Biden’s Diplomatic Magical Thinking
His attempts to soothe the Middle East have produced the opposite effect.
Sept. 23, 202
As tensions escalate and bombs fall across the Middle East, President Biden’s emissaries continue to urge all parties to calm down and dial back the violence. No one is listening, and this brings us to the central paradox of a troubled presidency stumbling toward an inglorious close. Mr. Biden may love diplomacy, but diplomacy doesn’t love him back.
No administration in American history has been as committed to Middle East diplomacy as this one. Yet have an administration’s diplomats ever had less success? Mr. Biden tried and failed to get Iran back into a nuclear agreement with the U.S. He tried and failed to get a new Israeli-Palestinian dialogue on track. He tried and failed to stop the civil war in Sudan. He tried and failed to get Saudi Arabia to open formal diplomatic relations with Israel. He tried to settle the war in Yemen through diplomacy, and when that failed and the Houthis began attacking shipping in the Red Sea, the ever-undaunted president sought a diplomatic solution to that problem too. He failed again.
For nearly a year Team Biden has given its all to the diplomatic effort to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Repeatedly, administration officials have hailed progress toward an agreement that would pause the fighting and send the Israeli hostages home. But senior officials are conceding privately that the chances of a cease-fire deal during Mr. Biden’s remaining months in office are slim.
For the past few weeks Washington has been frantically trying to prevent the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah from escalating dramatically. Like Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Hamas and the Houthis, neither Israel nor Hezbollah thinks Washington is dispensing sound policy advice.
The Biden administration wants something it can’t have in the Middle East: continued influence with diminished presence. Its diplomacy is aimed at preserving a regional order that depends on the kind of American power projection the president desperately wants to avoid.
The metastasizing conflicts across the Middle East that Mr. Biden hates are the natural and inevitable consequence of his own policies. As America withdraws, or attempts to withdraw, from the region, its influence over the relevant parties diminishes. The less reliable America looks, the less value anyone attaches to promises of American support. The more obviously America looks toward the exits, the less anyone fears American power.
As Iran’s fear of American power fades, it becomes more aggressive. As Gulf Arabs’ confidence in American wisdom and commitment shrinks, they hesitate between their desire to oppose Iran and the need to conciliate the rising power of a dangerous neighbor. This in turn drives Israel to ever tougher and more dramatic responses as it scrambles to convince both Iran and the Arab countries that it can deter Iranian aggression even as America walks away.
Mr. Biden has fundamentally misjudged what diplomacy is and what it can and can’t do. As a man who came of age politically during the Vietnam War and was politically and personally scarred by his support for the Iraq war, the president knows in his bones that military power projection unrelated to an achievable political goal often leads to expensive disasters.
He isn’t wrong about this, but like many in the Democratic policy world, Mr. Biden rejected a misguided overconfidence in military force only to attribute similar magic powers to diplomacy. Diplomacy in quest of an unachievable political goal is as misguided as poorly conceived military adventurism and can ultimately be as costly.
In the 1930s, the U.S. thought Japan’s attempt to conquer China was both immoral and bad for American interests, but a mix of naive pacifism and blind isolationism blocked any serious response. Instead, Washington settled on a diplomatic stance of nonresistance to Japanese aggression mixed with nonrecognition of Japanese conquests and claims. The policy failed to help China. What it accomplished was to persuade a critical mass of Japanese leaders that America was irredeemably decadent. They gradually came to believe that a nation so foolishly led would respond to the destruction of its Pacific fleet with diplomats rather than aircraft carriers.
Mr. Biden’s diplomats must struggle against the near-universal global perception that the administration’s Middle East policy is similarly blind. Allies as well as adversaries increasingly disregard American wishes and discount its warnings.
That isn’t good for American interests, and it won’t bring peace to the region. As events slide out of control, Mr. Biden’s diplomats can do little more than wring their hands and wish for better times. The failure isn’t their fault. Like soldiers sent into a war their leaders don’t know how to win, America’s diplomats were tasked with an impossible mission their leader never thought through.
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Appeared in the September 24, 2024, print edition as 'Biden’s Diplomatic Magical Thinking'.