Member Newsletter
In my post yesterday, I said Israel’s campaign in Gaza has reached a point of diminishing returns, even on its own terms, and that the U.S. needs to help Israel, even in spite of itself or at least in spite of the current government, to bring it to a halt. A friend of mine got in touch with me and asked basically, how precisely can the U.S. do that? He meant this not in a challenging way but literally, what power does the U.S. have to make this happen? This led to an interchange that helped me think through why the U.S. has been doing what it has been doing, what it can do and what it can’t.
First, why is the U.S. sending arms and munitions to Israel at all? Israel has an incredibly powerful military and huge stockpiles of weapons of all sorts. Set aside the policy or moral questions. Why is it even necessary? At the very beginning of the conflict the U.S. provided fulsome support and arms in part simply to signal support, that the U.S. was backing Israel to the hilt after October 7th. But beneath that messaging and symbolism there was something much more concrete.
The U.S. was focused on preventing a broader regional conflict in the whole region. That was always the core U.S. goal and national priority. The U.S. sent two aircraft carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean, a massive show of force, to deter Hezbollah or other Iranian proxies from opening a second front against Israel, which would have triggered massive Israeli retaliation against Lebanon and possibly Iran.
I suspect supplying weapons played a similar role. All Israeli military doctrines hold that Israel’s wars must be rapid and decisive because the country has no strategic depth (geography) and has a mass reserve army which can’t remain long in the field. Above all else that means maintaining the military initiative and not allowing adversaries to choose when conflicts occur.
How does that play out in this case? I suspect U.S. planners envisioned a scenario like this. Israel is fighting in Gaza and perhaps on a more limited level in the North against Hezbollah. It’s keeping its army in the field, reducing its readiness, drawing down its weapons stockpiles. That makes it increasingly vulnerable to escalation from Hezbollah or directly from Iran. With time operating against it like that, and feeling acute vulnerability over October 7th, Israeli military doctrines favor decisive attacks against potential enemies while Israel is still at peak readiness and strength. There’s your regional war which the U.S. sees as its core interest to avoid. That’s why you have the aircraft carrier groups off the cost and the resupply of weapons and munitions: to give Israel the backing that allows them not to default to their strike first/no long wars doctrines.
But does any of that still apply? It certainly seems much less relevant and operative now. A war between Israel and Hezbollah, one more direct and contained, is another matter. A whole swath of northern Israel remains evacuated since October 7th. But the dynamics of that, catastrophic as it would be, are still different from the scenario envisioned last fall. What’s not clear is how much that’s still playing into U.S. thinking. We’ve seen very little reporting on that. Or at least I haven’t seen it.
A huge amount of the debate in the U.S. has been driven by the assumption that the U.S. can dictate policy to Israel. But that’s simply not the case and demonstrably not the case, certainly not after an event like the October 7th massacres. But cutting off or restricting the resupply of weapons and munitions sends a clear signal even if it doesn’t force a change of policy in Israel. Maybe we can’t force Israel to change policy but we can make ourselves no longer on the line for it. Whatever the rationale at the outset of the war, and even if Israel would be doing the exact same things without it, the ongoing U.S. resupply of weapons and munitions implicates the U.S. in every Israeli decision in Gaza.
If I were running U.S. policy, I would announce that the U.S. believes that the military operation has run its course, that it’s time to move to post-war, reconstruction and government in Gaza with the Palestinian Authority taking a leading role. So more weapons transfers aren’t necessary. Would that force Israel’s hand? I don’t know. But it would certainly put the U.S. in a far better position. And I suspect it would change the situation fairly dramatically.
The key in my mind is that the current Israeli government is brittle and isolated. It’s extremely unpopular in Israel. It’s very vulnerable to this kind of U.S. strong arming. If it works and leads to new elections and a better government in Israel, great. If not, it’s still pretty good for the U.S. Netanyahu’s indifference to U.S. demands is making the U.S. and Joe Biden look weak.
Yesterday I took a huge amount of flak for not calling the food convey shootings in Gaza a “massacre.” But today one of the current government’s far-right ministers literally cheered the killings and said it was a good reason to cut off all food aid into Gaza. These are unconscionable statements that should be deemed wholly incompatible with ongoing U.S. resupply of the IDF and diplomatic cover for Israel. President Biden should say that that ministers goes or those shut offs happen immediately. Let the Israeli government decide whether that forces a change in policy.
There is much more we should demand. But that is the absolute minimum.
What I fear is holding this up is a foreign policy version of the kind of policy literalism and propriety that is always the bane of Democratic administrations. So basically, Tony Blinken is running this. He’s got the experts at the State Department and at the Pentagon. We’re not running this from the White House political office. We’re going to do this by the books. We’re going to do this right. We’ve seen this kind of thinking across countless policy domains in Democratic administrations for years. There are many laudable impulses that go into that. But it leads to a perverse myopia. That’s not how the world works or, frankly, how it should work. Domestic politics and the global context are integral parts of foreign policy always. I fear this kind of thinking is leading to a narrow and myopic kind of policy inertia. The U.S. has the room here to throw its weight around. The White House has great need of doing that domestically. Not mostly because of potential disaffection among Arab-Americans in Michigan but because this is profoundly divisive for the Democratic coalition generally and for the U.S. standing globally. Whatever the case in November and December, we are now along for the ride on a dead end policy — certainly for the Palestinians but also for Israel and most importantly for the U.S. as well.
Perhaps behind the scenes the U.S. is still mostly focused on heading off a wider regional conflagration. But it’s very hard for me to see that that’s really still the case. The current Israeli government is weak and brittle. It’s deeply unpopular at home. And even within Israel, which has viewed all of this through a totally different prism from most of the rest of the world, there’s a growing recognition that the operation has run its course. It’s time for the U.S. to act more decisively to bring this to an end.