Biden Hasn’t ‘Abandoned’ Anybody
Plus: Trump tries to pry the anti-vax crank vote back from RFK Jr.
Quick programming note before we start: Bill’s out next week, so Andrew (and a rotating cast of guest stars!) will be holding down Morning Shots in the meantime. Happy Friday.
Speaking of guest stars, let’s kick the morning off with an item from our military affairs fellow Will Selber, who asks an important question: How much will Biden’s decision to back away from Israel actually affect its Rafah plans?
Biden Hasn’t ‘Abandoned’ Anybody
I know what it means to abandon allies. I saw us do it during my last year in Afghanistan. Whether you agree with the withdrawal or not, we should acknowledge what it was for millions of Afghans: a betrayal.
Over the last three years, I’ve helped run an off-the-books operation that helped get our allies out. I’ve lost countless Afghan brothers, like my friend Colonel Sorhab Azimi, whom the Taliban executed—after his unit surrendered because they ran out of ammunition. They ran out of ammo because we withdrew the contractors who helped keep the Afghan Army operational.
What happened in Afghanistan will be a dark stain on America’s honor. And we are all—every American—responsible for the wars fought in our names.
This context is essential to remember as we discuss Israel. President Biden’s recent decision to limit “offensive weapons” to the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) may be a mistake, but he’s not abandoning them. He’s simply saying they must not use certain weapons or fight the war the way they did in the opening stages of the conflict.
The American Embassy in Jerusalem will remain.1 The United States Central Command will continue to provide operational support to the IDF as they did during Iran’s failed missile salvo a couple of weeks ago. America’s mighty intelligence community will still be collaborating with their Israeli intelligence partners, the Mossad and Shin Bet.
If that’s abandonment, then I know quite a few anti-Taliban resistance groups who would love to be similarly abandoned.
But the IDF is not the Afghan National Army. I love my ANA brothers; there was no finer honor than fighting alongside those heroes. But they were a younger force. They needed all the weapons we could give them. The IDF, however, is more than capable of finishing Rafah without our “offensive weapons.”
That’s because the IDF has made great strides in learning how to fight Hamas.
While everyone has understandably been focused on Gaza’s rising “body count,” it’s been less widely noticed that the trend in those numbers has changed. The earlier months of the IDF’s campaign were far more bloody.
That’s not because the IDF is some type of genocidal military. Rather, they did not have the operational experience, going in, to fight this type of war. That’s understandable: Nobody has fought a war like this before. The closest thing to it was America’s operation to assist the Iraqi Security Forces in retaking Mosul in 2016 and 2017. Yet even that bloody campaign was far easier than Israel’s battlefield in Gaza.
The IDF didn’t know where its enemy was. They didn’t know where the tunnels Hamas dug were located, so they had to find them first, which was bloody not only for Gazan civilians but also for the IDF. Israeli mothers and fathers paid a heavy price during the first months of the war finding these tunnels.
But as the fight goes on, the IDF learns. It is adapting to its battlefield. The late-March al-Shifa hospital raid netted thousands of Hamas operatives. They gleaned intelligence from those captured fighters. They can perform more precise operations because they’re getting closer and closer to the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar.
That doesn’t mean the battle will be a pinpoint operation where everything falls like a house of dominoes. There will still be tactical challenges—and some of these may be more difficult to surmount if the White House isn’t giving the IDF its full arsenal. The IDF will have to adapt to the limits presented to them by their political leaders, and by ours.
But that’s just what they’ve been getting better at doing for months now. The IDF is already finding Hamas’ tunnels near Rafah. They recently took control of the Rafah crossing to Egypt. They will essentially slice off more parts of the city as they go. They are telling Hamas: We can stop doing this anytime we want, but not until we get what remains of our hostages. More precise operations will help constrict the noose around Hamas’ neck until they either give up the hostages or are killed themselves.
That’s the option on the table. And that option remains with or without America’s “offensive weapons.”
—Will Selber
Trump Attacks RFK Jr: ‘He Likes Vaccines!’
Donald Trump is turning up the rhetorical firepower against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In a four-minute video posted to his Truth Social account yesterday, Trump denounced his independent opponent as “a Democrat plant” and “radical left liberal” who was “put in place” to help Biden get reelected.
“A lot of people think ‘Junior’ is a conservative—he’s not. He’s more liberal than anybody running on the Democrat side,” Trump said. “Republicans, get it out of your mind that you’re going to vote for this guy.”
For a while, the attacks stayed boilerplate: hits on RFK’s environmentalist beliefs and his running mate Nicole Shanahan. Then they got interesting.
“And by the other way, he said the other night that vaccines are fine,” Trump said incredulously. “He said it on a show, a television show, that vaccines are fine. He’s all for them. And that’s what he said. And for those of you who want to vote because you think he’s an anti-vaxxer—he’s not really an anti-vaxxer. That’s only his political moment. He said it the other night: He’s okay with the vaccine.”
“RFK’s views on vaccines are fake, as are everything else about his candidacy,” Trump added a minute later. “He’s not a Republican, so don’t think you’re gonna vote for him and feel good.”
