It’s Against the Rules to Win

By Seth Mandel

Friday, December 27, 2024

 

Joe Biden can be accused of a lot of things, but a long feature in yesterday’s New York Times, that “Biden Courted Allies Who Undermined U.S. Goals,” is not really about what it pretends to be about. The actual, underlying complaint appears to be that President Biden made a mistake in supporting several U.S. allies that are disliked by the New York Times and its sources.

 

The first ally mentioned is Afghanistan, which made the list because Biden believed Ashraf Ghani’s government could hold off the Taliban for another year, but then it didn’t. Another is South Korea, where President Yoon Suk Yeol recently declared martial law.

 

But in both cases, the support came after the incidents in question. The Biden administration’s Afghanistan failure wasn’t in “supporting” Ghani; it was in overseeing a military disengagement of world-historical recklessness and incompetence.

 

The article’s use of South Korea and Afghanistan (and, weirdly, the United Arab Emirates) is mere prelude to identifying the real villain: Benjamin Netanyahu: “Critics say Mr. Biden failed to use the only real leverage he had to shape Israel’s actions, and so Mr. Netanyahu ignored him.” (Oh is that what critics say?)

 

This part of the story gives us some quotes for the ages. Emma Ashford, a fellow at the Stimson Center, tells the Times that Biden’s hypocrisy was put on full display by “the split-screen much of the world sees on Gaza and Ukraine — with an administration who says one conflict is an unacceptable war crime, and the other self-defense.”

 

Ashford’s phrasing here is telling. “One conflict,” she says—not “one battle” or “one strike.” Israel’s entire side of the conflict apparently ought to be a war crime too.

 

This is an important window into how much the foreign-policy debate in America has deteriorated. Ukraine and Israel were the invaded parties. There is no argument over this—it’s not unclear who started either war, even if we debate about the chosen casus belli in each case. Even those who offer insipid justifications for Putin’s and Hamas’s actions implicitly accept that those actions marked the beginning of the current wars.

 

It is, then, genuinely insane to compare Ukraine and Gaza this way. What Ukraine and Gaza actually have in common at the moment is solely that they are, to different degrees, “losing” these wars. A “win” for Ukraine is generally defined by Kyiv as retaining all its territory. That was possible at one time, had the Biden administration and Western Europe provided the support Ukraine needed and deserved at the outset of the war, though now it appears unlikely.

 

Gaza, meanwhile, was doomed from the start because even a Hamas victory—which would mean its outlasting of Israel’s determination and its accumulation of enough international support to hold its legitimacy as rulers of Gaza—would be a disaster for Gazan civilians. Hamas essentially rigged the Gaza Strip to blow up, then lit the fuse, because it had already built a second Gaza for itself underground. But Hamas is on the ropes as well, bringing some measure of justice for what the terror group has done to Gaza and to Israel.

 

And that is Israel’s crime: winning a war it didn’t start.

 

The Times does its best to play along. “The Israeli military, supplied with American weapons, has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians and destroyed most of Gaza, according to officials in the strip and satellite images,” reads the report.

 

Of course, even if you accept Hamas’s overall numbers, it is still untrue that the IDF has killed 45,000 Palestinians. The Times is taking a Hamas lie and pushing it to its absolute limits, but there is no method of counting that gets you to this number unless you blame Israel for every single natural death in Gaza and for those killed by Hamas and other terror groups.

 

Nor is there any context to those long-debunked “stats.” Hamas has not surrendered, so the war goes on. Israel is continuing to win the war that Hamas started and is perpetuating. Should Israel simply stop fighting a war that the enemy carries on?

 

Never mind, we know the answer.