President Joe Biden’s actions over many months suggest that Israel can determine when and where the United States goes to war in the Middle East. That is unacceptable, and the next American president must change this dynamic.
In one framing, the past 12 months have witnessed a remarkable display of America’s might and resolve in the Middle East—especially relative to our principal adversary in the region, Iran. Since October of last year, Israel has severely degraded Iran’s two most important affiliates in the area, Hezbollah and Hamas. Iran has lashed out directly only twice, with one ballistic-missile assault in April and another this month—both largely neutralized by U.S., Israeli, and allied air and missile defenses.
The United States, in contrast with Iran, has backed its principal affiliate in the region, Israel, to the fullest extent. It has shipped billions of dollars of military equipment and munitions to Israel over the past 12 months, on top of the roughly $3.8 billion it already provides annually; shared sensitive intelligence to allow Israel to target Hamas’s senior leaders and recover its hostages; and repeatedly deployed its own troops to defend Israel from assault. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertions that Israel stands alone are at once laughable and insulting.
Yet few people in the Middle East, or at home, would view the United States as particularly strong at the moment in the region. The reason is that the Biden administration has made abundantly clear over the past year that it has chosen not to dictate the terms of its own Middle East policy. It has repeatedly allowed Netanyahu and the rest of Israel’s leadership to do so instead.
In April, Israel conducted an air strike in Damascus on a facility adjacent to the Iranian embassy. The United States received no warning about the strike; Biden and his advisers were caught unaware. The strike killed seven Iranian officers. Then Iran and its affiliates in the region launched a barrage of missiles at Israel. But the United States and several of its partners—most notably Jordan, France, the United Kingdom—helped blunt the attack with a coordinated display of air and missile defenses.
With that, a Rubicon had been quietly crossed. Israel had always boasted that a generous supply of U.S. arms allowed Israel to fight its own fights, and that no American soldier had ever been asked to fight Israel’s battles for it. But America has tens of thousands of troops semipermanently garrisoned in the region, in part to respond to contingencies involving Israel, and by interceding to thwart the missile attack, American troops were fighting directly on Israel’s behalf.
The situation in April repeated itself this past week, when Israel dramatically escalated its military offensive in Lebanon. No one should mourn the late Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. But Israeli aerial and ground assaults have displaced more than 1 million Lebanese, and America was once again forced to commit its troops, including two Navy destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean, to repelling an Iranian ballistic-missile attack. This is now a pattern: Israel escalates the conflict, Biden and his team do nothing to stop it, and America follows Israel into war.
Reasonable people can and will argue that the killing of Nasrallah and the destruction of Hezbollah are in America’s interest. But America’s leaders should be the ones making the decisions here, not Israel’s. Instead, and at each step of the conflict over the past 12 months, Biden and his advisers have ceded questions of strategy to Israel, in part by giving Israeli decision makers the benefit of the doubt at every major juncture. Previously established boundaries, such as the demand that Israel not march into Rafah this past summer, have been ignored as soon as Israel crosses them.
Neither the Trump administration nor the Obama administration behaved this way. As different as they were, each administration owned its Middle East policy and dictated policy to Israel, not vice versa. The Trump administration killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani (which surely delighted Israel) and also unilaterally announced a withdrawal from Syria (which surely did not delight Israel). The Obama administration, meanwhile, negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran over strenuous Israeli objections, because it assessed the deal to be in U.S. interest.
This is the way things are supposed to happen. A superpower does what it understands to be in its interest, and its partners in the region adjust. The Biden administration, by contrast, is acting like a dog that has decided that its own tail should wag it.
Franklin Foer’s account of the Biden administration during this crisis makes for maddening and essential reading. Biden and his advisers are consistently confused as to why a strategy regarding Israel made up of all carrots and no sticks isn’t affecting Israeli decision making. The president is surprised and upset by an Israeli prime minister who is ungrateful for American support and consistently does what is in his own interest without regard for his patron in Washington, D.C.
Biden, alone among major Democratic politicians, has a strong and warm relationship with Netanyahu. He seems to think that this rapport, along with the U.S. president’s powers of political persuasion, will somehow trump Netanyahu’s well-established and well-documented pathologies, which have frustrated American policy makers since James A. Baker. President Clinton famously asked, after meeting Netanyahu in 1996, “Who is the fucking superpower here?”
Netanyahu doesn’t care about his friendship with Biden, or even about Israel’s dependence on the United States. He cares only about his near-term political interests. Everyone but Biden can see this.
Many Arab American voters are fed up, and understandably so. Some of them see Donald Trump as a stronger leader than Biden because, let’s be honest, when it comes to the Middle East, he appears to be a stronger leader, or at least more assertive about U.S. interests. And the average voter can reasonably doubt that Biden’s vice president will be much different from him as president. This war could thus cost the Democrats a Senate seat in Michigan, which has a large Arab population, as well as the presidency itself given how narrow Kamala Harris’s lead in the state remains. Just yesterday, an American citizen from Michigan was killed in Lebanon. Yet when Palestinian Americans in Gaza or Lebanese Americans in Lebanon are killed, the response from their president is little more than a shrug, as if to say, What else can we do?
That was, in fact, the conclusion that Biden’s team reached last month, according to Foer’s reporting:
Over the course of two hours, the group batted ideas back and forth. In the end, they threw up their hands. There was no magical act of diplomacy, no brilliant flourish of creative statecraft that they could suddenly deploy.
With this president, they may be right. Biden has made clear that his Middle East policy will be decided in Jerusalem, not Washington.
But Israel is not going to stop. As Thomas L. Friedman once observed, Israel’s mentality has always been: If I am weak, how can I compromise? Yet if I am strong, why should I compromise?
An American president has to be the one to say “enough.”
But it will probably not be this American president.