The Biden administration’s recent decision to put a hold on weapons shipments to Israel is a stab in the back to a vital American ally that endangers its fight in the existential war against Hamas. It threatens to undermine important moves to peace and stability in the region as well. Beyond just the Middle East, though, this represents the culmination in a string of American missteps that threaten to undermine the liberal world order, abolish America’s role as world superpower, and create a new period of chaos and war.
The move, first reported by Axios and confirmed by Biden in a rambling interview, is openly aimed at pressuring the Jewish state not to invade Rafah. Adding injury to injury, the administration now says it has information on where Hamas leaders are hiding – but it will only share the intelligence if Israel complies with its demand not to invade Rafah. (Imagine if, say, France told America it knew where bin Laden was hiding just months after 9/11, but that Chirac would only tell us if we agreed not to invade Afghanistan!)
It is important to note exactly why Israel needs to invade this city. Following the Oct. 7 massacre, in which Hamas terrorists stormed from Gaza into Israel to murder and rape everyone in their path, Israel’s leaders and voters determine that it was necessary to remove Hamas as Gaza’s de facto governing authority and, next, to destroy Hamas as a military entity.
Israel’s army, the IDF, moved into Gaza, first by air and then through a full-scale invasion. It cut the strip into two pieces, clearing Hamas from the north and then, in the south, pushing Hamas to Rafah, its last stronghold. Due to ongoing hostage negotiations, pressure from the U.S. and other states, as well as concerns about the fate of hostages, the Rafah operation has been on hold for months. Hamas has not bargained in good faith (who would have thought that the terrorist organization responsible for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust would operate in bad faith?, and it is obvious they are using the negotiations as a ploy to maintain power. Israel’s leaders have said that the time has come to enter Rafah. Just the other day, Israeli tanks took control of the Gaza side of Rafah crossing,
Unfortunately, there are many civilians in Rafah, forced – mostly, but not entirely – against their will by Hamas to act as human shields. While the IDF is taking precautions to prevent civilian casualties, including by giving them information on exactly where to go to avoid harm, the situation has been used as a pretext by Hamas’s supporters and the proverbial “useful idiots” to press Israel not to undertake the final act of the Gaza war.
The situation is far from ideal, but what is to be done? Israel has destroyed 20 out of 24 of Hamas’s battalions. The rest are in Rafah. As the oft-repeated analogy goes, putting out 80 percent of a fire and then calling it quits still leaves you without a house. Ending the war now, refusing to go into Rafah, would mean that Israel fought for six months only to surrender to Hamas, who would then rebuild and, in a few years, repeat October 7, as they have promised to do.
Biden, caving into the demands of campus radicals, has decided that Israel should not invade Rafah to destroy Hamas and, to prevent Israel from doing so, has held up the shipments of military aid that Congress, in a bipartisan vote, has ordered. Additionally, the president is now engaged in blackmail, saying America won’t share information about terrorist leaders with its ally unless demands are met.
The effect on Israel’s defense is obvious. Either Israel agrees to national annihilation or it breaks with Washington. The harm to Israel in quashing its chance at victory in an existential fight is obvious enough that it’s not necessary to elaborate at great length.
If the Biden administration, which now seems only interested in retaining the votes of the Islamist-socialist alliance setting up tents at colleges across America, has its way, Hamas will retake Gaza and again create a totalitarian state – as a start. According to their founding charter, they want to wipe out Israel – and the Jews altogether – and then go on to establish an Islamist state everywhere.
Beyond Israel, Iran would be emboldened, as would its proxies besides Hamas, such as Hezbollah and the Houthis. We know that none of these groups care about the people they rule over – indeed, Israelis are more sorrowful about the deaths of Gazan civilians than Hamas (officials were even considering arming some Gazan civilians to facilitate distribution of aid). This means that Oct. 7 would have been essentially cost-free for Hamas. It would know that it has no reason to fear Israel, given that it could survive even after it committed the worst terror in Israeli history. Hamas could create another Oct. 7, and then another and another, knowing that the “international community” would allow Israel to defend itself briefly, only to then pressure it into one-sided negotiations and a suicidal ceasefire. Hezbollah, with its more advanced rockets, and Iran, with its unchecked nuclear program, would know this as well. The Houthis would know what they are already suspecting, that there is nothing they could do that would cause the militaries of the “enlightened” “humanitarian” states to bring about their demise.
