Biden May Be Set On A Regional War

Twisted logic, failed leadership, and a catastrophe in the making.

The fundamental flaw at the core of the Biden presidency is that Joe Biden is the wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time. This is a fact that was apparent well before his administration began, and it has been with Gaza where it has become truly calamitous. While perhaps no possible president would have handled the conflict adequately, it is hard to imagine any non-Republican who would have been worse for the moment than Biden. Since the beginning of his career in the 1970s, the president, a self-declared Zionist, has backed Israel with a consistency and fervor that has both matched and surpassed that of the country’s most hardline extremists. He has stood against efforts to put pressure on the country every time they have been tried, even repeatedly breaking with his own boss to do so. So when the most recent episode of the conflict began last October, everyone expected him to once again support Israel beyond the bounds of reason, and he did.

Still, perhaps nobody anticipated how far Biden would go in this support. During the first few weeks, it was posited by both Biden’s supporters and many neutral observers that he was only engaging in an excessive show of support to get enough buy-in with Netanyahu to stave off the threat of a disastrous ground invasion. When that failed, the narrative shifted to say that he was simply trying to gain purchase within Netanyahu’s government to push for a ceasefire, scale down assaults, and prevent a regional war. When the temporary ceasefire collapsed, death counts skyrocketed, and Biden himself expanded the conflict on Israel’s behalf, it became impossible for even the most Biden-friendly observers to describe him as an unbiased actor. Outside of the most shameless hacks, most gravitated to an understanding of the president that I myself argued very early on. This was that his stance towards the crisis was clouded by an immense personal bias towards Israel that left him incapable of seeing things clearly.

It was a harsh judgment to make of a president. Now, it is beginning to appear as if it gave Biden too much credit. With well over 30,000 Gazans dead and no end for the conflict in sight, many historically pro-Israel figures, governments, and institutions have reached a breaking point. Across the world, everyone from mainstream Democratic senators to former Bush officials to the U.K. Conservative Party have broken ranks and called for a new look at the country. At the same time, Biden has only doubled down on his blind support for Israel, relentlessly insisting on a policy that has been an abject failure by any imaginable standard. Absent periodic lip service that has gone constantly unheeded, there are no signs that this will stop anytime soon.

We have now reached a point where bias alone is not an adequate explanation for these actions. As we enter the seventh month of Israel’s assault on the strip, it is worth considering Biden’s policies along the most pessimistic of all lines. Not only has he failed to stop Israel’s war, and not only is he not keeping it from expanding, but he may have already bought in to and is preparing to support a regional war—not just because he’s failing to look after U.S. interests, but because he isn’t even trying.