Biden’s Weakness, to a Degree That’s Almost Risible, Is Leaving America Increasingly Outgunned, Diplomatically Speaking

The White House seems incapable of charting any kind of course correction in America’s — or Israel’s — favor as the outlook in the Middle East darkens.

Miriam Alster/pool via AP
President Biden during a meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu to discuss the war between Israel and Hamas, at Tel Aviv, October 18, 2023. Miriam Alster/pool via AP

The declaration from the G7 summit in Japan on Wednesday morning was almost risible: The group’s members are “working together” to deny Hamas “the ability to raise funds to carry out atrocities” by “imposing sanctions and other measures.” How much America’s top diplomat, Secretary Blinken, had to do with that weasley wordsmithing is not clear.

Yet as with President Biden’s studious sanctioning of Russia after it invaded Ukraine and not before, this looks like the tail wagging the dog. Endless parleys of world leaders like the one under way at Tokyo might actually be worthwhile were there any payoff, but increasingly they look like so much grasping at diplomatic straws.

In the case of the G7’s bafflingly narrow take on the war in Gaza,, has the feeble Mr. Biden blanked out yet again?  Hamas, obviously, has already committed the atrocities. Only by destroying Hamas will further attacks be prevented, and only Israel is doing the hard work of knocking out the terrorists, one by one

Everything else is optics, and if they don’t look good for Washington, that may be because Mr. Biden seems almost pathologically driven to merely react to unfolding global crises instead of aggressively cutting them off. The president turns 81 this month, and the consequences of this catalog of inaction include diminished international clout. 

That should be setting off alarm bells in Congress and elsewhere. Suggesting a  three-day pause in the fight against Hamas, as Mr. Biden reportedly did on Tuesday, while Hamas is lobbing rockets at Tel Aviv and holding 241 people hostage, might strike some as uncouth. The pressure should be on Hamas and its backers in the Arab world — not on Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Mr. Blinken’s mostly pro forma performance in this Middle East crisis has not only not earned him respect, it has garnered some high-profile international displays of discourtesy. Turkey’s religiously surly president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, snubbed Mr. Blinken during his stop at Ankara on Monday. As a NATO member, Turkey seemingly should have done better.

Who is listening to us? Consider that the day before the slight to Mr. Blinken, the state secretary met with the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas — but for less than an hour. Foggy Bottom has proved itself incapable of charting any kind of course correction in America’s — or Israel’s — favor as the world careers out of control.

In this respect, what is happening in the Middle East is of a piece with the dismal situation in eastern Europe. The president seems convinced that he will be remembered for how he tried to restore order in the West after the Trump years, which, stripped of the colorful personality of President Trump himself, now seems like an almost placid interlude. 

Yes, the president admirably defended Kyiv’s independence, strengthened Western ties, reinvigorated and expanded NATO, and signaled to President Putin that there will be limits to his imperial aims. Yet sanctions did nothing to deter Moscow: They actually fertilized deeper ties with Communist China and Iran. Attempts to cancel Russia culturally have also flopped.

In respect of that, at least, President Macron’s approach, if not fully or even partially vindicated, has yet to be proved wrong. More importantly the war is at a standstill and the White House is caught between President Zelensky, who refuses compromises, and a Congress that finds it increasingly difficult to vote on military aid packages without seeing a path toward an end to the conflict.

This  world is rife with new and unscrupulous regional powers. Turkey is nominally as much a pillar of NATO as is Greece, but Mr. Erdogan refuses to  sanction Russia and courts billions of dollars in Russian investments. He preens Hamas terror goons, though not as egregiously as the sheiks of Qatar. 

Mr. Blinken seems to have avoided asking his counterparts at Doha why the organizers of the October 7 massacres are still living the high life in that desert dictatorship. At least one Republican lawmaker, Andy Ogles of Texas, has made the effort to take Qatar down a notch unless it expels the Hamas criminals. 

Sending two carrier strike groups to the Eastern Mediterranean to deter Iran and Hezbollah is good, and America’s troops do their commander-in-chief proud, but the deterrence power is limited. It reminds of 2013, when President Obama had the chance to attack Iran’s bosom buddy in Syria, Bashar al-Assad, but retreated. 

If there is nothing that can really stop the steady shift of the balance of power toward Asia and the Global South, Moscow’s bear hug of Beijing included, there is something else at work. Mr. Biden is failing to capitalize on America’s economic power that is built, at least partly, on respect for international rules and democratic values. Recent events show that we are largely being ignored.

Biden officials were busy colluding with social media companies to suppress accounts of Hunter Biden’s shady business dealings with foreigners when they ought to have been working with Silicon Valley to minimize anti-American and antisemitic incitement on social media. Those platforms are now directly contributing to violence against Jews in America and abroad. It’s nothing less than a cancer.

Mr. Biden’s disastrous retreat from Afghanistan showed the world that America, at least under a Democratic administration, is capable of talking a good game and parting with a vast amount of treasure, but is also less than reliable. To some clear-thinking minds, every day that a hostage remains captive in the tunnels under Gaza City is a failure of diplomacy — ours included.


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