Biden is the president Republicans say they want
On Israel, China, and more, blind partisanship stops them from seeing it
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I found the cover of this week’s Washington Examiner, a conservative magazine, kind of funny:
Where, indeed, are the moderate, problem-solving Democrats to be found in a party headed by Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries? They’re a veritable Marxist cell.
Or not. On Israel, as on many other issues, the right is struggling with the same problem Trump faced running against Biden in 2020: wanting to label him both as a bomb throwing agent of social chaos and a checked out old geezer who has no clue what is going on. “Sleepy Joe Biden is in bed with the radical Islamists” is, as slogans go, pretty incoherent.
The GOP response to Biden’s Israel policy has been a classic example of this. It is just categorically incorrect to state that Biden has been standing with the left of the Democratic Party on this conflict. In fact, he’s done the opposite of that to such an extent that it has launched a thousand articles about how he’s torching his standing with numerous constituencies (progressives, Arab Americans, Muslim Americans) who will play an important role in his re-election.
I think the most productive way to think about this is that it represents the fracturing of a liberal-progressive coalition which has been tenuously held in place by two things: (1) Relative quiet in the Middle East and (2) the existence of Donald Trump. In the era in which Trump was promoting a Muslim ban (as he’s now doing again) and Israel was not engaged in a full-scale war, it was no big deal for moderate Democrats to find common cause with younger progressives for whom the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a major issue. Even as many progressives came to view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of the post-George Floyd racial justice movement, there was tenuous agreement that Trump represented the bigger threat.
The liberal-progressive coalition is now splintering and new battle lines are forming, but it’s absurd to pretend that Biden is on the left of any of them. American politics dictates that almost any president would have offered a high degree of support to Israel, but the extent to which it was so clearly visceral and instinctual from Biden was notable. I’ve spoken to plenty of people who live in right-wing media bubbles who are shocked - they still think sleepy Joe Biden is in bed with the radical Islamists - but it ought not to have been a surprise to anyone who knows Biden and knows the Democratic Party. It still is the party of moderates.
It’s not even as if there was much difference between Trump’s Middle East policy and Biden’s before the events of this month. The highest levels of the Biden administration is made up of people who served at the second- and third-highest levels of the Obama administration, and the lesson they took away from the experience is that the U.S. has precious little ability to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that trying to do so just creates fruitless distractions. Accordingly, they made no new major initiative and continued with the policy of pursuing diplomatic normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states, a process which began under Trump and which may have played a role in the timing of Hamas’ attack on Israel.
(Okay, there was one difference between the Trump and Biden administrations: only in the former was Jared Kushner running around the region with a begging bowl trying to get sheikhs to bail out his failing businesses).
Israel joins another issue in which Republicans like to criticize Biden for supposedly not doing exactly what he is already doing: China. The current administration’s policy towards Beijing is significantly to the right of Trump’s and is being implemented more forcefully because the basic standards of competence are much higher under Biden. The administration has shored up military and diplomatic alliances in Asia and worked with partner countries to implement smart rather than indiscriminate trade and technology sanctions. It has the most hawkish stance towards China of any administration since the normalization of relations in the 1970s - but to listen to Republicans, you’d think Biden was running for a seat on the Politburo.
Whether all of these policies are right or not is another matter, and as a certified wonk I am uncomfortable with broad labels - I find them right in some ways and wrong in others, even as I share the administration’s overall goals. But it’s a major problem with American politics that it produces such a disingenuous foreign policy discourse. I actually don’t think this is entirely a product of modern polarization, either - the “Who lost China?” debate of the 1940s and ‘50s was equally rancorous and ridiculous. The difference is that today almost nothing escapes this degree of contestation.
This also has concrete consequences for the policies that end up getting enacted. Faced with a centrist foreign policy president who they want to depict as a Communist, Republicans reach for ever more outlandish policy proposals to try to make Biden look soft by comparison. With their thunder stolen by a guy who is basically doing what they want anyway, they start suggesting that America invade Mexico or place a massive tariff on all U.S. imports or reinstate the Muslim ban and deport protesters. This march to the right will have major consequences under the next Republican president - especially if his name is Donald Trump.