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In the wake of the horrific Oct. 7 attacks, U.S. President Joe Biden and his administration have stressed that there can be no return to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo. “It also means that when this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next. And in our view, it has to be a two-state solution,” Biden said at an Oct. 25 press conference.
In the wake of the horrific Oct. 7 attacks, U.S. President Joe Biden and his administration have stressed that there can be no return to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo. “It also means that when this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next. And in our view, it has to be a two-state solution,” Biden said at an Oct. 25 press conference.
Last month, the administration offered a preview of its new plan for the Middle East via New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, a longtime favorite of the president’s. “We are about to see a new Biden administration strategy unfold to address this multifront war involving Gaza, Iran, Israel, and the region,” Friedman wrote, “what I hope will be a ‘Biden Doctrine’ that meets the seriousness and complexity of this dangerous moment.”
“If the administration can pull this together—a huge if—a Biden Doctrine could become the biggest strategic realignment in the region since the 1979 Camp David treaty,” Friedman wrote.
While I appreciate Friedman’s enthusiasm, let’s just say I don’t have a huge amount of confidence in his judgment when it comes to “big, bold” doctrines for the Middle East. The last time he seemed this excited was when he was enthusing over the revolutionary vision of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The Biden plan he lays out offers little that’s new or promising—and threatens to keep U.S. policy stuck in the same failed rut it’s been in for decades.
As relayed by Friedman, the plan has three parts: a revitalized push for a Palestinian state; a U.S.-backed Israel-Saudi normalization deal that would include a U.S. security alliance with Saudi Arabia but would be contingent on Israeli support for the first part; and a more aggressive response to Iran and its regional network.
First, let’s focus on the positive. One of the main problems with the U.S.-managed peace process is that it has generally imposed consequences on the weaker side, the Palestinians. For Israel, only carrots. For Palestinians, mainly sticks. There are a few signs now that the administration is prepared to change this. A recent executive order enabling sanctions to be imposed on extremist settlers in the West Bank, as well as organizations that support them, is a small but important sign that the U.S. is finally willing to impose consequences on both sides. (Anyone claiming that the order is simply window dressing should take a look at this FinCEN notice, and then find someone who can explain it to them.)
So, too, with the recent White House memorandum conditioning military aid on adherence to international law, an idea Biden previously referred to as “bizarre.” While the necessity of the memorandum is questionable, as the administration already has the tools and authorities required to condition aid (and is, in fact, legally required to do so), it’s still a step in the right direction. Provided, of course, the administration keeps stepping that way and doesn’t treat the new process as simply a method to bury credible allegations of Israeli abuses in more layers of paper.
But apart from some greater attention to the Palestinians, Biden’s post-Oct. 7 plan looks a lot like Biden’s pre-Oct. 7 plan. And that’s because the underlying priority is the same: strategic competition with China, the lens through which this administration views all of foreign policy. A U.S.-Saudi security pact is seen as a necessary step to box China out of the Middle East, and the only way to possibly sell such an agreement with such a regime is by wrapping it in the candy coating of a Saudi-Israel normalization agreement (which the two countries are, of course, free to pursue on their own). There are a lot of questions to ask about such an agreement, but an important one is: If decades of close relations and unmatched military support between Israel and the United States haven’t enabled the U.S. to influence the course of the war in Gaza or curb Israel’s misuse of arms, can a deal with Mohammed bin Salman ensure responsible use of arms by the Saudis?
It’s worth taking a moment to recognize how the events of the last months have utterly demolished a key premise of the Abraham Accords: that the Palestinians don’t really matter. This was, for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Washington allies, presented as proof of a claim they had made for years. It turned out to be politically motivated wish casting. This shouldn’t have been surprising. After all, Netanyahu is the guy who assured us that invading Iraq and pulling out of the Iran nuclear agreement were both great ideas. He has an almost flawless record of being wrong about the region.
