Author: Daniel Larison

Blinken is selling a bridge to nowhere:

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday that Israel has accepted a proposal to bridge gaps in ceasefire negotiations and the next step is for Hamas to accept ahead of further negotiations expected to take place later this week.

The so-called bridging proposal is not a serious effort to secure a ceasefire. The only gap that it closes is between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government, and it does this by including even more conditions from the Israeli side that Hamas won’t accept. Netanyahu agreed to the new proposal only because he knew that Hamas wouldn’t.

Continue reading “Blinken Wants To Sell Us a Bridge”

Matthew Petti reports on a string of recent Biden administration decisions to provide even more weapons to Middle Eastern clients:

It’s been a good week for the weapons industry. President Joe Biden signed off on order after order allowing American weapons to flow to Middle Eastern regimes. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Biden administration will sell shipments of bombs worth $750 million to Saudi Arabia, breaking its ban on selling “offensive weapons” to the kingdom.

On the same day, the State Department announced over $20 billion in new arms sales to Israel, including fighter jets, armored vehicles, and ammunition. And the Friday before, the administration removed several major barriers to arming the Israeli military. It released $3.5 billion in U.S. taxpayer money for the Israeli military, unfroze a $262 million munition shipment that had been held up since May, and decided not to restrict U.S. aid to an Israeli army unit accused of beating an American to death.

The Biden administration has dropped any pretense that it cares how U.S.-made weapons are used. It will instead reward governments run by war criminals by providing them with as many weapons as they want. That doesn’t come as a surprise after watching the U.S. aid and abet Israel’s atrocities in Gaza for the last ten months, but it underscores the moral bankruptcy of the administration’s foreign policy and confirms that the president has nothing but contempt for our own laws. When it comes to arming war criminals in the Middle East, Biden is indistinguishable from Trump.

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.

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.

Continue reading “The Many Entanglements of the ‘Indispensable Nation’”

A new survey from the Chicago Council finds that most Americans oppose sending U.S. forces to defend Israel if it comes under attack. If Israel is attacked by Iran, 56% oppose U.S. intervention to defend them. If Israel is attacked by any of its immediate neighbors, 55% oppose sending U.S. troops to defend them in that scenario. Now that these scenarios are not so hypothetical, most Americans aren’t interested in having the U.S. military come to the rescue.

Support for U.S. intervention to defend Israel has declined significantly since 2021. Three years ago, 53% of the public supported direct intervention, and now that figure is 41%. Support among Democrats has dropped 6 points to 35%. Support has dropped among independents by 14 points, and among Republicans it has dropped 17. Most Republicans still favor intervention.

Unfortunately, no one in the administration seems to know or care that most of the country doesn’t want the U.S. to rush to Israel’s defense. The Biden administration has been sending more ships, jets, and military personnel to the Middle East in the wake of the Israeli government’s latest reckless and provocative attacks. If Iran and its proxies launch their reprisals in the coming days, American deployed on the ground and at sea throughout the region will be at much greater risk and the U.S. will even closer to the major war that every administration official keeps claiming not to want.

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.

The Israeli government assassinated the leader of Hamas’ political wing while he was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of the newly-elected Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian:

Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political wing, was killed in Iran, Hamas announced Wednesday, describing the death as an assassination. Hamas and Iran both blamed Israel and vowed to retaliate; the Israel Defense Forces declined to comment. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said it was Iran’s “duty” to avenge the killing, and Hamas’s armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, warned of “major repercussions” for the whole region.

Continue reading “A Reckless and Dangerous Israeli Assassination in Iran”

J.D. Vance sometimes talks like a non-interventionist, but most of his foreign policy positions don’t match his rhetoric. The other day, he was talking about foreign conflicts and he said, “Sometimes, it is just none of our business and we ought to stay out of it.” That is a reasonable and defensible position, and I agree with it, but that can’t be squared with Vance’s own support for the war in Gaza and his calls for Israel to “finish the job.” If ever there were a time for the U.S. to “stay out of it,” it is when a U.S. client is waging a monstrous war that kills tens of thousands of civilians while they also create a man-made famine.

Continue reading “Vance and the War in Gaza”