Biden’s Reelection Goals Increasingly Conflict with U.S. National Priorities

By Noah Rothman

Friday, March 22, 2024

 

Because Joe Biden and his administration officials have so often said as much, we know that this White House understands that U.S. national interests would be advanced by Israeli and Ukrainian battlefield victories. We can, therefore, deduce that it would represent a setback for American geostrategic priorities if our embattled partners failed to secure their goals. It must be said that the administration has devoted commendable effort over the last two years to supporting America’s preferred outcomes in those respective theaters of conflict. And yet, U.S. objectives on the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East are apparently increasingly in conflict with Joe Biden’s political priorities, the foremost of which is getting reelected in the fall. Forced to choose, Biden is siding with his own reelection.

 

It has been hard to miss the extent of the White House’s anxiety over how uncomfortable progressives, young voters, and Arab-American Michiganders have become with Biden’s support for Israel. By flamboyantly projecting their dissatisfaction with Israel in public while arming Jerusalem and urging it to pursue a quick and victorious resolution to its war in the Gaza Strip in private, the administration has tried to have its cake and eat it, too. It now seems that the administration is applying this same duplicitous approach to its relations with Ukraine.

 

According to its sources, the Financial Times reported on Friday that the Biden administration has been reduced to begging Ukrainian forces to refrain from executing strikes on dual-use infrastructure inside Russia — specifically, its oil storage and refining facilities. Those strikes are “hurting its oil production capacity,” which is, in fact, the whole point of Ukraine’s enterprise. But while this approach makes sense for Ukraine — an asymmetric strategy against a better-armed and well-funded aggressor — it imperils Joe Biden’s political prospects.

 

“Oil prices have risen about 15 percent this year, to $85 a barrel, pushing up fuel costs just as US President Joe Biden begins his campaign for re-election,” the FT continued. “Washington is also concerned that if Ukraine keeps hitting Russian facilities, including many that are hundreds of miles from the border, Russia could retaliate by lashing out at energy infrastructure relied on by the west.”

 

The Biden administration will struggle to explain why the Russian energy resources it has sanctioned must remain unmolested by Ukraine’s defenders. The president has already implored Americans to expect and endure financial pain as part of our commitment to the preservation of the U.S.-led world order. But it seems the White House cannot observe its own admonitions.

 

The Biden administration has invested American treasure and prestige in the defensive wars its partners in Israel and Ukraine are waging. The president needs them to win — or, at least, to be able to lay convincing claim to something that can be called victory. The political return on the administration’s investments in these conflicts will only materialize in that event, and such a feat would resonate with a broad audience of American voters. Biden’s team has lost sight of that possibility. It’s no longer thinking so big. Rather, it’s consumed with the minutiae of domestic politics in its pursuit of all that it apparently thinks is possible: the narrowest of reelection victories in the fall.

 

The president’s reelection team is fixated on marginal voters on the fringes of the Democratic coalition and the low-propensity voters who might be discouraged in November because the gas to get to their polling place is too expensive. They cannot see a pathway toward a more convincingly broad Democratic coalition in the fall, and their fatalism may be justified. But the Biden White House’s near-sightedness entails plenty of risks.

 

The president’s carping at our partners abroad threatens to scuttle the White House’s efforts to lay the blame for their battlefield setbacks at the feet of the GOP. Average voters will struggle to reconcile the president’s claims that Republicans have hung our allies out to dry by failing to appropriate funds to support their defense with its simultaneous demands on Israel and Ukraine to fight with one arm tied behind their backs.

 

Every indication suggests Americans share the objectives sought by both Israel and Ukraine. If Joe Biden’s support for their respective goals looks like the fair-weather sort come November, voters may conclude that we can do better.