The roots of Biden's Middle East inaction
How he over-learned the lessons of the Obama administration
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Every American president since Barack Obama has come to power pledging to focus less on the Middle East, and each has been disappointed. But for Joe Biden and his national security team, the whiplash has been particularly intense. Most of Biden’s top national security aides served in the Obama administration, where they experienced the Middle East primarily as a source of political pain and distraction for their boss. Upon entering office with Biden, this gave them a particular attitude towards the region. In a recent book, Franklin Foer summed up this attitude by describing how it was interpreted by Biden’s top Middle East advisor, Brett McGurk:
McGurk liked to say that if he could reduce Biden’s Middle East policy to a bumper sticker, it would read “No New Projects”. That meant no peace processes, no grand plans for strategic realignment, no grandiose objectives. His job was to minimize the prospects of a crisis - to keep the Middle East off the president’s desk as much as possible.
The Biden folks had a number of reasons for adopting this point of view. One was that they considered a lot of other things to be more important. When they entered office, the coronavirus pandemic was still raging and the U.S. economy needed digging out of a deep hole. Overseas - like many of their predecessors - they identified a rising China as America’s main threat and wanted to shift their energy and resources to focus on countering it. If Biden had any particular goals for the Middle East, it was to liquidate current commitments, such as the American presence in Afghanistan, and not make new ones.
But as Biden’s officials surveyed the world and decided which regions deserved their attention and which didn’t, they were also weighed down by their memories of the Obama administration. In 2009, Barack Obama had come to office faced with a moribund Middle East peace process and an Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu which was determined to undermine any prospect of restarting it. Obama decided to try to do it anyway. Instead, he got burned - and set a generation of Democratic Party policy intellectuals against the idea of trying again.
New president, new hopes
A turbulent sequence of events set the scene for Obama’s Middle East peace efforts. The first was the failed Annapolis Conference of 2007, the last major American effort to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians. As with every previous effort, negotiations at the conference bogged down over land swaps, the Palestinian “right of return” to Israel, and Jerusalem. Then, in January 2009, Israel launched a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, causing the negotiations to break down completely. Hamas, which had recently solidified its control of Gaza by driving out and murdering its rival faction Fatah, had emerged with what looked like a veto over any peace efforts - as soon as they got even remotely serious, it could start a war with Israel, collapsing the talks.
Another process was going on in the background, but was just as important - if not more so - for the future prospects of peace. This was the steady expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which by 2009 had about 300,000 residents. These settlements dramatically reduced the chance of a future peace deal because they sat on land that Palestinians would demand as part of one. At the same time, the settlement movement had greatly increased its influence over Israeli politicians, making it extremely difficult for any government in Tel Aviv to agree to their dismantlement. Some of these settlements - such as Modi’in and Beitar Illit - sat on the border with Israel, and perhaps could be included in a land swap. Others, like Ariel, sat in the heart of the West Bank, and gave peace negotiators no easy options.
Is any of this sounding familiar?
If it is, that’s because the basic contours of this situation did not change a great deal between 2009 and October 7th of this year. But in 2009, Obama made the last serious attempt of any American president to try.
In order to try to jumpstart peace negotiations, Obama decided to pressure Netanyahu’s government to impose a temporary freeze on new settlement construction. Because this would do nothing to address the problem posed by the existing settlements, it amounted to a request for nothing more than a good faith gesture - one that might convince the Palestinians to come back to the table. In return, the Palestinian Authority was asked to stop incitements to violence against Israelis in the West Bank - something that was much harder to measure and police. Regardless, Obama wrote in his memoirs, “I thought it was reasonable to ask the stronger party to take a bigger first step in the direction of peace”.
After a lot of pressure, Netanyahu eventually agreed to a ten-month freeze in the West Bank, but excluding East Jerusalem, one of the most important areas of settlement activity. Because East Jerusalem was excluded, the Palestinian Authority declared the freeze to be a sham and refused to enter talks. Then, during a visit by none other than Vice President Joe Biden to Jerusalem in March 2010, the Netanyahu government announced the approval of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem - a move that was widely seen as a public slap in the face to both Biden and the Obama administration. A few months later, Netanyahu let the settlement freeze expire, peace talks again collapsed, and Israel went back to merrily building settlements wherever it chose.
