not a performance of physical stereotypes exaggerated for sexual pleasure. They’re real and they’re wonderful.

This fall, my first college party will be a wedding between recent Benedictine alumni. It promises to be a much more beautiful ceremony than what our elites just decided to put on in Paris.

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Cecilia Jones is a student at Benedictine College and is a Summer 2024 Member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.

The view expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.