How Biden’s Middle East Policy Fell Apart

Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

How Biden’s Middle East Policy Fell Apart

Oct. 8, 2024

Ezra Klein

By Ezra Klein

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-franklin-foer.html

 

This episode is being published almost a year to the day after Hamas attacked Israel. I have tried writing different versions of this introduction, tried to write something up to that moment — and failed. Nothing I write is up to memorializing the horror of that day or of what has followed.

 

So I’m just going to try to say what has happened. On Oct. 7 a year ago, Hamas launched an invasion of Israel. Its fighters butchered Israeli citizens and non-Israelis and took hundreds of people hostage. Many things can be said about Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas. One thing I have never heard said, including by Israelis, is that he is irrational or emotional or impulsive. He is, agreed by all, to be an icy tactician. He has aims and plans, and he is willing to sacrifice lives, including Palestinian lives, by the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands to achieve them.

 

Like many Americans, my frame of reference after Oct. 7 was Sept. 11, when America was attacked, when civilians were killed, by an adversary who wanted to provoke us into disastrous reaction. In my first audio essay after Oct. 7, I was one of many who offered a warning based on that: Don’t give Sinwar what he wants, what he is trying to get you to give him.

 

What did Sinwar want on Oct. 7? At a moment when Israel was normalizing relations with some Arab countries and the Palestinian cause was dimming geopolitically and in the region, he wanted to recenter his people, their suffering, their fight. He wanted to show that Israel could be attacked, that it was vulnerable. He wanted, in doing that, to call his allies — Hezbollah, Iran — into the fight. He wanted to lure Israel into a massive, brutal invasion of Gaza that would become an occupation with no obvious end, that would shred Israel’s international legitimacy and, over time, sap its strength. That would begin or continue, depending on how you look at it, the work of turning Israel into the modern equivalent of apartheid South Africa, a pariah state internationally. He wanted to make the Palestinian Authority look weak, ineffectual, a subcontractor of Israeli control, while his Hamas, at least, was fighting for liberation as the group saw it.

 

So where are we, then, a year later? Israel’s possible peace deal with Saudi Arabia has vanished. Israel’s invasion of Gaza has left more than 40,000 Palestinians dead and many, many more homeless, wounded, grieving, exposed to famine and disease. Gaza is leveled, the destruction immense, almost beyond what the human mind can comprehend.

 

Israel’s leaders have no idea what to do next there. They have no plan for who is going to run it, except for them. They do not admit they are reoccupying Gaza, but it is clearly what they have done. Occupations get harder as time goes on. They have no offramp for this occupation. They have no theory of what to do after or next.

 

Hostages remain in Gaza. The hopes of a deal to bring them home have faded. Six were recently murdered in Gaza’s tunnels. Israel is now at war in Lebanon. It has been exchanging fire with Iran. Its international reputation is abysmal. South Africa brought genocide charges against Israel in international court. Global opinion is solidly with the Palestinians. The Palestinian cause has been revived as a central matter of international concern and activism. Even in America, support for Israel is now generational. Older Americans largely stand with Israel. Younger Americans do not.

 

That Sinwar got much of what he wanted does not mean Israel does not believe it has achieved much in its war. Hamas is eviscerated as a military and political organization. Much of Hezbollah’s leadership has been killed. Iran’s proxies have been shown to be weaker. Iran’s responses have been largely ineffectual. Israel’s deterrence power has been restored. The strength of its military, the reach of Mossad, is undeniable.

 

But the much-talked-about day-after plan doesn’t exist. Israel may be on the verge of needing to occupy both Gaza and southern Lebanon indefinitely.

 

If there is anything at all that onlookers agree on about Benjamin Netanyahu, it is that he does not live in the day after. He lives today. And he figures out tomorrow tomorrow. And Netanyahu’s days have gotten better. He has gone from reviled to seeing his Likud party leading in polls. His political obituary has been unwritten.

 

There is a strange way in which, right now, one year on, both Sinwar and Netanyahu might be feeling victorious. Their people suffer terribly. Their losses are undeniable. But so, too, now are their victories.

 

The same cannot be said for America. There is so much that we wanted to shape here. We wanted to avoid a regional war. We wanted to bring home the hostages. We wanted to create a political process for the Palestinians and the Israelis, to create some kind of durable peace, durable settlement, durable stability. We wanted to protect innocent Palestinians from the ferocity of Israel’s response. We wanted to show that America could still influence and broker events in the Middle East. And on all of that, we have failed.

