“This war must end.”
“I will get that settled and fast.”
That was Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, respectively, the two main US presidential candidates, on the Gaza war during their televised debate on September 10. That was as much detail as the audience heard on this critical US foreign policy issue. Harris stated the obvious; Trump offered nonsense.
Yes, the war must stop. And: how could it stop by the mere fact of another Trump presidency, given that his contempt of Palestinians and their desire for self-determination helped lead to this horror in the first place?
The fact remains that neither candidate offered any realistic way to stop the war, or a political and diplomatic path forward following the end of the conflict. This may not be surprising in the context of debate shorthand, where catchphrases substitute for substance. But for many Americans concerned about the horrific conflict, this vagueness and neglect encapsulate the bad choices and heartbreak involved in casting a presidential vote in November.
The glib discourse on Gaza in US politics, and the accumulating failures of US policy, have disheartening implications not only for the November 5 presidential election but also for America’s standing in the world.
Biden Ties Himself in a Knot
The United States, sometimes considered the adult in the room when arbitrating international conflicts, has proved to be more of an adolescent when it came to the Gaza war. This became apparent as US policy first asserted itself, and then fell into confusion.
President Joe Biden’s Gaza approach was initially rooted in traditional American thinking on Israel, which usually seems like a safe bet: Israel had the right to defend itself; it could rely upon flows of US weapons and money to make sure the Israeli military had what it needed to prevail; and Israel’s economy would be protected from a potentially disastrous fallout. Biden’s visit to Israel on October 18, 2023, just a week and a half after Hamas’s terrorist incursion, was a diplomatic masterstroke in a wavering world. That and his emotional expressions of support were deeply appreciated by Israelis across the political spectrum, and claimed much of American public opinion as well. Biden’s longstanding personal relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was also thought to matter to many as events unfolded.
The United States has continued to publicly defend Israel even though its patience has been stretched.
In exchange for this immediate and huge show of US support, Biden likely assumed that Israel would consider his own political equities. That is, Israel would heed American advice on Tel Aviv’s conduct of the war—fueled largely by US-made weaponry. Israel would take significant steps to protect Palestinian civilians. And perhaps most important, Israel would limit its war aims and provide Washington, at least privately, a timetable for military operations. Biden apparently took it for granted that the traditional crisis-equals-opportunity formula would provide the endgame after the war, and that all sides would bow their heads and proceed, no matter how cynically, on another diplomatic path leading to a two-state solution at some point in the hazy future.
Misplaced Expectations
What the Biden administration did not expect was that the Netanyahu government would sabotage every American diplomatic maneuver and reject any negotiations based on a two-state solution in no uncertain terms. Nor did the administration anticipate that Israel would refuse to articulate any sort of timetable or benchmarks for ending the war. While the administration choked, Netanyahu seemed to revel in scoring political points off his opposition to Biden’s demands.
It was not until early February that Biden began to mildly criticize in public Israel’s Gaza conduct; after that the Biden administration made sporadic attempts to reign in Israeli behavior by suspending or delaying arms sales. Such moves, however, have been ineffective, resulting in politically uncomfortable pushback from Netanyahu and no change in Israel’s prosecution of the war. Biden’s subsequent periodic jabs at the Israeli prime minister for frustrating US policy, including on hostage negotiations, have likewise failed to discourage Netanyahu’s determination to fight the war down to the last Palestinian in Gaza.
The United States nevertheless has continued to publicly defend Israel, even though its patience has been stretched. Indeed, none of the Biden administration’s mild and very occasional public criticism has, so far, led to a US break with Israel, or to any actual reduction in arms supplies. And the Department of Defense has continued to deploy forces in the region to defend Israel in the event of wider warfare. Amid the signal to noise ratio, there appears to be little question in the minds of Israeli policymakers, that the United States will continue to protect their country, come what may.
US Policy Inertia Sets In
How did US relations with Israel reach this point? As Biden’s Gaza policy, like Israel’s war itself, has sunk ever deeper into strategic failure and military quagmire, it is a good question. There are at least three major causes.
First, the president is a prisoner of his own experience in the Middle East, much of it now dated. The time of Israel as a youthful, plucky, and outgunned democracy is over. With the most powerful army in the region and a massive military-industrial complex of its own, the Israeli government sees itself more as the regional superpower it is and less like the beleaguered start-up many still might think it to be. Israel behaves as if it does not need or particularly want American tutelage anymore and may pursue its own war aims independent of American weapons. The sharp rightward and nationalist turn of Israeli politics in the last twenty years—and its apotheosis in the current government—means that US advice for the “day after” in Gaza are worse than simply irrelevant. They are regarded as unwelcome and even hostile.
Netanyahu, indeed, clings to this government and its partisan politics like a life preserver; deep suspicions remain in Israel and abroad that he wants to prolong the Gaza war to prevent his ouster in new elections or imprisonment on criminal charges related to corruption. His ever-changing demands in hostage talks have provoked consternation among negotiating partners, including Washington, and deep ire among Israeli hostage families. The US administration’s slowness to deal with these hard modern political realities helped US policy failures accumulate as the war has dragged on.
Second, a politically enfeebled Joe Biden no longer appears to have the stamina or will to carry out major changes to US policy. He seems bewildered by his inability to persuade Netanyahu of anything. His Middle East team, both at the White House and Department of State, are not much help. They too appear mired in traditional approaches to the region. They are also wed to newer dubious policies, such as the “Biden-Trump doctrine” of building Israel’s ties with leading Arab states as a way of confronting Iran while circumventing the Palestine-Israel conflict. Administration officials talk about a “two-state solution,” for example, but have not put forward specific ideas to bring this about in the post-conflict years that, one hopes, will come.
