One day, two wars, and what haunts the Biden presidency

The sense that Biden fights wars but doesn’t know how to end them may well turn out to be not just his big geopolitical challenge but also a major electoral one

Washington: OnTuesday, President Joe Biden began his public engagements disagreeing with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government on how he was proceeding with the war against Hamas and Israel’s plans for Gaza the day after the war.

US President Joe Biden. (AFP)

Biden ended the day, standing alongside Ukrainian president Volodymr Zelensky, disagreeing with the US Congress, which has been reluctant to provide any additional funding for the Ukrainian resistance against Russian aggression, amid a drop in the wider public support for continued aid to Kyiv.

If Biden inherited one war, Afghanistan, where the absence of a clear endgame resulted in a humiliating American withdrawal, the two wars that will be most closely associated with his presidency are now marked by the same feature – the lack of an endgame resulting in diminished political, public, legislative and international support for the American allies at war.

In one case, the US, despite the public support, isn’t on the same page with its closest ally, Israel, as Tel Aviv continues its brutal offensive in Gaza and the far-right government in Israel led by Netanyahu refuses to make even the basic political concession to the idea of a two-state solution that has been the fundamental promise to Palestinians for at least three decades.

In the other case, the US executive, led by Democrats, isn’t on the same page as the US Congress, where Republicans dominate the House and are a key presence in the Senate, in the backdrop of a failed Ukrainian counteroffensive this year, renewed Russian momentum, and a general sense that America has done enough to support a distant European country and it is time to turn inwards.

On one day this week, the two warfronts and geopolitics fused with US domestic politics in Washington DC, illustrating how even the most dominant actor in the international system is constrained by internal and external limits.

The message to Netanyahu

During a campaign speech on Tuesday morning in DC, Biden – whose support for Israel has resulted in relentless international and domestic criticism and a fracture in his political coalition with younger progressives and people of colour walking away – shifted his strategy. If, until now, he had been publicly supportive as a way to gain private leverage with Netanyahu and counsel restraint, Biden has now gone public in his criticism.

While reiterating his strong condemnation of Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7, and Israel’s right to respond, Biden said that Netanyahu had got a “tough decision to make”. The President first traced his own relationship with the Israeli PM, and how Netanyahu has a signed picture on his desk from Biden with a note where Biden says, “Bibi, I love you but I don’t agree with a damn thing you have to say”.

“He is a good friend but he has to change...This government in Israel is making it very difficult for him to move…This is the most conservative government in Israel’s history, the most conservative,” Biden said, referring to the presence of Far-Right leaders in Netanyahu’s government.

Claiming that he had known every Israeli leader since Golda Meir (who was PM in 1973 when Biden first became a Senator), Biden said this was a different group. “They don’t want anything remotely approaching a two-state solution. They not only want to have retribution, which they should for what Hamas did, but against all Palestinians. They don’t want a two-state solution. They don’t want anything having to do with the Palestinians.”

The president’s remarks came in the backdrop of Netanyahu publicly declaring that Israel would not just stop Hamas, but even Fatah (the Palestinian Authority or PA) from running Gaza. The US has hoped that the end of the Israeli offensive will lead to a movement on the two-state solution, with the more moderate PA, currently in charge of governance in West Bank, having a greater role in Gaza. Biden and Netanyahu’s public comments show that the two leaders, and their countries, aren’t on the same page not just about the conduct of the war but also the endgame as far as Gaza is concerned.

Biden said that he had engaged closely with Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, which wanted normalisation and he referred to the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor he unveiled on the sidelines of the G20 summit in New Delhi in September. “But we have to make sure that Bibi (as Netanyahu is popularly called) understands that he has got to make some moves to strengthen PA, change it, move it. You cannot say there is no Palestinian state at all in the future. That’s going to be the hard part.”

Once again, reiterating his solidarity with Israel and terming Hamas as “animals”, Biden said Israel’s security rests not just on the US but others including Europe and “most of the world” supporting it. But in a clear warning, Biden added, “They are starting to lose that support by the indiscriminate bombing that takes place.”

Biden’s comments came on a day when 153 countries overwhelmingly voted for a UN General Assembly resolution calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. The US and Israel were among the ten countries that opposed the resolution. His use of the word, indiscriminate, also carries tremendous significance for its implications in terms of possible violation of international law.

Suggesting that when he raised this issue with Netanyahu, the Israeli PM responded by pointing to the US actions during the Second World War, including its bombardment of Germany and its use of atomic weapons killing civilians. Biden said he had told Netanyahu that is the reason why international institutions were set up after the war, to ensure “it didn’t happen again”. “Don’t make the same mistakes we made after 9/11. There was no reason we had to be in war in Afghanistan at 9/11, There was no reason why we had to do some of the things we did.”

For Biden’s critics, the message is too little and too late, as the US is seen as complicit with Israel’s alleged war crimes and excesses in Gaza. It is also clear that Biden’s strategy of “smothering with love”, as a chronicler of his presidency described his approach to Israel, isn’t quite working. No one quite knows how and when Israel plans to end its offensive and what comes next, and there is suspicion that Netanyahu’s political survival is linked to the extension, rather than the resolution, of the conflict.

