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.
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
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.