Gaza Defines Biden's Foreign Policy Legacy

U.S. backing for the war in Gaza isn’t some minor error or a footnote to Biden’s foreign policy legacy.

Charles Kupchan offers up an extremely positive assessment of Biden’s foreign policy record, including this incredible spin of his handling of the war in Gaza:

Biden has sustained criticism for providing continuing support to Israel amid its military campaign against Hamas. To be sure, the loss of civilian life in Gaza has been beyond excessive, the level of humanitarian crisis shocking and avoidable, and Israel’s failure to plan for the day after inexcusable. But Biden has repeatedly pressed the Israelis on all three of those fronts, while—true to character— demonstrating loyalty to a longstanding ally and sticking to his conviction that Israel has a right to defend itself.

Kupchan refers to unspeakable war crimes, a man-made famine and an ongoing genocide in just one sentence in the entire brief, and then tries to excuse Biden’s indefensible enabling of the same by saying that he “pressed” the Israelis on these issues. It is understandable that he doesn’t want to dwell on this part of Biden’s record, since it flatly contradicts and undermines the rest of his argument that Biden “reestablished the United States’ credentials as the world’s leading democracy and reclaimed the nation’s commitment to upholding a liberal international order.” If the president gets credit for this because of his support for Ukraine, he ought to receive at least as much blame for demolishing America’s reputation and hurting American interests by backing the slaughter in Gaza.

Another problem with his summary is that Kupchan understates the horrors of the war and the severity of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. A recent letter sent to Biden and Harris from 45 doctors and nurses that served in Gaza recounts some of what the U.S. has been supporting for the last nine and a half months, and it is so much worse than what Kupchan is saying. (The link Kupchan provides on the humanitarian crisis goes back to an outdated CFR article from February.) The letter’s authors include an estimate of the death toll in Gaza that far exceeds the official figures: “This letter and the appendix show probative evidence that the human toll in Gaza is far higher than is understood in the United States. It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 92,000, an astonishing 4.2% of Gaza’s population.” If that is right, that means the war has killed an average of nearly ten thousand Palestinians per month. The U.S. has been an accomplice to all that killing, and the responsibility for thst rests with the president.

The letter touches on every aspect of the crisis in Gaza: malnutrition, lack of access to clean water, lack of sanitation, the spread of disease, the destruction of the health care system, mass displacement, and atrocities committed against the civilian population by Israeli forces. The letter says, “Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict. However, every single signatory to this letter treated children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest.” The doctors and nurses’ witness to all these crimes exposes the lies that Netanyahu told Congress last week.

To the extent that Biden did anything to “press” Netanyahu, he was completely unsuccessful in getting the Israeli government to change its behavior because he refused to use the considerable leverage that the U.S. has. The White House has paid lip service to the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, but the administration has done remarkably little to contain one of the most rapid and intense man-made famines in modern times. Most of the time, Biden was not “pressing” Israel on anything. Instead, he went out of his way to make sure that the arms transfers kept happening as quickly as possible while he also shielded Israel from any consequences for their crimes.

When the client of a major power is committing thousands of war crimes and deliberately starving millions of innocent people, the leader of the major power doesn’t get credit for half-heartedly suggesting to the client that a little more aid should maybe be allowed in. The patron is responsible for what the client does with the weapons it provides, and it owns the results. Biden doesn’t get to have it both ways where he is the loyal and steadfast supporter and then gets a pass for enabling atrocities and mass starvation because he occasionally chided Netanyahu in private. The president demonstrated loyalty to the client all right, but he did so in violation of U.S. law and at the expense of any pretense that the U.S. cares about defending international law.

U.S. backing for the war in Gaza isn’t some minor error or a footnote to Biden’s foreign policy legacy. It is one of the most staggering policy failures in modern U.S. history, and it is an enduring stain on the reputation of the United States. Most of the world is likely going to remember the horrors that the U.S. supported in Gaza long after the rest of Biden’s ostensible accomplishments are forgotten. Any fair assessment of Biden’s record has to give full weight to the ongoing disaster that he helped to create in Gaza. We also need to remember that the disaster is only going to get worse in the second half of the year if U.S. policy remains unchanged.

If Biden doesn’t change course on the war between now and January, his legacy will be one of senseless killing and the starvation of innocent people. He will be remembered as a president who refused to use his great influence with a client government to halt one of the great crimes of the twenty-first century. More than that, he will be remembered as the president who kept indulging and arming the genocidaires until the very end.