Enas Rami/AP Photo
A Palestinian boy sits in the rubble of his destroyed home in the wake of an Israeli air and ground offensive in Jebaliya, northern Gaza Strip, after Israeli forces withdrew from the area, May 31, 2024.
The geopolitical static you may be hearing comes from the simultaneous broadcasts of two diametrically opposed messages, one coming from distant war zones, the other from the president of the United States. Nothing in those war zones comports with what Joe Biden wishes were happening.
Last Wednesday, Tzachi Hanegbi, Israel’s national-security adviser, said that he expected Israel’s war on Gaza would extend at least to the end of the year if not longer. Last Friday, President Biden responded with an announcement that Hamas no longer had the capabilities to mount a major terrorist attack on Israel and that a cease-fire should therefore happen immediately. The following day, however, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu called Biden’s proposal a “nonstarter” and said he had no interest in stopping the fighting until Hamas was totally eliminated (which may well mean: never).
At the same time, the war in Ukraine, in which the United States has provided the lion’s share of the arms and intelligence that has enabled Ukraine to keep fighting, has settled into a war of attrition that Ukraine will be extremely hard-pressed to win. For the past half-year, its offensives have been stillborn, and it has been incrementally but inexorably losing ground to Russia, chiefly because Russia has four times Ukraine’s population and can put more soldiers in the field than Ukraine can (and also because Republicans in Congress bottled up military aid to the country for months).
There appear to be no serious internal pressures that would stop Vladimir Putin from waging his war. Dissident Russians have either fled the country or been arrested, while the remaining population has access only to state-controlled media. However slowly, and whatever the casualty count to his own armies, Putin knows that his forces are advancing and that Ukraine is having increased difficulty in stopping them.
The window through which the Israeli public views the war in Gaza is similarly tilted to a one-sided perspective, with few media outlets showing them the carnage and destruction to which Gaza has been subjected. This isn’t the result of the kind of state suppression that Putin has inflicted on any wayward Russian media, though Israel’s government has indeed suppressed any number of non-Israeli news outlets. Rather, Israeli media, with the very honorable exception of Ha’aretz, has focused, even now, on Hamas’s October 7 murder raid rather than the IDF’s demolition of Gaza—gauging that this is what the Israeli public has uppermost in mind.
What exactly the IDF would be doing if Israel keeps the war going for the next seven months almost defies comprehension. Kill every last one of Hamas’s estimated 30,000 fighters, most of whom Israel already claims to have killed? If that’s the goal, will any buildings in Gaza remain standing? If that’s the goal, how many children in Gaza will have starved to death? If that’s the goal, does Israel really expect to have any of its hostages returned?
Perhaps the real goal is to forestall any Israeli reckoning with Netanyahu’s conduct in office, which will surely follow the cessation of the war. Indeed, by refusing to have a postwar plan for a peacetime Gaza, Bibi can argue that Gaza still poses a threat and it’s not yet time for a national postmortem—as self-fulfilling a prophecy as statecraft has ever seen.
Perhaps the real goal is to forestall any Israeli reckoning with Netanyahu’s conduct in office.
But what’s good news for Bibi—the war’s continuance—is bad news for Biden. The White House has plainly hoped that the furious response of young protesters to its support for Israel’s war, as well as the growing frustration and dismay with which a majority of Democratic voters view that support, will have subsided by the time the party’s convention, or at least the November election, has rolled around. If the IDF is still leveling whatever remains of Gaza, however, and Biden still hasn’t put real conditions on Israel—like a cessation of arms provisions and not just an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza but the beginnings of one from the West Bank—the protests of the spring will pale next to the protests of the fall.
The Ukraine conundrum is no less knotty. The U.S. and its NATO allies can provide Ukraine with billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to counter the Russians, but they can’t provide it with enough soldiers to ultimately stop Russia’s advances if Putin chooses to keep the war going. (Slow, yes; stop, no.) If that’s the case—and I think it is—it’s in Ukraine’s interest to call an end to the war now rather than later, since if it’s later, that would mean it would have to cede more territory than it would today. Whether Putin would actually agree to such a proposal, rather than seeing it as a sign of desperation motivating further attacks, is of course an open question. But no Ukrainian government would have the internal support to do that until the loss of territory becomes so great that the future of even a reduced Ukraine as an independent state is plainly at risk.
Besides, as Ukraine struggles to hold what it currently has, support for continuing to arm it will likely dwindle within the American public and its congressional representatives. There are surely some administration officials at the Defense Department and on the National Security Council who understand that some kind of peace agreement now, should it prove attainable, would likely be less onerous for Ukraine than some kind of peace agreement a year or two from now. That doesn’t mean, however, that the questions of what that agreement would say and how it could be reached can be easily answered, if answered at all.
If Putin believes his forces can keep advancing and any skepticism among the Russian people about keeping the war going can be avoided or suppressed, he’ll have to be offered something for his agreement to stop. To be sure, he probably doesn’t want to take over the bulk of Ukraine, where Russian forces and officials would doubtless experience deep and lasting hatred, and the consequences thereof, from the occupied population. Then again, his determination to extend Russia’s borders to those of the lamented USSR may trump all such realism. What would he want? The end of economic sanctions, to be sure, but what else? A guarantee that Ukraine won’t join NATO? A withdrawal of NATO forces from areas near Russia’s other borders?
And that’s just Putin. What about Zelensky? What about the leaders of the Baltic states and Poland? And, again, what about Biden? He had to move heaven and earth to get the most recent appropriation of funds to help arm Ukraine through Congress. In the case of Ukraine, he can’t very well issue the kind of call he issued Friday for a cease-fire in Gaza. He can’t very well issue that call between now and Election Day, as it runs counter to what his policy has been. Moreover, I think his policy has been the right one in its two most important particulars. It was right to show Putin that the West wouldn’t let him invade other countries without paying a major price, and it was right that he repeatedly stated that it was up to Ukraine’s government, not ours, to decide whether some kind of cease-fire or peace agreement was in order.
Thus Biden is stuck—paying, in this instance, for his commendable commitments. Only if Russian forces break out and threaten the country as a whole—or if Trump is elected and Zelensky concludes that Ukraine would get better terms if a lame-duck Biden negotiated them than if Putin-fanboy Trump did—would Biden be able to move. (In that eventuality, however, Putin would surely want to wait until Trump takes power.)
Biden’s freedom of action is far greater in Gaza. If Israel is truly determined to drag out its war, Biden could finally get serious about stopping it by placing real conditions on the continuance of U.S. aid. Even if that doesn’t stop Israel, it might just firm up his support in the left and center-left of the American electorate. In other words, it might just stop Trump.
