POLITICO: How Israeli policy undermines Biden's foreign policy – Oct. 7 “changed everything”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Photo: The Cradle

Every administration has to readjust to respond to world events, but the Israel-Hamas conflict has been particularly disruptive to Biden’s other foreign policy efforts, notes POLITICO.

Now, some administration officials say that the White House has had to make hard calls to divert attention and resources away from other foreign policy priorities as it focuses on the Israel-Hamas conflict. And Biden’s support for Israel has also complicated U.S. efforts to build relationships in some other parts of the world.

“More than any other crisis, it exposed the limits of U.S. power,” said Comfort Ero, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group think tank.

As one senior administration official said of the Israel-Hamas conflict: “It became our foreign policy priority whether we liked it or not.”

Biden, after his withdrawal from Afghanistan, was supposed to be the first president to finally close the chapter on the costly war on terror era. But the U.S. is once again bogged down in the Middle East, unable to contain Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offensives in Gaza and Lebanon and struggling to head off a full-scale regional war.

“Oct. 7 changed everything,” said another senior administration official.

In some cases, U.S. attention and resources have been diverted from the administration’s priorities in the Indo-Pacific, Europe and Africa. In others, the U.S. approach to Israel has hurt its standing with countries it is trying to woo away from adversaries Russia and China.

But the Israel-Gaza crisis stands out as one of the world’s thorniest diplomatic challenges, as well as a grave humanitarian catastrophe. It’d be tough for any administration to navigate without making a few tradeoffs. And the areas that don’t get as much attention now could become tomorrow’s drop-everything emergency.

Here are a few of the Biden administration foreign policy priorities that have been sidelined or disrupted by the crisis in the Middle East:

The Biden administration has been forced to reroute major military assets, including aircraft carrier strike groups, from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East. And that’s happening just as nervous allies Japan, South Korea and the Philippines seek to boost the U.S. footprint in their own backyard in a signal to China.

“The pivot to Asia has been delayed again, again,” one administration official wryly declared.

U.S. support for Israel has also dented its reputation in the region as it competes with China for influence, particularly in Muslim-majority countries Malaysia and Indonesia. Recent public opinion polls in those two countries show support for aligning with the U.S. instead of China dropping from 61 percent last year to less than 50 percent this year.

“It is surely no coincidence,” said Michael Singh, managing director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “I think that we can hope these trends will reverse when the dust settles in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the dust shows no sign of settling — quite the opposite.”

Three senior eastern European defense and security officials argued the Middle East crisis has diverted Western attention from the war in Ukraine, where Russia is stubbornly making incremental gains despite steep losses in eastern Ukraine.

“We realize the U.S. can’t do everything everywhere all at once, and the Middle East certainly takes attention from Ukraine,” said one of the officials. Ukrainian officials and other analysts have also voiced fears that Ukraine’s own peace plans are being overshadowed by Middle East crisis diplomacy. Data also showed Biden dialed back his rhetoric on the Ukraine war in the immediate months after the Israel-Hamas war began.

The Middle East crisis has also fueled debates about whether the U.S. is stretched too thin to simultaneously supply weapons to Israel, Ukraine and allies in Asia even with its defense industrial base under strain. The U.S. has already depleted its excess military stocks by arming Ukraine in its war against Russia. But delivering military aid and munitions to Israel is further straining those dwindling supplies, while the U.S. Navy uses up precious stocks of air defense missiles lobbed by Iran-backed militants in Yemen across the Red Sea.

The Oct. 7 attacks may have entirely derailed U.S. efforts to strike a deal to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, a pact the U.S. has been pursuing for nearly two years as a way to forge long-term stability in the Middle East.

U.S. officials who work on Middle East policy, as well as regional analysts, widely agree that a Saudi-Israel normalization deal is extremely difficult to broker for Riyadh without a meaningful plan to establish Palestinian statehood — a prospect that Israel’s government has repeatedly said it would not accept.

Top White House officials say they are still pursuing a diplomatic breakthrough on a Saudi-Israel deal in parallel with cease-fire talks in Gaza and de-escalating the crisis in Lebanon.

Biden also vowed early into his administration to try to end the war in Yemen, tapping a senior envoy, Tim Lenderking, to tackle the issue during his first month in office. But a permanent peace in Yemen now seems further away than ever.

Sudan’s civil war is considered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with some 25 million people on the brink of famine, yet U.S. officials who work on Africa policy privately fume that it is getting a fraction of the attention the Middle East is receiving from the Biden administration.

Other conflict zones getting short shrift are Somalia and the eastern Congo. To be sure, U.S. Director for National Intelligence Avril Haines visited Congo in 2023 and Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Congo the year prior. But by comparison, Blinken has traveled to the Middle East nearly a dozen times in the past year.

“Failure to treat any of Africa’s crises with half the rigor of Oct. 7’s fallout is a direct point African governments bring up” in meetings with U.S. lawmakers in Washington, said one congressional aide who works on foreign affairs issues.

Several administration officials said the Middle East crisis has damaged Biden’s long-stated effort to restore U.S. leadership on human rights.

Human rights groups have repeatedly hammered Biden for not holding Israel to the same standards on adhering to international humanitarian law as other countries, particularly on its use of U.S.-made weapons.

“We’re hearing from human rights defenders all over the map that they want nothing to do with the United States anymore, that they don’t believe the U.S. is a good actor in the world,” said Sarah Yager, Washington director at Human Rights Watch, citing conversations with activists in Jordan and Yemen. “That’s how far the U.S. reputation has sunk because of the president’s handling of Gaza and now Lebanon.”

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