And given the effort that Biden’s spokespersons invested on Wednesday in a regular White House briefing to dilute his remarks — there was no reiteration of the claim of “indiscriminate bombing”, the issue of the nature of the Israeli government which Biden suggested had to change was underplayed with polite noises on how it was for the Israeli people to decide, and there was unequivocal rejection of the idea of a ceasefire — the narrative inconsistency of America will continue to dent its credibility.

The plea to US Congress

If Biden spent the morning pleading with Israel to change its tactics and rethink its endgame, he spent the afternoon with Zelensky in the White House, listening to Ukrainian pleas for support and sending a message to the US Congress about the need to sanction this support to deter Vladimir Putin.

Zelensky was in DC to lobby with the US Senate and House of Representatives, particularly the Republican leadership, for the additional $50 billion in security assistance that the Biden administration has sought to support Ukraine — a proposal that the Senate shot down last week. But if Zelensky was greeted as a hero last year, when his ability to resist Russia had won him accolades, this time around, his sales pitch found fewer takers. And that is because of not just the tougher conditions on the ground but because of the change in domestic mood in America.

A recent CNN poll showed that 55% respondents believed that the Congress shouldn’t authorise more funds for Ukraine while 51% said that US had done enough; there was a clear partisan divide, with 71% Republicans unwilling to extend more support for Ukraine. While the previous House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was somewhat more supportive of Ukraine, the current House leadership, including Speaker Mike Johnson, who represents the extreme-Right flank of the Republican Party, is more isolationist in its own orientation. This segment, many of whom are loyal to Donald Trump, hasn’t ever been fully convinced that supporting Ukraine is essential for American national interest.

The Republicans also believe that this is the moment to extract their pound of flesh, for, the calculation goes, if Biden is so keen on funding for Ukraine, the administration can be pushed to do more on border security and what Republicans allege is a mass influx of illegal immigrants from the south. The Republicans assess, probably correctly, that in the run-up to the elections next year, immigration is a more potent political issue than Ukraine.

At a press conference in the White House, Biden’s aim was to bring back hope that Ukraine could win. He declared that for Zelensky standing in Washington, and for Ukraine to be standing free, close to two years after Putin’s invasion, was an “enormous victory” itself and a sign that Russia had failed. But Biden acknowledged that without the supplemental funding, the American ability to help Kyiv was diminishing. “Putin is banking on the United States failing to deliver for Ukraine. We must, we must, we must prove him wrong.”

He said that Russian anchors celebrated it when Republicans blocked funding for Ukraine last week, adding, “If you are being celebrated by Russian propagandists, it might be time to rethink what you are doing.” Biden also claimed that 90% of the funding for Ukraine is being spent in the US, particularly in the military industry complex, as a way to garner domestic support for the fight.

Zelensky too focused on convincing the Congress that his country had the appetite and will and capability to fight more. He framed Ukraine’s defence as a fight for freedom in Europe, saying, “We have freed 50 percent of the territories Russia occupied after February 24th. And we won the Black Sea and are reviving our economy. Thanks to maritime exports, Ukraine’s 5 percent economic growth this year proves our effective partnership. And we have shown no Russian missiles can overdo the powerful American Patriot systems.”

He did his job, of both showing how far Ukraine had come while acknowledging American indispensability, but the problem was that fewer people have faith in Ukraine’s ability to completely repel Russia than they had last year and a plea for American support seems to only reinforce that apprehension.

The US invaded Vietnam on the spurious theory that if the country went communist, there would be a “domino” effect, leading to communism elsewhere in the region. It was a bogus theory, but it took America a decade, hundreds of thousands of lives, and a defeat to get out of the war. The US invaded Afghanistan to get Osama bin Laden, finish off al-Qaeda, eliminate Taliban and refashion Afghanistan into a democracy. It took 20 years and thousands of lives before America walked away, handing over power in Kabul to the same force it had sought to defeat. The US went to Iraq on the outright false grounds that it possessed weapons of mass destruction. It walked away in a decade, but after tearing apart the country, sharpening the Shia-Sunni divide in the region with Iran gaining influence, and enabling, indirectly, the rise of the Islamic State.

The same structural deficiency of US foreign policy is back to haunt Biden. To be fair, he didn’t start the war in Ukraine, but he made the defence of Ukraine a central pillar of his term and now appears stuck as public appetite to support Ukraine in America dips and partisan divide sharpens. He didn’t start the war in West Asia; Hamas did with its terror attacks on October 7 and Israel responded the way it deemed fit. But by not drawing a clear redline on what was acceptable and what wasn’t acceptable in terms of the conduct of the war, and not making American support contingent on clear tangible military outcomes at the least human cost, he frittered away America’s moral capital and is now stuck as US is left hostage to Israeli whims.

In a political climate where a strong segment of Americans turning inwards, the sense that Biden fights wars but doesn’t know how to end them may well turn out to be not just his big geopolitical challenge but also a major electoral one.