Biden Muddies the Waters on Israel

The perils of foreign policy by random interview.

If it were up to us poor a.m. newsletter writers, the president of the United States wouldn’t be allowed to break major policy news in evening interviews. There oughta be a law.

Also, if you blinked, you might’ve missed it: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s long-blustered-about ouster attempt against Speaker Mike Johnson finally came and went in less than an hour yesterday afternoon. Majority Leader Steve Scalise called to table Greene’s motion minutes after she introduced it, and Congress happily obliged his request, 359-43.

And although we’re duty-bound to discuss far more consequential matters, we hope you didn’t miss the news that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has (had?) a dead worm in his brain. Happy Thursday.

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(Composite by Hannah Yoest, with homage to Klawe Rzeczy / Photos via Getty Images)

What’s ‘Ironclad’ Mean?

In yesterday’s newsletter, we summed up Joe Biden’s position on Israel’s war in Gaza, as his administration has laid it out for months, like this: “Israel should do more to minimize civilian casualties, but those casualties are ultimately the responsibility of Hamas, and the United States believes Israel has the right to strain every nerve to root Hamas out of Gaza.”

Well, maybe not every nerve. The news from Biden’s sit-down interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett last night was an ultimatum from Biden to Israel: If you forge ahead with your invasion of Rafah—Hamas’s last stronghold—the United States won’t be providing the bombs for you to do it.

Here’s the relevant portion of the interview, worth reading (or watching) in full:

BURNETT: I want to ask you about something happening as we sit here and speak. And that, of course, is, Israel is striking Rafah.

I know that you have paused, Mr. President, shipments of 2,000-pound U.S. bombs to Israel due to concern that they could be used in any offensive on Rafah. Have those bombs, those powerful 2,000-pound bombs, been used to kill civilians in Gaza?

BIDEN: Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers.

And I made it clear that, if they go into Rafah—they haven’t gone into Rafah yet. If they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities, to deal with that problem.

We’re going to continue to make sure Israel is secure, in terms of Iron Dome and their ability to respond to attacks like came out of the Middle East recently.

But it’s—it’s just wrong. We’re not going to supply the weapons and the artillery shells that have been used—

BURNETT: Artillery shells as well?

BIDEN: Yes, artillery shells.

BURNETT: So, just to understand, what they’re doing right now in Rafah, is that not going into Rafah, as you define it?

BIDEN: No, they haven’t gone into the population centers. What they did is right on the border . . . But I have made it clear to Bibi and the war cabinet they’re not going to get our support if, in fact, they’re going into these population centers.

We’re not walking away from Israel’s security. We’re walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas.

A few questions to consider as you think about all of this.

First, how big a deal is this? Something very much like this has happened before. In fact, it’s basically happened in every war Israel has fought. Biden has joined the roster of American presidents—including Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, Richard Nixon in 1973, Ronald Reagan in 1982, and George W. Bush in 2006—in pressuring Israel not to wage wars quite as their government might have planned, or to bring wars to a close more quickly than Israel’s government might have wished. And many of those efforts by earlier American administrations involved pauses or restrictions on arms shipment to Israel, or other forms of pressure.

So, is this just par for the course, or is this time different? How much of this is the normal friction of foreign policy between allies in a time of war? Or is this something more?

It’s hard to answer this, partly because of the particular circumstances of this war—the horrific attack of October 7, Israel’s determination never to let that happen again, but also the scale of destruction and death in Gaza and a lack of clarity about and confidence in the Netanyahu government’s overall strategy.

But one can say this: It had seemed that the U.S. position had been that if Israel were going to go into Rafah, they had to show they had a real plan and were making a real effort to mitigate as much as possible with consequences for civilians. But is it the failure to make adequate provision for civilians that Biden is now objecting to? Or is it going into Rafah at all? It sounds from the interview like the latter. But Israel has been saying for months that they’re going to have to finish the job of dealing with Hamas, which means going into Rafah. So why this change in U.S. policy, if it is one?

Which brings us a second question. Why did President Biden choose to offer these thoughts in the middle of an interview during a trip to Wisconsin focused on the economy and jobs? There are reasons that when presidents make important foreign policy statements, they tend to read a prepared text and have other administration officials lined up and ready to explain and amplify.

Obviously it was perfectly appropriate for Erin Burnett to ask the questions she did. But it would have been equally appropriate for President Biden to say that we’re in sensitive and complicated discussions with the Israeli government on these issues, and I’m not discussing any of that right here on CNN.

But Biden didn’t take this course.

Isn’t this a surprising lack of discipline from an experienced president? Which has real consequences in making the policy harder to understand here at home, and for those inclined to agree with it, harder to defend, in the political maelstrom that we’re already seeing.

A final point, about one thing President Biden did not say. Burnett went on to ask about the “frustration here in the U.S. on college campuses”: “Mr. President, signs at college campuses, some say ‘Genocide Joe.’ Any of us that have gone to those campuses, sometimes, we hear that chant. Do you hear the message of those young Americans?”

The president responded, “Absolutely, I hear the message.” And then he went on to discuss free speech and its limits, and the problem of antisemitism.

