Robert Gates, call your office: President Biden’s 40 years of being wrong on nearly every foreign policy issue is on full display — yet again — with an ill-timed attack on the leader of America’s most reliable Mideast ally.  

Several sources with ties to the White House tell the Sun that Mr. Biden’s outburst on Tuesday against Prime Minister Netanyahu was a reaction to public statements by America’s own ambassador in Jerusalem, Thomas Nides. Earlier in the day the ambassador said in several press interviews that the president would soon invite Mr. Netanyahu to visit the White House. 

“No, not in the near term,” Mr. Biden told a reporter who asked if such an invitation would be forthcoming. The president’s answer followed a diatribe in which Mr. Biden publicly opined on the crisis in Israel over an effort in the Knesset to overhaul relations between the legislative and the judiciary.

“I hope he walks away from it,” Mr. Biden said, referring to Mr. Netanyahu. “Like many strong supporters of Israel, I am very concerned. I am concerned that they get this straight. They can not continue down this road. I have sort of made that clear.” Mr. Biden added that he hoped the prime minister would “try to work out some genuine compromise, but that remains to be seen.”

The president’s shoot-from-the-hip statement resembled some of his famous gaffes, such as saying on the eve of Russia’s Ukraine invasion that America would tolerate a “minor incursion,” or his vow to make a decades-old American ally in the Mideast, Saudi Arabia, a “pariah.” 

In Israel, many are questioning the timing of Mr. Biden’s decision to make public his pressure campaign on Mr. Netanyahu. Until then, that pressure had been mostly conducted behind the scenes. The public spat erupted after Mr. Netanyahu postponed the legislative effort on Monday and as his representatives, in an attempt to negotiate an agreed path forward, met with opposition leaders Tuesday at President Herzog’s residence. 

“When the White House decides on entering an internal conflict of one of its allies, it has to project that the intervention somehow makes the crisis at hand easier to solve,” the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Dore Gold, tells the Sun.

In this case, “Israel was in the process of solving the crisis by itself, and the language of the intervention makes the solution much more difficult,” Mr. Gold, a past Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, says.  

Another former Israeli diplomat, who asked not to be identified and who now regularly attends protests against the government, said that even as he supported the anti-Netanyahu sentiment, he feared that Mr. Biden’s statement could weaken America globally — and especially in the Mideast. 

Last year Mr. Biden went to Saudi Arabia to make amends for his earlier pressure on the kingdom. Yet, after two years of criticism, the president’s fist bump with Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman accomplished little. The dejected prince turned to America’s global competitor, Communist China.

This week the kingdom’s oil arm, Aramco, entered new multibillion-dollar deals with Beijing, consolidating Saudi Arabia’s status as China’s top oil supplier. Riyadh reportedly is now considering accepting China’s yuan in oil sales, a move that could end the dollar’s primacy as global currency of choice. 

In America, Mr. Biden’s latest outburst intensified partisan divisions over support of Israel. “Utterly disgraceful,” Senator Cruz of Texas tweeted. “Biden gleefully hosts anti-American radicals like Lula, while shunning close American allies like Netanyahu. It’s clear that Biden and his officials are high from funding what they believe to be successful anti-government protests in Israel.”

Another Republican, Governor DeSantis of Florida, who is widely expected to run for the presidency in 2024, announced he would travel to Israel next month to celebrate its 75th independence day. 

Mr. Biden has framed his incursion into Israel’s internal politics as a struggle to save its democracy, which he said is at the heart of America’s special relation with Israel. He made sure to exclude Mr. Netanyahu from tomorrow’s “summit of democracies,” to which he invited Costa Rica, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Zambia.

Yet, countries have very different approaches to what a democracy entails. Zambia, for one, has turned democratic only recently, and is far from secure in remaining so. “You can’t eat democracy. Human rights may sustain the spirit, but not the body,” its president, Hakainde Hichilema, wrote in an op-ed this week.

“Thank you, Poland. Thank you, thank you, thank you for what you’re doing,” Mr. Biden said last month in a Warsaw speech commemorating the first anniversary of Russia’s Ukraine invasion, which was framed as a fight between democracies and tyrannies. Yet, last year Mr. Biden sent a “subtle” message to Warsaw, warning President Duda against erosion of Poland’s democratic values and institutions.   

Mr. Netanyahu has heard such messages from the White House ever since he returned to power following the November election in Israel. The question now is not whether Israel’s democracy will survive; it will. Rather, it is whether Mr. Biden will now be forced to repair relations with Mr. Netanyahu the same way he attempted to do with Prince bin Salman and Mr. Duda.