Empowering Iran and its proxies would endanger Israel, but it would also make the entire region, a central geopolitical and economic crosswords of the planet, less stable. The Abraham Accords have been forged largely because Arab states have seen Israel as a powerful ally against Iran. Leaving Hamas in power would be an amazing display of weakness on Israel’s part, and in the Middle East, weakness is death, a concept the West hasn’t had to reckon with for nearly a century. The accords, which have been the sole promise of stability in the region, would then have no justifying principle. In this way, Biden is now actively destroying the only real possibility of peace, based on mutual security, in the Middle East.
Of course, other countries are watching the U.S. response to Israel. Saudi Arabia surely cannot help but wonder whether the United States really is a good ally in the struggle against Iranian extremism. True, the U.S. did help to lead an Israeli-American-Saudi-Jordanian defense of Israel, and that could have been the basis for a united, muscular policy for peace. Sadly, we’ve already watched as the U.S. pressured Israel not “to escalate” the situation, meaning that Iran went unpunished. Further, though Biden told Iran “don’t,” they’ve suffered no consequences for crossing the U.S., similar to the lack of consequences for Russia and Assad after they crossed Obama’s “red line” in Syria.
Even a year ago, before Oct. 7, but after the Biden administration began to bungle its relationship with Saudi Arabia (calling an important ally a “pariah” is simply bad foreign policy), the kingdom was already hedging its bets. Seemingly worried even then it might not be able to count on Washington, the Saudis began tentative negotiations with Iran – brokered by Beijing. The People’s Republic has desperately been trying to get its collective hands on the region, so that it can quietly gain power there as it has in many regions of Africa and elsewhere.
All of the above is the last thing that the U.S. should want. We should want our allies to be strong, we should want them to feel that the U.S. is a powerful force, we should want our enemies to feel even more so that the U.S. is overwhelmingly powerful, and we should want Beijing and Moscow to be as isolated as possible in the Middle East. For a tiny example as to why, note that the Houthis, a tin-pot Islamist alliance governing just part of the tiny Arabian state of Yemen, have been able to disrupt a significant portion of global trade. (The U.S. under Biden has done little to combat them as well.) It’s not hard to imagine the chaos Beijing or Moscow could produce.
Beyond the Middle East, Biden’s policy of weakness and appeasement – shared with the previous two administrations, at least to an extent – weakens the global standing of the United States. Since World War II’s conclusion, the United States has acted as the guarantor of the democratic world order and, since 1991, it has acted as the guarantor of the worldwide economic and security order. Now, however, the U.S. appears to be intent on retreating from the scene.
As Israel fights for its survival, Biden is hampering its efforts. As Ukraine fights for its own survival, Biden offered initial support, but then slow-walked ATACMs and other weaponry Ukraine could have used to defeat Russia, even while making absurd demands, e.g., that Ukraine not attack inside of Russia or attack Russian oil rigs. Terrified of “escalation,” that Russia would use nuclear weapons, the U.S. under Biden blinked, and did so multiple times. Now escalation is everywhere, as the world sees no one will punish it – or at least not punish it very much.
Arguably, Russia felt like it had the green light to invade Ukraine after Biden’s disastrous pull out from Afghanistan, which demonstrated for all the world to see that the U.S. did not have the fortitude to see the war through to completion, as it did in previous generations. If that’s the lesson Moscow took, they were, sadly, right. Imagine if the U.S. had left South Korea after only two decades (we’re still there now). The economic miracle never would have happened, millions of Koreans enjoying a prosperous life would instead be either dead of starvation or living under Kim-ist totalitarian rule. China would be unchecked in the region.
All of these foreign policy disasters – in which real people paid in blood – paint the new version of America in a stark light. The U.S. now seems as cowardly as any of the European states that routinely condemned American “militarism” while basking in the shade of the U.S. nuclear umbrella during the Cold War. Just as no one would look to France or Spain for their defense, policy makers in the near future might discount America and American guarantees as well. Indeed, though America guaranteed Ukraine that we would fully protect its independence if it gave up its nuclear weapons to Moscow after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, tiny European states like Denmark have committed far more of their GDP to Ukrainian survival.
If America does make the inward turn, from guarantor of the liberal world order to European-style peace-at-all-costs appeaser, that seems all but inevitable under the Biden administration (and probably the next Trump administration as well), there will be a power void, quickly filled by some part of the Beijing-Tehran-Moscow axis. The liberal world order, which has, despite its problems, been the most peaceful in world history and has reduced poverty to its lowest level ever, would be dead.
Biden is slapping Israel in the face, but he’s also kneecapping America and stabbing the democratic world in the back.
Image via Israel Defense Force under a Creative Commons license.
