Biden and the Myth of America as the 'Essential Nation'

The uglier the reality, the greater the need to talk about the myth.

Fintan O’Toole criticizes Biden’s decision to tie the wars in Ukraine and Gaza together in his public rhetoric:

By linking Ukraine so closely to Israel, Biden was clearly hoping to use one political appeal to boost the other. The energy unleashed by a shared determination to rally around Israel would galvanize the right’s flagging enthusiasm for Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression.

The opposite is happening. The pairing of Israel and Ukraine has not created a single moral cause. It has exposed a double standard.

It isn’t news that the U.S. uses a very different standard for itself and for its clients, but it not so common for the double standard to be on such prominent display for all to see as it has been in the last seven weeks. Biden’s choice to call even more attention to the double standard by talking about the two wars together is also somewhat unusual. Political leaders typically don’t go out of their way to highlight how hypocritical and cynical they are, but that is what Biden did.

Biden’s pairing of the two conflicts as part of a larger struggle never made any sense because they aren’t linked to each other and they have different causes, but he did it again in his Post op-ed a week ago. The first attempt was clumsy and unconvincing, and the second was even worse because it showed how out of step with the public Biden is when it comes to the war in Gaza. One might have expected the president to recognize the political backlash against his response to the war and adjust his rhetoric accordingly, but if anything Biden has become more strident and more ideological in how he talks about the war.