Mary Altaffer/AP Photo
Police in riot gear stand guard as demonstrators chant slogans outside the Columbia University campus, April 18, 2024, in New York.
For my generation, the Vietnam War was the catastrophe that destroyed our hopes for a decent America. Vietnam wrecked the most expansive domestic program since the New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society. Vietnam splintered the New Deal coalition, divided the kids from the hard hats, and ushered in a Republican era that undermined civil rights and began the “Southern strategy” of using racism to convert the Dixiecrat Solid South into a Republican Solid South. The defection of the white working class from the Democrats began a long and winding road that led to Donald Trump.
If anything, Biden’s quagmire is worse. And so are the consequences.
Like Lyndon Johnson, Joe Biden was a pleasant surprise for progressives. His speech to the Steelworkers Wednesday was the most pro-union speech by a U.S. president I’ve ever heard, outdoing even FDR. Like Johnson, Biden has pursued a stunningly progressive series of economic policies. Unlike Johnson, who had a working majority in Congress that rivaled Roosevelt’s, Biden has done it with fumes.
Like Johnson’s Vietnam blunder, Biden’s Gaza war could well cost him re-election. In 1968, the consequences were “only” the election of Richard Nixon. In 2024, the election of Donald Trump would cost America our democracy, quite possibly forever.
And if you unpack the details, it gets worse. Israel’s annihilation of civilian Gaza is unmistakably Biden’s war, every bit as much as Vietnam was LBJ’s war. As Nick Kristof wrote in The New York Times, “when an American-made aircraft drops an American-made bomb on an American aid group in an American-supported war, how can that not come back to Biden?”
But at least the Vietnam War was entirely LBJ’s, with the South Vietnamese regime in the role of American puppets. Johnson and his generals called the shots, with their own illusions and their own strategic mistakes, and finally, when it was too late, decided to de-escalate.
By contrast, Bibi Netanyahu is no puppet. Bibi, like Pinocchio, is determined to be a Real Boy, and Bibi is Pinocchio in more ways than one (this is a reference to lying, not to Jewish noses). If anything, Biden has willingly become Bibi’s puppet.
So Biden has the worst of both worlds. His fingerprints are all over a war that has killed upward of 30,000 civilians, but he has no control over how the war is conducted.
This is Biden’s fault, not Bibi’s. He could be conditioning aid far more explicitly. He keeps tiptoeing up to the edge of that posture and then backing off.
And it gets still worse. Like Vietnam, Israel’s behavior is dividing Democrats and playing havoc with civil liberties. Among the knock-on effects with echoes of Vietnam are protests that include civil disobedience, with police invading campuses. Unlike Vietnam, we have an increase in antisemitism, with far-right Republicans in the bizarre and purely opportunistic role of Defenders of the Jews (who, the Republicans’ evangelical base believes, are worth defending only pending their descent to eternal Hell with the coming of the Rapture).
Like my generation recoiling from Vietnam, large numbers of American young people see the Gaza disgrace as a colonialist war, with crimes against humanity. Notwithstanding the greater threat of Trump, many have vowed never to vote for Biden, as we once foolishly vowed never to vote for LBJ or even for Hubert Humphrey. In one more awful echo, as in 1968 there will be protests and civil disobedience at the unfortunately located Chicago Democratic National Convention, upstaging and wrecking what should be a Biden unity event.
Meanwhile, back in the Middle East, there is a very narrow window for some kind of provisional settlement. Israel’s provocation of Iran, bombing its embassy complex in Damascus, in turn led to Iran’s missile and drone attack on Israel, which did no damage. Israel’s retaliatory raid today on a military target in Iran was surprisingly restrained.
For the moment, both sides can claim vindication, with no immediate need for further escalation. American diplomats are now pushing a regional deal that includes much closer three-way ties between Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S.
But this proposed deal is pure carrot. To get Netanyahu to take him seriously, Biden needs to wield a much bigger stick. Time is running out, both in terms of the risk of a wider war and in terms of whether Biden can ever regain the trust of America’s young to win re-election.