The Biden administration now understands that, in buying into the logic of the Abraham Accords, it had dramatically underestimated the enduring importance of Palestinian liberation among regional publics. This is a welcome correction, but an incomplete one. The pre-Oct. 7 plan wasn’t flawed just because it was premised on the perpetual repression of the Palestinian people. It was flawed because it was premised on the perpetual repression of all the region’s peoples, attempting to reconsolidate a U.S.-dominated regional order of abusive, unrepresentative governments that promised to deliver stability. As we had to learn terribly once again on Oct. 7, such an arrangement may seem stable for a while—until it doesn’t.
The urgent priority is to end the killing in Gaza and ensure the release of the hostages held by Hamas. Since soon after Oct. 7, the administration has been willing to engage in conversations about the “day after” but seems not to fully appreciate how the horrific reality Israel is creating on the ground, day after day, with unstinting and unconditional U.S. support, will determine what is actually possible on that theoretical day. That’s especially the case since the Israeli war effort is being led by a prime minister who knows that his political career will end as soon as the killing does and therefore has an incentive to prolong the fighting.
Much of the damage done—to human lives and homes, to regional and global security, and to U.S. credibility—is already irreversible. The impact on our country’s reputation will be, as David Petraeus said of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, “non-biodegradable.” It will endure beyond this presidency. But there are steps the administration can take to ameliorate the damage, starting with bringing U.S. policy on the Israel-Palestine conflict back into line with international law. State unequivocally that the territories occupied in 1967 are, in fact, occupied territories. Restore the State Department position that Israeli settlements in those territories are illegal. Reopen the Consulate General in Jerusalem to serve as the U.S. Embassy for the Palestinians, which Trump closed and Biden promised to reopen. Support an International Criminal Court investigation into potential war crimes by all sides, just as it has for Russia’s war in Ukraine. Join the 139 other countries—72 percent of the United Nations—that recognize the State of Palestine.
Ultimately, any serious effort to promote Palestinian liberation will require Biden to pressure Israel in a way he has thus far shown no willingness to do. There’s no getting around that. But it also requires the administration to see the current crisis not just as a challenge to its regional policy but to the entire “rules-based international order” that it claims to uphold. Front-loading a few treats for the Palestinians does not address the fundamentally flawed logic of a security strategy premised on the durability of authoritarian rule. I’m not asking for a Biden version of the George W. Bush Freedom Agenda, which wrongly presumed the U.S.’s ability to transform political systems at the point of a gun. But it’s worth recognizing that even if Bush’s prescription was wrong, his basic diagnosis—that depending on repressive regimes to deliver safety and stability is a bad bet—was not. Our policy needs to grapple with that.
Biden’s New Plan for the Middle East Is More of the Same
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14.02.2024
News, analysis, and background on the ongoing conflict.
More on this topic
In the wake of the horrific Oct. 7 attacks, U.S. President Joe Biden and his administration have stressed that there can be no return to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo. “It also means that when this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next. And in our view, it has to be a two-state solution,” Biden said at an Oct. 25 press conference.
In the wake of the horrific Oct. 7 attacks, U.S. President Joe Biden and his administration have stressed that there can be no return to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo. “It also means that when this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next. And in our view, it has to be a two-state solution,” Biden said at an Oct. 25 press conference.
Last month, the administration offered a preview of its new plan for the Middle East via New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, a longtime favorite of the president’s. “We are about to see a new Biden administration strategy unfold to address this multifront war involving Gaza, Iran, Israel, and the region,” Friedman wrote, “what I hope will be a ‘Biden Doctrine’ that meets the seriousness and complexity of this dangerous moment.”
“If the administration can pull this together—a huge if—a Biden Doctrine could become the biggest strategic realignment in the region since the 1979 Camp David treaty,” Friedman wrote.
While I appreciate Friedman’s enthusiasm, let’s just say I don’t have a huge amount of confidence in his judgment when it comes to “big, bold” doctrines for the Middle East. The last time he seemed this excited was when he was enthusing over the revolutionary vision of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The Biden plan he lays out offers little that’s new or promising—and threatens to keep U.S. policy stuck in the same failed rut it’s been in for decades.
As relayed by Friedman, the plan has three parts: a revitalized push for a Palestinian state; a U.S.-backed Israel-Saudi normalization deal that........
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