There Is No Salvaging Biden's Legacy

Biden’s legacy will be one of enabling mass starvation and genocide.

Jonah Blank tries to make the case that Biden can somehow salvage something from the wreckage of his policies in the Middle East:

Biden has so far failed to achieve his highest goals for the Middle East—but in his final days he can single-handedly reset the Israeli-Palestinian equation, preserve the potential for a two-state solution, and rescue much of his tarnished legacy. His status as a lame duck paradoxically gives him the power to do things possible only for a leader whose next step is retirement.

Biden is not going to do any of this. He has already shown that he will spend what little time he has left in office running interference for Netanyahu and letting the Israeli government off the hook for its many crimes. The president’s lame duck status might theoretically free him to do things he wouldn’t normally do, but Biden doesn’t want to do any of those things. To the extent that Biden feels less constrained now that the election is over, he no longer feels any need to pretend that his administration cares about what happens in Gaza. The cynical deadline that Blinken and Austin set before the election came and went, conditions in Gaza keep getting worse because the Israeli government is starving the people to death, and the Biden administration will make no changes to their policy.

Nathan Robinson explained this week that Biden was never really trying to end the war in Gaza. As Robinson says, “The facts show that the Biden administration never made a serious effort to secure a genuine and lasting cease-fire in Gaza.” The ceasefire negotiations that the administration kept touting as proof of their tireless efforts were a charade. Biden wanted to appear to be working on ending the war, but he had no intention of using U.S. leverage to bring it to an end. Whenever there was a chance of securing a ceasefire, Netanyahu would sabotage it and the administration would provide cover for him. The official line from the White House was that Hamas was the main obstacle to a ceasefire at the same time that the Israeli government was assassinating Hamas’ chief negotiator.

The charade was meant to assuage Democratic voters who were disgusted by Biden’s unconditional support for the war, but it was a little too obvious that Biden didn’t want the war to end because he kept rushing weapons to Israel and sending U.S. military personnel to support it. While the administration was supposed to be “working tirelessly” for the elusive ceasefire, the real policy was to continue arming the war criminals to the teeth and shielding them from reprisals. Once the election was over, there was no longer any need to keep up the pretense. Why is Biden going to lift a finger for peace now that he feels less domestic political pressure than he did before?

Lame duck presidents may be “relieved of all domestic political constraints,” but they are also in an unusually weak position because everyone understands that they will soon be gone. It costs other governments nothing to ignore or defy a lame duck president, especially when they can expect that the next administration will be even more accommodating to them. Biden wouldn’t pressure Netanyahu when he was still a candidate seeking reelection, and he certainly isn’t going to do it now that he is on the way out. The president is flatly opposed to using U.S. leverage with Israel for ideological reasons, and he is too old and stuck in his ways to change in the next two months.

I don’t know how anyone can look at the last thirteen months of U.S.-enabled slaughter and starvation and still say that “[e]mpathy is Biden’s superpower.” When it comes to Palestinian and Lebanese people, that clearly isn’t true. Aside from the occasional boilerplate line deploring civilian casualties, Biden has exhibited nothing but callous disregard and contempt for Palestinian and Lebanese lives. Regardless, what matters most is what Biden has done as president, and in his actions he has taken the side of the genocidaires against their victims. He arms and protects the perpetrators, and he condemns the people that try to hold the perpetrators accountable.

Blank calls on Biden to do three things that he is not going to do: “Biden should recognize Palestinian statehood, sponsor a resolution on a two-state solution at the UN Security Council, and enforce existing U.S. legislation on arms transfers.” We know he won’t enforce the laws on arms transfers. He spent more than a year breaking them. Biden won’t recognize Palestine. The president is so deep in his own ideological bubble that he probably thinks that would be “rewarding” Hamas. The only thing that Biden seems interested in doing at the Security Council is vetoing other governments’ ceasefire resolutions.

It is true that these would relatively easy things for Biden to do, so it should tell us something that he has refused to do them before now. Biden is objectively the most anti-Palestinian president we have had so far, so there is no reason to expect that he could change into the opposite overnight. We can expect instead that he will keep chasing his ridiculous obsession with a Saudi pact until his last day in office.

Biden’s legacy will be one of enabling mass starvation and genocide. That is how he chose to spend the end of his presidency, and that is how he will be remembered. He had many opportunities in the last thirteen months to choose a different path, and he refused to take them. No last-minute gestures can fix that.