A 'No Daylight' Policy with Clients Always Fails

The administration has pursued a “no daylight” approach to Israel, and we are seeing once again how deeply flawed that approach is.

Some people in the Biden administration are now beginning to realize that unconditional backing for a client as it commits war crimes and inflicts collective punishment on millions of people might not be so clever after all:

Biden and his top aides have in the past week adjusted the administration’s public message to emphasize concern for Palestinian civilians and U.S. efforts to get them humanitarian relief. The shift follows growing criticism at home and abroad of Biden’s decision to swiftly and staunchly back Israel’s military response to Hamas while initially speaking less forcefully about protecting Palestinians; meanwhile, images of civilian casualties in Gaza continue to ricochet around the world.

“If this really goes bad, we want to be able to point to our past statements,” a senior U.S. official said. The official said the administration is particularly worried about a narrative taking hold that Biden supports all Israeli military actions and that U.S.-provided weapons have been used to kill Palestinian civilians, many of them women and children [bold mine-DL]. The Defense Department has said the U.S. is not putting any limits or restrictions on the weapons it’s providing Israel. 

Actions speak louder than words, and a few late, half-hearted warnings won’t count for very much when people are judging the administration’s response. Whatever the president and other U.S. officials may be saying, it is clear that as a matter of policy the U.S. is doing nothing to rein the Israeli government in. That unconditional backing might have been a point of pride for the administration in the past, but it is slowly dawning on them that their policy is sinking them politically at home and around the world. Despite that, there is no hint in this reporting that the administration intends to make a significant course correction.

Any statements that administration officials have made or might make in the coming weeks won’t amount to anything if they are not backed up by reducing the assistance that the U.S. provides. Administration officials are touting the fact that they are paying lip service to humanitarian concerns, and they think that the lip service will somehow make up for their enabling of the catastrophe. If they think that they are buying themselves political cover with empty rhetoric, they are badly mistaken.

Gregg Carlstrom ridiculed the administration official’s quote:

From bear hug to cover your ass: just in case this turns out to be a long and devastating war with no coherent plan for what comes next, at least we'll be able to say we offered some milquetoast criticism.

The report says that the administration is worried about a “narrative taking hold” when that narrative is just a list of things that the U.S. has done and continues to do. The “narrative” is “taking hold” because for all intents and purposes Biden evidently does support all Israeli military actions and U.S.-provided weapons have been used to kill Palestinian civilians. Having recklessly embraced a heavy-handed military response, the U.S. has locked itself into a policy that is contributing to the killing and maiming of a huge number of innocent people through bombing and starvation. The rest of the world sees the U.S. enabling an avoidable disaster because that is what the U.S. is doing.

While Biden aides are defending the president’s approach as being so much more “nuanced” than Trump’s (talk about a low bar!), the president himself is making a mockery of their claims by publicly casting doubt on Palestinian casualty figures without any serious basis for doing so. As The Washington Post’s fact check put it, “he swept away all the numbers as not credible. That’s his opinion — but it’s remarkably uninformed by history and precedent.” The Intercept reported:

Biden’s claim was quickly rejected by human rights organizations that have been active in Gaza for years. The Associated Press noted that the Ministry of Health’s figures from previous conflicts have broadly matched the numbers arrived at by both the Israeli government and the United Nations. And the State Department itself has long considered the numbers reliable. 

Meanwhile, State Department officials find themselves being sidelined and cut out of shaping policy. Akbar Shahid Ahmed continues his reporting on the demoralization and disgust inside the department:

Frustrated State Department officials describe disillusionment and a sense of powerlessness as they watch the U.S. pursue policies they believe will cause immense suffering in the near term and painful blowback in the future.

“It feels like we are advocates on the outside or civil society banging on the doors of government and that’s not our role,” one department official said.

Whenever an administration ignores and shuts out relevant experts, including some of its own officials, it is a warning sign that the administration’s policy is ill-conceived, dangerous, and likely to end in costly failure. The sidelining of the State Department also suggests that this policy is being driven to a large degree by the president’s own ideological hang-ups as a reflexive “pro-Israel” hawk. Ahmed noted that the policy remains one of unconditional support:

While Biden, Blinken and others have said they expect Israel to abide by the laws of war in its offensive, American officials have not made any suggestion the U.S. would withhold assistance over worrying actions by the Israelis.

Like its predecessors, the administration has pursued a “no daylight” approach to Israel, and we are seeing once again how deeply flawed that approach is. According to its supporters, a “no daylight” approach is supposed to give the U.S. more influence with the client, but in practice it means that the U.S. can never publicly criticize the client for anything it does and it can never penalize the client if it ignores Washington’s preferences. At best, the “no daylight” approach allows the president to deliver some mild rebukes in private that the leader of the client government can safely dismiss because they are private and because the president won’t do anything when the rebukes are ignored. Meanwhile, all that the rest of the world can see is that the U.S. is boasting about how much it supports its client as it commits even more war crimes.