Biden’s false choice
Dominic Green
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In his 2014 autobiography, Robert Gates, who spent three decades at the CIA and served as secretary of defense in the Bush II and Obama administrations, wrote that Vice President Joe Biden had “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Failure falling upward, Biden was president in 2021 when Gates added Biden’s “naive” cut-and-run retreat from Afghanistan to misjudgments such as opposing “every one of Ronald Reagan’s military programs to contest the Soviet Union,” not forgetting the 1990 Gulf War, the 2007 “surge” in Iraq, and the 2009 surge in Afghanistan.
Biden was wrong every time because he saw foreign issues as domestic ones, and domestic issues as partisan ones. Democracy incentivizes politicians to give the public what they want. It is bad electoral politics to step up military commitments, and good electoral politics to wind down foreign wars. The Europeans call this the choice between “guns or butter”; we might now say “Reaper drones or high-fructose corn starch.” Why expend the red stuff overseas when you can print out the green stuff at home?
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President Joe Biden rushed to Israel after the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7. He said that Hamas must be defeated and promised unrelenting support of Israel’s campaign to defeat Hamas. Biden got this foreign issue right because he saw it as a domestic issue. Americans like Israel, and they dislike Islamists. They like Gal Gadot, and they dislike masked terrorists who rape children and disembowel pregnant women. The Democratic Left just makes the most noise in the streets and the media.
Now, however, Biden may get it wrong, and for the same reason. Sooner or later, the hostage negotiations in Qatar will produce a proposal in which Hamas returns all its hostages in return for Israel freeing hundreds of Palestinian terrorists. America’s Arab and European allies will join the U.N., Russia, and China in pressing Israel to declare an end to the war. The State Department is already doing its best to leave Israel no choice by setting impossible conditions on Israel’s pursuit of its kidnapped citizens and the mass murderers who hold them hostage. What will President Joe Biden do?
A few days before the temporary ceasefire began on Nov. 24, I sat down with Michael Oren, the Israeli-American historian who was Benjamin Netanyahu’s ambassador to Washington, D.C., in the early Obama years. “I will never forget what Obama said to me on the last day of my job in 2013,” Oren recalled. “I was in the Oval Office with Bibi and Obama, and Obama said, ‘You know, if Israel ever gets into a war, you know the United States will be there for you, because that’s what the American people expect.’” The inference, Oren suggested, was that this wasn’t what Obama wanted.
“Biden’s not Obama,” Oren went on. But Biden, Oren pointed out, inherited and tried to revive Obama’s Mideast strategy. The attempt to convert Iran’s clerical regime into an American ally by licensing its nuclear weapons program, indulging its genocidal threats against Israel, and tacitly encouraging its imperial conquest of Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, and Sana is now exposed as an “abject failure.” The Biden administration has been “playing politics with a highly combustible region.” It has now blown up. The reflex response of the State Department is to glue the pieces together. But the damage is already done.
Any ceasefire which leaves Hamas in power is a defeat for Israel — and a blow to the United States’s global credibility. Iran is already claiming victory, and a win for Iran is also a win for its backers in Moscow and Beijing. Hamas has exploited the hostage transfers as a propaganda coup; left in power, Hamas will commit further atrocities against Israelis and complete its undermining of Fatah in the West Bank. And what about Hezbollah? Or the pro-Iranian militias in Iraq and Syria who have fired dozens of rockets and drones at American bases? Or the Houthis of Yemen, who fired ballistic missiles at the USS Mason in the Red Sea during the ceasefire? Or Iran, whose drones buzzed the USS Eisenhower as it entered the Persian Gulf on Nov. 27 and again took “unsafe action” on Nov. 29?
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The collapse of America’s global influence is also a domestic issue. President Joe Biden’s foreign policy is now caught between two domestic impulses. He can support Israel in its war of survival and retain American influence in the Middle East by restoring deterrence against Iran and its satrapies. Or he can abandon his promises of support and weaken America’s most reliable ally by forcing a false peace which leaves Iran as the regional arbiter.
The risks of backing Israel and deterring Iran include war in the Persian Gulf, more American hostages, and a spike in energy prices in an election year. So do the risks of abandoning Israel and surrendering to Iran. The regime in Tehran has repeatedly shown that it will not allow the U.S. to set the terms and timetable of its retreat. The mullahs must chase out the Great Satan to intimidate the Arabs and the Jews and prove that the Islamic revolution is not in a Soviet-style dotage. Even if Biden gets it wrong and decides that winning Michigan matters more than losing the Middle East, America’s enemies may force him to get it right.