The New York Times published a report on Biden’s foreign policy record last week that annoyed a lot of analysts and other readers because of its original hyperbolic headline about the U.S. being “consumed by war” on Biden’s watch. As Joel Mathis noted, the headline was changed to make it the more defensible “entangled in war,” but by then there weren’t many people interested in what the article said. As often happens, the content of the article was more reasonable than the original headline. The thrust of the story was that Biden’s foreign policy has been defined by the foreign conflicts that he has supported, and no one can seriously argue that this isn’t what has happened.
Michael Crowley, the author of the article, opened by quoting from the president’s speech last month in which he falsely claimed that the U.S. was not at war anywhere in the world. Crowley continued, “But while America is no longer waging a large-scale ground war like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, for much of his tenure Mr. Biden has seemed like a wartime leader.” That seems hard to dispute since so much of Biden’s foreign policy agenda has been taken up (one might even say consumed) by the foreign wars that he has chosen to support.
As Crowley mentions, Biden and his campaign very much wanted the public to see him as a wartime leader when he was still a candidate. This may have initially benefited him, at least in Washington, but it has done the opposite over the last year as the wars have dragged on without the success that many supporters expected. Now Biden would like to be perceived as presiding over an America that isn’t at war at the same time that he fuels the war in Gaza with a steady supply of weapons.
Biden has tied himself and the reputation of the U.S. to the fortunes of wars that may be unwinnable (Ukraine) or are indefensible (Israel/Gaza). The president identified himself personally with Israel’s war effort more than any other American president before him. Since then, the war in Gaza has created a humanitarian catastrophe and brought the region closer to a major conflagration that the U.S. is making more likely with its unconditional support for Israel. The slaughter and man-made famine in Gaza have naturally caused most Americans to recoil in horror from the administration’s policy of support.
The president has tried selling U.S. support for the war in Gaza by arguing that things would be far worse if the U.S. “walked away,” but that is hard to take seriously when the U.S. is enabling mass starvation and genocide. U.S. troops may not be engaged in combat there, but the president has implicated the U.S. in some of the worst crimes of the century. Those crimes haven’t stopped, and the administration has done practically nothing to try to stop them. This entanglement through complicity in the slaughter and starvation of innocent people is even worse than committing U.S. forces to an unnecessary war.
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Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.