By Noah Rothman
Tuesday,
February 20, 2024
On Monday,
the president’s reelection campaign dispatched a co-chair, former New Orleans
mayor Mitch Landrieu, to Michigan to plead its case. It did not go well.
Landrieu was reportedly set upon by embittered activists who
presented the Biden White House with an ultimatum: withdraw its support for
Israel and its goal of neutralizing Hamas or they walk, possibly taking
Michigan’s coveted electoral votes with them. To this, Landrieu confessed that
the administration’s hands were tied. “This conflict is going to be a long
conflict,” he said. “I don’t expect that it’s going to end anytime
soon.” Landrieu’s audience was unimpressed. Along with at least 39 state and
local officials, Biden’s Michigan-based critics plan to support an effort to
protest the administration endorsed by Representative Rashida Tlaib by voting “uncommitted”
in the state’s Democratic primary.
This
threat to the Biden campaign’s bottom line in November is sufficient to explain
the administration’s efforts to mollify the anti-Israel activists in its
coalition in ways that, in every other aspect, defy logic. The latest example
of the administration’s commitment to folly has taken the form of a proposed
draft U.N. Security Council resolution which, if passed, would signal that
America’s support for Israel’s defensive war against Hamas has come to an end.
The text of the resolution calls for a temporary ceasefire
in Gaza — a cessation of hostilities Biden has already said he would force Israel to observe indefinitely. It calls on
Israel to refrain from taking its ground offensive into Rafah, from which it
recently exfiltrated Israeli hostages and in which Hamas fighters are still
holding out. A State Department spokesperson defended the resolution by
insisting that there should be no “full-scale Israel military operation in
Rafah” absent a “credible and executable plan” for protecting civilians — a
goal that is in irreconcilable conflict with the resolution’s
objection to the “further displacement” of Palestinian civilians from harm’s
way. “The best way to achieve an enduring end to the crisis in Gaza that
provides lasting peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians alike, is our
strong commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state,” the spokesperson
added.
Though
it reads like an act of statecraft, the resolution is intended for the
consumption of Biden’s monomaniacally anti-Israel domestic critics. Little else
explains the administration’s willingness to sacrifice U.S. national interests
but its political investment in self-preservation.
It
should not need to be said that the impetus for the establishment of a
Palestinian state by international fiat cannot be the massacre, rape, and
abduction of thousands of Israelis. We shouldn’t have to explain to advocates
of Palestinian statehood that the prospects for a sovereign nation composed of
two non-contiguous territories that are continually at each other’s throats —
autonomous entities with wildly distinct economies, foreign policies, and
political cultures — are not great. No one seems to have much considered what
U.S. national interests would be advanced by the creation of a nation which, on
Day One, would become a bulwark in the region against U.S. influence by
aligning itself with Iran, Russia, and China.
Nor
has the Biden administration apparently considered that the sacrifice of its
influence with and even leverage over Israel by sidling up alongside its
enemies is a high-risk, low-reward proposition. Israel will not relent in its
campaign to neutralize Hamas as a threat. No Israeli government would survive
the abandonment of an objective shared by the whole of Israeli society. The Biden
administration would only be establishing a predicate for heaping scorn on
Israel from great moral heights. The Israelis are used to that, but an American
betrayal at this time in the country’s history will not be soon forgotten. And
what would the administration gain from such perfidy? What goodwill would it
buy from Jerusalem’s opponents in the U.S. and abroad as Israel continues its
campaign and the U.S. maintains its congressionally authorized support for Israel’s
self-defense?
The
United States benefits directly from the speedy execution of Israel’s mandate
to take an Iranian chess piece off the geopolitical board. The Biden
administration has acknowledged that both in rhetorical terms and through its
material commitments to punishing the Iranian proxies who, it must
unfortunately be restated, are attacking the
U.S. and its allies and killing Americans. Those actions speak louder than U.N.
Security Council resolutions. America’s enemies won’t subordinate their
campaign against the West to the aspirations expressed in diplomatic ephemera.
All the resolution could achieve is to convey to America’s embattled partners
abroad that U.S. support for their respective causes comes with an expiration
date — as if more evidence of America’s fair-weather friendship were needed.
Because
none of this makes any sense absent a consideration of the domestic political
pressures a wildly unrepresentative class of activists are putting on this
presidency, we must conclude that Biden has prioritized his reelection
prospects over America’s permanent interests. If the Biden campaign genuinely
believes its success hinges on a small number of malcontents in Michigan, it is
in deep trouble well beyond the state’s borders. Biden would be better served
appealing to the majority of Americans for whom Israel’s cause is a
vital extension of American grand strategy abroad. At the very least, his
administration would go down without putting American national interests on the
chopping block in a cloying effort to appease the unappeasable. But then,
desperation makes people do crazy things.
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