This reliance on conventional thinking and risk-avoidance has kept the administration in a diplomatic safe space in Washington, perhaps, as well as in closed leadership circles internationally. But it has shut out fresh ideas on how to move forward and contributed to the bind in which the administration now finds itself: unhappy about how the Gaza war is going but unwilling or unable to exert major influence to change it. (Not that unconventional thinking on the Middle East has ever gotten anyone more than an acre of pain in Washington, to be fair.)
Third, of course, is the 2024 US election. The Democratic Party will win no points by appearing to break with Israel before November 5. Kamala Harris’s canny but vague formulation—to work to “end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination”—may serve well enough for now. That line got the biggest applause of her Democratic National Convention acceptance speech in August, but it is hard to see it serving as an effective policy formulation if she is elected.
This electoral platform vagueness has angered at least some Democratic activists and voters, which has proved a genuine liability first for Biden, and now for Harris. How she handles this may become a key factor in whether many of these voters sit this election out; depressed turnout could make a difference in key states with significant Arab American populations, such as Michigan, that Harris needs to carry. But the administration, no doubt with substantial input from the Harris campaign, has decided to keep things quiet and not impose significant policy changes.
All this has contributed to the inertia in US policy toward Israel and Gaza, despite obvious disagreements within the administration and Netanyahu’s clear contempt for the president and US policy priorities. The Biden administration, it seems, is in a bind it can no longer escape.
The Costs
The implications for this state of affairs go well beyond domestic American political considerations. They travel to the heart of US foreign policy in the Middle East—and could wreak havoc on the very goals Washington claims it wants to advance.
The most concerning threat to American interests and the lives of people in the region is the risk of a broader war, a threat that has built slowly, over many months, but appears to be increasing. Israel is currently engaged in military action on at least five fronts. These include: exchanges with Hezbollah in Lebanon (including a bizarre “pager attack” on September 17-18 that reportedly has killed at least 26 people and injured thousands); a major offensive in the West Bank against Palestinian “militants,” in which some 600 Palestinians have died, along with American citizens; exchanges of strikes from and against Yemen’s Houthis for months; tit-for-tat assassinations, airstrikes, and missile attacks involving Iran. And of course the war in Gaza goes on, with the Palestinian death toll standing at more than 40,000.
A politically enfeebled Joe Biden no longer appears to have the stamina or will to carry out major changes to US policy.
If these ongoing conflicts merge into a full-blown regional war, instability stemming from political unrest, and the infrastructure and economic damage a war would leave in its wake, could be significant. In addition, the growing conflict is straining the fabric of ties between Israel and the Arab states, which have felt compelled to retrench from blossoming relations with the Zionist state. The longer Gaza and its offspring conflicts go on, the more strained these ties will be, threatening to dash Biden administration hopes for a diplomatic breakthrough (a regional peace of sorts centered on Saudi-Israeli rapprochement). Israel’s refusal even to entertain Biden’s demands for a negotiated two-state solution will only compound the damage. To be sure, certain Arab states continue to do economic and security business with Israel, in part due to the political capital this stance has afforded them in Washington. But it is uncertain how long their position can last in a regional atmosphere of flux, uncertainty, and violence.
This chaotic situation calls into question Washington’s ability to lead in a part of the world where America has been the overweening outside arbiter for the better part of seven decades. But Biden, and by extension Washington, appear helpless in the face of Netanyahu’s determination to inflict maximum damage on Gaza and its population, and locked into tired diplomatic formulations that have no effect in advancing solutions. Foreign policy, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and any US faltering provides ample opportunities for China and Russia, both of whom have been competing with the United States for regional influence. It also provides opportunities for Iran to step up cooperation with regional militant groups that have an interest in confronting Israel and pushing Washington out of the region, or at least into a diminished role.
Overall, the Gaza quagmire in which the United States finds itself, combined with the diametrically opposed Democratic and Republican views of the proper US role of the United States in international affairs, have cast doubt on whether the United States can set a constructive policy course, now and in the future.
Gaza, the US Election, and the Aftermath
One major question here is how the war in Gaza will affect the US presidential election. For many young and Arab-American voters, as noted above, Biden failed miserably on this score. But while Harris has taken positions that perhaps have encouraged some voters, she too has failed to address fully their concerns about Gaza, and has even appeared at times to brush them off. Recent polling by the Arab-American Institute has shown, though, that it might not take much to win back these voters’ confidence. As the Institute found, “a decisive stance demanding that Israel agree to an immediate ceasefire and unimpeded aid to Palestinians” could swing many reluctant voters to Harris. This should not be a bridge too far for most Americans, and is not much of a break with Biden’s current policies.
However American electoral politics play out, the United States eventually will have to try to patch up a regional order badly stressed by the Israel-Gaza crisis, if it can. That will be a major task. It may be that the repercussions of the conflict are what finally drives the United States from preeminence in the Middle East, amid its paralyzed policy matrix, great power rivalries, and a shattered status quo. Or maybe not. After all, most countries in the region still look to Washington to mediate their disputes and supply them with the weapons and political support they seek. Either way, the next American president will have a foreign policy misery to deal with from day one.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