Lessons learned
Biden’s reaction to this sequence of events is perhaps the most interesting. He responded to his deliberate humiliation by Netanyahu not by cursing him out or refusing to meet him, as others in the White House reportedly wanted him to, but by embracing him and treating him like a roguish friend who had cheekily gone a step too far. It was shortly after this incident that Biden sent Netanyahu a signed photograph with the inscription “Bibi, I don’t agree with a damn thing you say, but I love ya”, an act which has become enshrined in Biden-Netanyahu lore.
In Biden administration background briefings, this whole sequence of events is cited in defense of the administration’s “hug them close” strategy. Basically, the logic goes, only praise and support of Netanyahu in public is capable of winning the administration a chance to influence him in private. Where Obama went wrong, the story continues, is that he tried to criticize and censure Netanyahu in public - a stance that was doomed to backfire.
The only problem with the administration’s story is that there’s little evidence that “hugging them close” is any more successful at influencing Israel’s actions. And in the first years of the Biden administration, what it meant in practice was something much worse - an abdication of any role or responsibility in the region at all: No New Projects.
The reason that the Biden officials who were also Obama alums landed on this approach was simple When Obama tried to pressure Netanyahu, he didn’t just face stonewalling on Tel Aviv - he also faced a furious backlash in Washington. Much of this came from Americans themselves, including liberals, as Obama recounts in his memoir:
The White House phones started ringing off the hook, as members of my national security team fielded calls from reporters, leaders of American Jewish organizations, prominent supporters, and members of Congress, all wondering why we were picking on Israel and focusing on settlements when everyone knew that Palestinian violence was the main impediment to peace. One afternoon, Ben hurried in late for a meeting, looking particularly harried after having spent the better part of an hour on the phone with a highly agitated liberal Democratic congressman.
“I thought he opposes settlements,” I said.
“He does,” Ben said. “He also opposes us doing anything to actually stop settlements.”
The rest of the backlash came from Netanyahu’s own interventions. Deeply knowledgeable about American politics and speaking with a hint of an American accent, Netanyahu is a master at manipulating the American political scene - and after 2009 he turned his attention to trying to undermine Obama. An under-rated reason for Israel’s transformation into a partisan issue over the past 10 years or so is the way Netanyahu himself tried to turn it into one, lambasting a Democratic president and openly siding with the Republican Party. This culminated in Netanyahu’s 2015 speech to Congress, on the invitation of its Republican leadership, to sharply criticize the Iran nuclear deal that the Obama administration was then negotiating.
For Barack Obama, the political pain that came from all of this was significant, especially when weighed alongside the meagre policy achievements of his pressure campaign on Israel. And for the mid-level staffers who would go on to more senior positions in the Biden administration, the lesson seemed to be that messing with Israel and Netanyahu was trouble. An approach of No New Projects was born.
Autopilot
The problem with this approach should by now be apparent. The Biden administration’s Middle East policy was left essentially on autopilot, a continuation of that of the Trump administration. The focus was on brokering diplomatic agreements between Israel and the Arab countries while ignoring the Palestinians. Trying to achieve progress on the Palestinian issue would have been a “new project”. But the problem was that the Palestinians still had the ability to violently grab the world’s attention and derail their plans, just like in 2009 - something Hamas did on October 7th in the most despicable and atrocious way.
The events of October 7th once again demonstrated that just ignoring the Middle East in general or the Palestinians more specifically will not make them go away. Constructive American leadership is needed, along with a greater measure of flexibility than the conflict’s participants have customarily shown, to make progress. Perhaps the pre-October 7th atmosphere, in which each of the participants was settled into a comfortable role and believed that the status quo was sustainable, was not an atmosphere in which genuine progress could be made. If the tragedy of October 7th could be eventually turned into an opportunity - a New Project for peace - maybe we could have some hope. If the result instead is a renewed cycle of violence and political cowardliness, we cannot.