 

And that is not just my view. Richard Haass, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told us that the point of foreign policy is to influence the policies of foreign governments. By that measure, America has failed. The things that we wanted to influence, by and large, we have not.

 

In The Atlantic, Franklin Foer has reconstructed the past year of American policy. He talked to dozens of people in the Biden administration and across the Middle East, and he described what he was doing at the end as the “anatomy of a failure.” He is a longtime journalist. He’s the author of a book on President Biden’s administration called “The Last Politician.” And even as someone who’s covered this extensively, I learned a lot that I didn’t know from his reporting. And so why does he call it the “anatomy of a failure”? On what did we fail and why?

 

This is an edited excerpt from our conversation for my podcast. For the full conversation, listen to “The Ezra Klein Show.”

 

How Biden’s Middle East Policy Fell Apart

The journalist Franklin Foer traced the Biden administration’s diplomacy in the Middle East since Oct. 7 and emerged with an “anatomy of a failure.”

There’s this sense of opportunity, of tragedy, at the beginning of your piece that ends up haunting the rest of it. Your article begins on Oct. 6, the day before the Hamas attack. You have Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, sitting with these Saudi diplomats working out a grand bargain: In exchange for a Palestinian state, Saudi Arabia would normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. Tell me about that deal.

 

We have to begin beyond the Middle East. The United States is contesting large chunks of the world with China, and there was a sense within the administration that Saudi Arabia was about to slip into China’s sphere. So even though the Biden administration came into power really prepared to be hostile to the Saudi government, to its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, for the killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, they also wanted to make sure that the major producer of fossil fuels in the world, this country that sits in a strategic place that has all these resources, didn’t slip into the wrong sphere.

 

So it begins talking to Mohammed bin Salman, who is very keen to normalize relations with Israel. Because over the course of his career as crown prince, he’s observed American politics. He’s seen how his reputation has started to slide, and he realizes that he’d rather bet on the United States as a military power. He’d rather bet on the United States as an economic power. He’d rather have American A.I. than Chinese A.I.

 

So he wants to create a deal where he’s able to enter into a defense pact with the United States, where we agree to protect his kingdom, essentially, against Iran. And we provide them with air defenses and other things in exchange for tethering himself to the U.S. dollar. And he realizes that the centerpiece of this plan has to be normalizing relations with Israel. Because there’s no way a mutual defense treaty is going to pass the U.S. Senate unless there’s some carrot, some enticement for progressives who abhor Saudi Arabia to join. So a Palestinian state is that enticement.

 

On Oct. 6, the U.S. is sitting with the Saudis and hammering through what a blueprint for a Palestinian state would look like. And this was largely broad strokes, but there were some very specific things that they were starting to hammer out only hours before the attacks of Oct. 7.

 

It’s going to be a theme of this conversation that I’m curious about when America was operating with a realistic view of Israel and Israeli politics and when it wasn’t. And this is my first moment of skepticism. Nothing I understand to be true about Israeli politics on Oct. 6 a year ago suggests that Netanyahu or the people in his cabinet or the mainstream of Israeli society would have accepted anything that would have been recognizable as a Palestinian state. You suggest that McGurk thinks that this deal is real. Do you think this deal was real?

 

I think I want to just explain a little bit about what the Biden administration was really thinking or, more particularly, what Joe Biden was thinking as they begin to pursue this.

 

Joe Biden is somebody who really does love the state of Israel. He’s a bona fide Zionist. And I think where he saw Netanyahu leading Israel before Oct. 7 was in a very dangerous, authoritarian direction, where all possibilities for a two-state solution were shutting down. So he saw this as an opportunity to basically get a toehold for a Palestinian state. And more important than that, he wanted to tether Israel to a two-state solution, because it would be good for the democratic soul of Israel, that it would be something that he saw as mitigating its turn toward right-wing, theocratic authoritarianism.

 

The question you’re asking pointedly is about Israeli politics and whether Benjamin Netanyahu would ever sign off on a deal that culminated in a Palestinian state, given his lifelong aversion to uttering the words “Palestinian state” and given the political coalition that he resides in.