But surely the right answer when you hear the phrase “Genocide Joe,” is to say that the charge of genocide is a lie. Israel is not committing genocide, and the United States is not complicit in one.

Maybe President Biden doesn’t want to address the “Genocide Joe” accusations directly from fear of appearing defensive. But it isn’t just him that that charge implicates. It’s a slander against both Israel and the United States, and Biden should denounce it.

—William Kristol

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Two quick additional points I’d add to Bill’s remarks on Biden’s Israel shift. 

First, there’s the fact that he announced it publicly. It would be one thing to let Netanyahu know, behind closed doors, that the United States considered a ground invasion of Rafah a red line that would result in the yanking of some support. That would still protect Palestinian civilians, but it would also keep the heaviest possible pressure on Hamas as last-minute negotiations continue under threat of that promised invasion. Instead, Biden tipped his hand ahead of time—a move seemingly designed to ensure he received credit for pulling Israel back, should Israel now decide not to proceed.

In other words, announcing the change last night was a move motivated by domestic political considerations. It’s hard to scold the president too much for that; no politician ever wriggles out from under such considerations entirely.

But will it actually help Biden in the arena of domestic politics? Withholding the biggest bombs from Rafah while continuing to support Israel’s war effort in a hundred other ways isn’t winning back anybody in the “Genocide Joe” crowd. Meanwhile, it’s a dismaying jolt to a not insignificant number of staunch Israel supporters—a group probably overrepresented among America’s actual swing voters, by the way—who wonder how Biden can continue to insist his support for Israel is “ironclad” while trying to micromanage its battlefield operations from an ocean away.

The second point is a moral one. There’s one way to justify the war Israel has waged so far, a war that has killed thousands if not tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and turned much of the Gaza Strip into a parking lot: to say, correctly, that this is the price demanded by Hamas, an enemy whose entire theory of the war is to force the slaughter of its own people until America blinks, and the only way not to reward those tactics if you’re America is to refuse to blink. In short: You can’t let the terrorists win.

That’s the argument Biden and other Israel supporters have made all along. To put it bluntly: If Biden thinks it doesn’t hold with respect to Rafah, on what grounds did it hold before?

—Andrew Egger

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Catching up . . .

• Federal judge indefinitely postpones Trump classified documents trial: CNN

• House votes to block Marjorie Taylor Greene’s effort to oust Johnson from speakership: CNN

• Johnson survived his first ouster attempt. Making it past November will be harder: Politico

• Georgia court will hear appeal of ruling that kept Prosecutor Fani Willis on Trump case: New York Times

• Top Republicans, led by Trump, refuse to commit to accept 2024 election results: Washington Post

• Speaker Johnson slams Biden’s ‘senior moment’ on Israel aid: Politico

• Barron Trump to serve as Florida delegate at RNC: NBC News

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Quick Hits: Libertarian Crackup

Back in 2016, libertarianism was having a moment. Amid broad dissatisfaction with the presidential matchup of Trump and Hillary Clinton, the presidential ticket of Gary Johnson and Bill Weld tried to offer a reasonable, small-government third way. Despite some major flubs (remember “What is Aleppo?”), they still took home millions of votes that November.

This year, we’re facing another matchup—Biden vs. Trump 2: Geriatric Boogaloo—that’s provoked widespread voter dissatisfaction. But don’t expect the Libertarians to put forward a reasonable, small-government third way this time. As the Mercatus Center’s Tyler Groenendal explains in a slobberknocker piece for the site today, the Libertarians have spent the years since 2016 getting just as brain-poisoned by conspiracy-nut online populism as the Republicans have. This was largely due to the party’s hostile takeover by a new faction called the Mises Caucus:

The caucus is named for Ludwig von Mises, a twentieth-century Austrian economist who is one of the intellectual godfathers of the modern libertarian movement. Though named for Mises, the caucus owes much of its philosophy to Ron Paul, the former Republican congressman and perennial presidential candidate (alternately as a Republican and a Libertarian).

The Mises Caucus spread like wildfire online, through “celebritarian” Twitter threads and promotion via the extensive network of libertarian podcasts. By the 2022 Libertarian National Convention in Reno, the Mises Caucus was on the verge of taking over the party. Growing grassroots dissatisfaction with party leadership, as well as lingering frustration over what they saw as a lackluster response to pandemic-era policies like lockdowns and mandates for mask-wearing and vaccination, catapulted the Mises Caucus to victory. . .

The first and most obvious change that the new crew brought about concerned the party’s messaging. For many in the Mises Caucus, the question of whether the party’s Twitter account was sufficiently “owning the libs” was more important than workaday political-organizational concerns like ballot access or running candidates.

Shortly after their victory in Reno, the Mises Caucus removed a longstanding plank of the Libertarian party platform that had said, “We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” One has to wonder: What kinds of  would-be Libertarians were being held back from joining the party by those words—and, more importantly, why did the Mises Caucus want to court them?

The messaging got worse from there. Since the takeover, the official Libertarian party Twitter account has become a hotbed of conspiracy theories, inflammatory rhetoric, and scorn. State affiliates quickly followed in its wake, with the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire recently tweeting a revised version  of the “14 words,” a white-supremacist slogan.

Read the whole thing.

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