Gaza and Biden's Failure of Leadership

Biden isn’t just sticking with “decades-old military backing of Israel.” He is actively supporting an ongoing war without conditions.

Susan Glasser seems surprised that Americans are paying more attention to a devastating war that their government is backing unconditionally than they are to a visiting foreign leader:

It says much about this moment in U.S. politics that, on Thursday, when demonstrators staged a die-in on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge timed to the APEC summit, they were protesting Biden’s strong support for Israel in the wake of the October 7th terrorist attack by Hamas and subsequent Israeli attack of Gaza, not anything having to do with Xi.

It would be bizarre if there were more American protesters showing up to condemn Xi than to protest Biden’s policy when Biden is their president and he is currently giving full support to a disastrous war that has killed thousands of innocent people in just a few weeks. There are plenty of things to protest about the Chinese government’s actions, but at the moment they aren’t the ones providing weapons and diplomatic cover for a military campaign against a densely-populated, besieged enclave where children make up nearly half the population. It is normal for people to put more effort in trying to influence their own government, and obviously lots of Americans believe that there is an urgent need to pressure the Biden administration to change its terrible policy.

Glasser talked to Andrei Cherny, who made this very strange comment:

“It feels like, in some ways, the first real foreign-policy debate among Democrats in the post-Cold War era,” Cherny told me. His view is that, while there have been strong disagreements among Democrats in recent decades on foreign-policy issues such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, most Democrats eventually came to see that war as a mistake.

If Cherny thinks this is the first real foreign policy debate among Democrats in the last thirty years, he hasn’t been paying attention. It is true that many Democratic supporters of the invasion, including Biden, eventually came around to the view that it was a mistake, but for years the party leadership and most of their contenders for the presidential nomination supported the war and disagreed with Bush only over how he was conducting it. They judged that was the politically “smart” position to take, only to scramble and change course when things started to get even worse in 2005 and 2006.

Between 2002 and at least 2006, opposition to the war inside the party came almost entirely from the left, and the out-of-touch leadership was just as clueless then as it is proving to be now. Maybe four or five years from now many of the Democratic politicians cheering on the war in Gaza will change their tune, but right now they are playing the same role that Biden, Kerry, Clinton, and others played in 2002-03. The comparison with the Iraq war debate is a useful reminder that U.S. policy right now is being set and supported by some of the same Democrats that voted for authorizing that disastrous war then.

Glasser goes on to say, “None of this may matter too much for Biden politically.” It is usually a safe bet that a single foreign policy issue isn’t going to affect the course of a presidential election, but in this case it would be a mistake to assume that this isn’t costing Biden some important support in several key states. Arab-American and Muslim-American voters pledging not to vote for Biden again are not making idle threats. They mean it, and there aren’t going to be the only ones withholding their support. We should also consider that this war is receiving wall-to-wall coverage in a way that very few other foreign policy issues normally does, and unlike most other issues this one has captured the attention of a large part of the public.

The daily coverage of new atrocities is bound to turn people against Biden as long as he is out there echoing Israeli government propaganda, making excuses for the slaughter, and providing more weapons to fuel the war. It isn’t going to matter to people that Trump’s policy would be the same or maybe even worse. What they can see is that Biden backs the ongoing disaster and they can see that he is doing nothing to stop it despite the considerable leverage at his disposal. Even if the war ends in a month or two, a lot of people are going to remember where Biden and other elected officials stood and some of them will insist on holding them accountable. If the war drags on well into next year, it will be an even greater catastrophe for the people of Gaza and it will be a major liability for Biden.

By itself, Biden’s response to the war in Gaza is already doing real damage to his support in Minnesota and Michigan, among other places, and taken together with the rest of his foreign policy record the president doesn’t have much that he can boast about to his voters. One problem with keeping so many Trump-era policies in place and then expanding on them is that Biden won’t have much luck convincing disaffected voters that he offers a real alternative to Trump when the time comes. That might not be an insuperable obstacle for a president who was otherwise popular, but Biden is getting poor marks across the board on the domestic front, too. Glasser acknowledges that, but misses the point: “The inflated price of gas or a gallon of milk seems like a bigger problem for Biden than his decision to stick with America’s decades-old military backing of Israel.”

Biden doesn’t have the luxury of alienating large numbers of otherwise reliable Democratic voters, but that is what he has been doing for the last six weeks. It’s also important to understand that Biden isn’t just sticking with “decades-old military backing of Israel.” He is actively supporting an ongoing war without conditions, and the victims of that war are mostly civilians. There is a significant difference between supporting the usual military aid that Israel has received for decades and rushing more weapons to a belligerent as its forces attack hospitals and refugee camps. The former may be a bad policy, but the latter is truly horrible.

The mistake that Glasser and others are making is to see this only in terms of a “rift between the Democrats’ young and increasingly left-leaning base and an old-fashioned liberal of a President who is turning eighty-one on Monday.” Critics on the left may be the most vocal opponents of Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza, but they are far from the only ones disgusted and appalled by the terrible leadership that they are witnessing.