There’s something beautifully and tragically cracked about this. Years before the 2015 political pivot that would somehow make him leader of the free world, Trump was already building up a base of goodwill among America’s cranks by spreading the spurious notion that childhood vaccinations were linked to autism. He even briefly flirted with bringing that conspiracy theory with him to the Oval Office: In January 2017, he considered empaneling a “vaccine safety” commission that would have been chaired by none other than RFK Jr.
But being anti-vax was the rare, rare Trump vice that the guy actually got over. During COVID, Trump’s full-throttle vaccine-funding program, Operation Warp Speed, helped clear the path for pandemic-slaying mRNA vaccines to hit the market far faster than most had dared hope—unambiguously the single greatest success of his presidency. And now, it seems, the single act in his presidency for which he’s worried he may pay a political price.
Another thing worth noting. For years, America’s crackpots and cranks have had a straightforward but boring electoral playbook: voting, in the immortal words of GOP Rep. Thomas Massie, for “the craziest son of a bitch in the race.” This year—and who knows in how many future years?—the cranks are spoiled for choice: There are multiple crazy sons of bitches to choose from. Pick what flavor you like.
—Andrew Egger
Catching up . . .
House GOP drafting Biden impeachment articles over Israel aid cutoff threat: Fox News
Nikki Haley is huddling with donors and won’t endorse Donald Trump yet: Wall Street Journal
Police make arrests at encampments at M.I.T. and University of Pennsylvania: New York Times
Protesters, cops clash in D.C. streets as George Washington University protest encampment cleared: Fox 5 DC
Paul Manafort, poised to rejoin Trump world, aided Chinese media deal: Washington Post
Quick Hits
1. Will Gaza Sink Joe?
Up at the site today, Nicholas Grossman isn’t so sure that the data supports the claim that “Biden’s electoral weakness is related to his Middle East policy”: “The Israel-Hamas war doesn’t appear to be driving voters away from Biden in significant numbers,” he writes. “And most of the people criticizing Biden from the left for his support of Israel don’t appear to be his voters anyway”:
PROTESTERS AREN’T POLICYMAKERS. They don’t need to know all the nuances of a situation to conclude that it’s bad, and don’t need a well-articulated plan for fixing it before they demand improvement. But framing Biden’s Middle East policy in electoral terms raises the question: Is it possible for Biden to win back the voters he’s lost with a change in policy?
For a contingent on the left, one that’s especially vocal online, the answer is probably No. If someone currently believes it would be immoral to vote for the politician they’ve been calling “Genocide Joe,” they will likely think so later this year, too. The war might be over by the fall, but even in the best-case scenario, Gaza will likely be in crisis, with food and medicine shortages, and problems of governance.
If the Americans accusing Biden of genocide by proxy already largely disapproved of him before the Israel-Hamas war—because he’s too old or too moderate or for any other reason—then no plausible adjustment in his stance on Israel-Palestine is likely to satisfy them.
Biden may have created a real-world experiment to test this hypothesis. On Wednesday, he announced the suspension of American deliveries of bombs and artillery ammunition to Israel, apparently so that American munitions would not be used in civilian-packed Rafah in an operation to which Biden objects. When the next round of opinion polls come out, we’ll see if this decision wins him back some support from his left-wing critics. I wouldn’t bet on it, though.
There may be voters who believe that Biden’s approach to Gaza has been so horrific, so immoral, that they must oppose him—even though Trump is more supportive of Netanyahu’s policy, much harsher against domestic protest, and enacted a Muslim ban, not to mention everything else—but there aren’t many such voters, and the electoral impact they’ll have is mostly, perhaps entirely, locked in.
2. Protectionism for All!
One major downside of the collapse of the GOP into MAGA populism: a Republican Party that’s lost its ability to curb the trade-policy excesses of the other side. Witness the spectacle of some of the protectionist New Republicans’ leading lights egging Joe Biden on to block the sale of U.S. Steel to Japan’s Nippon Steel:
“For weeks you have maintained that ‘it is vital [for U.S. Steel] to remain an American steel company that is domestically owned and operated,” Sens. J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley wrote in a letter to Biden yesterday. “Pronouncements about what you consider “vital” or what you think “should” happen to U.S. Steel are worthless unless you act to keep U.S. Steel under American control.”
“Your predecessor displayed no such reticence,” they went on. “President Trump exercised his powers to suspend or prohibit foreign transactions unilaterally more than any other president . . . He has already declared that he would block the sale of U.S. Steel.”
The senators are correct: During his term, Trump displayed no reticence at all about acting unilaterally to restrict trade in ways that baldly exceeded his appropriate legal powers. That’s not a great reason for Biden to do the same.
Cheap Shots
Correction, 11:30 a.m. EDT May 10: An earlier version of this article stated the American Embassy in Israel is located in Tel Aviv. It is in Jerusalem.
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I don't find the President's decision to limit sending offensive weapons to the IDF as a mistake. We're providing the defensive weapons to keep Israel's Iron Dome intact, but our country, as an ally, has every right to say to another ally that we disagree with their tactics and strategy and we're not going to support it. If your friends can't tell you the truth, who can? President Biden is doing precisely what former Presidents Reagan and GHW Bush did in similar situations.
The President made it clear that we support Israel and always will. That doesn't mean we have to back to their every play.
It isn't about abandonment with regard to the arms shipments. It is about accountability. It is a distinction with a difference. particularly when some try to make it foremost a political consideration.