The Biden Administration Is the Last to Know

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 21, 2024

 

For all the Democratic Party’s theatrical rapture, Joe Biden’s loyalists are still trapped in a psychological torment of their own making. The Biden administration’s foreign-policy hands are in a bleak mood as it appears their latest plan for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip — the one the president claimed was all but a done deal in June without consulting the Israelis, and only to corner the supposedly recalcitrant Netanyahu government — is “on the brink of collapse,” according to Politico. And it’s Hamas that will collapse it.

 

If Hamas’s decimated leadership does formally reject the Biden administration’s overture, it’s only the latest such occasion. Hamas balked at terms that would have paused the fighting in Gaza for two months in exchange for the release of some of its hostages in January. It did the same in March, at which point U.S. negotiators became “skeptical that Hamas actually wants a deal,” but the Biden team kept plugging away. Hamas objected to new cease-fire terms in April and again in May, and the terrorist group signaled its unwillingness to consent to the contours of Biden’s latest offer almost from the moment he proposed it. Now a spent political force, the Biden White House seems to be entertaining the notion that Hamas won’t consent to any deal that sacrifices whatever leverage it still possesses over Israel. Imagine that.

 

Biden officials’ abject emotional state is reflected in a sentence Politico published in its sympathetic writeup of their despondency. “If they cannot get Hamas on board, they may be out of options,” it began. What a profound realization, but what took so long? If the administration was previously operating on the assumption that Hamas would consent to its dissolution and submit its members to Israeli justice, they were deluded. Israel never entertained a permanent cessation of hostilities — merely temporary pauses designed to exfiltrate the hostages. Neither the Netanyahu government nor the Israeli political consensus it represents ever entertained the notion that Hamas would survive this war intact. The proposition on offer from Israel since 10/7 is that one or the other party to this conflict will unambiguously lose it. For all its rhetorical support for Israel’s mission in Gaza, it seems the Biden White House and its functionaries never really believed them.

 

The second half of that egregious sentence is even more blinkered. If talks fail, there is a “chance of an increase in violence between Israel and Hezbollah and a direct confrontation between Israel and Tehran.” Politico quotes “one of the officials familiar with Israel’s stance” who insists that, while it’s unclear that Hamas wants to negotiate at all, there simply must be a deal. Absent one, “There’s a chance that Iran attacks and this escalates into a full-blown confrontation,” the official said.

 

It is not the Iranian regime’s hopes for peace in the Gaza Strip that has stayed its hand. Indeed, Iran’s hand is not and has never been stayed. Its proxies — Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria — have been active since 10/7. Iran itself executed a massive missile and drone barrage against Israel in April. Iran has not yet acted on the threats it has made against Israel in the wake of the July 31 assassination of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, not because the theocratic regime is composed of dewy-eyed peacemakers. It is deterred by hard power — America’s and Israel’s alike.

 

The forward positioning of U.S. forces, which have already demonstrated their capacity to humiliate Iran — as they and their regional allies did by largely neutralizing the volley of ordnance Iran unleashed in the spring. Israel’s assassination campaign in the region has demonstrated how thoroughly Israeli intelligence has penetrated the Iranian regime and its security services. The Iranians are insecure and unsure that a retaliatory operation will succeed in the way it must — a face-saving action that restores the Iranian regime’s wounded pride but is calibrated enough that it does not trigger a broader war, which Tehran has every reason to fear it would lose. Cease-fire talks in Doha are not preventing Iran from acting. Its own strategic calculations are.

 

The worst part about this is that Biden is not “out of options.” They have the option of allowing Israel to emerge from its defensive war in Gaza the unambiguous victor, eliminating Hamas’s command and control elements and erecting a durable civilian-led authority in its place. That outcome is not hard to envision, but the Biden administration just cannot see it. So, it has talked itself into despair. But it’s unlikely that many outside observers were operating under the delusion that Israel didn’t mean it when its government insisted that Hamas would not survive this war. Nor did spectators to this conflict conclude that the millenarian terrorist group responsible for the 10/7 massacre would consent to its own destruction. They knew how this war would end even if the Biden administration did not.