 

But I know almost a year before Oct. 7, there were conversations that Netanyahu was having with President Biden. And Netanyahu is privately telling him: Look, I want to get this deal. I’m willing to ditch the far right of my coalition in order to get this deal.

 

This is going to be the capstone achievement of his career. It would stitch him into a defense alliance with Saudi Arabia and the United States. There are all sorts of objective reasons Israel should want this. And again, he was telling Biden he’s willing to chuck Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich from his political coalition in order to get this.

 

Is he sincere in this? I think that there’s part of Netanyahu who always believes that he can whittle a better deal out of whoever he’s negotiating with. Will it be a real Palestinian state? I think he thinks that he can keep twisting and twisting and twisting until it’s a nub of what you and I might consider to be a legitimate, viable Palestinian state. And he knows on the other end that the Saudis have their own domestic political reasons for achieving a nominal Palestinian state but the Saudis don’t actually care about the substance of it.

 

My sense from foreign policy circles around this deal was that a lot of people believed it was about sidelining what gets called the Palestinian issue, that the reality of this deal was that Saudi Arabia wanted the relationship with Israel and the U.S., Israel wanted the relationship with Saudi Arabia and they were kind of trying to figure out what the fig leaf was to make that sellable.

 

But this was part of a process kicked off by the Abraham Accords, where you had Israel normalizing relationships with other Arab states without the Palestinian question and Palestinian statehood being at the center of it or being an impediment to those other regional alliances. And this is thought by many to be one of the things that Sinwar and Hamas are taking into consideration when they decide to launch this attack. They feel their cause and their possibilities being decentered, and they need to do something to upend the chessboard.

 

In your reporting with the administration, do they believe that? Do they think that there was some relationship between these negotiations and the more desperate move Hamas then attempts?

 

There’s no way to know what role this precisely played in triggering Sinwar’s thinking about the invasion of Israel on Oct. 7. I happen to think that it pretty clearly played some significant role in the timing there. And as it relates to how he would have considered how Iran would have responded to this, I mean, this deal would be fundamentally threatening to Iran. So even if Sinwar didn’t directly ask Iran for permission to invade Israel on Oct. 7, he would have known that this would have suited their geopolitical thinking at that moment.

 

So then comes Oct. 7. What is that day like inside the Biden administration?

 

Oct. 7 really happens on the waning hours of Oct. 6 because of the time lag. Brett McGurk, who’d been in his office a couple of hours earlier negotiating with the Saudis about what a Palestinian state would look like, receives a text message from Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Michael Herzog, saying: We’ve been attacked. And his instantaneous response is to say: We’re with you.

 

Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, was actually just about to go on vacation in Europe. So he’s up through the night talking to the Israelis. And over the night, as the scale and scope of the attack start to unfold, officials are woken up, and they go to their computers, and they start to call the intel.

 

In the Situation Room, Jake Sullivan asks the military aides who were there to start going through the intelligence to see if there was something that the U.S. had missed, because the attack took the administration by as much surprise as it clearly took the Israelis.

 

In the morning, at about 9 a.m., several hours into the attack, the president is officially briefed. And over the course of that day, they start showing him video footage of the atrocities that were captured and showing him photos and telling him stories.

 

And U.S. presidents tend to be hardened against the reports that they get about terrorist attacks, but he was visibly shaken. He starts to talk to Prime Minister Netanyahu, who also is clearly shaken by what’s happened. There was this sense of fear that officials felt like they could hear in his voice, because at that time in these early conversations, the war within Israel was still taking place. That battle was still happening. Villages were being cleared, and the scale of the atrocities became more apparent with each passing hour.

 

But at the very outset, Netanyahu tells the president: We’re going to have to respond in some sort of severe sort of way, or we’re going to be roadkill, and we need the U.S. to be with us. And the president says: Of course, we’ll be with you.

 

But what was striking to me was that, even in those very, very early hours, where the sense of solidarity was the strongest and most uncomplicated, there was this sense of foreboding that members of the administration, the president’s inner circle started to feel. Because they could see traces of what was coming in the coming months.

 

I want to bring in some of the other players here. Hezbollah begins firing rockets on Oct. 8. It’s almost immediate. And in your reporting, this is not a coordinated alliance. There’s actually annoyance on Hezbollah’s part that they did not have more of a heads-up from Hamas and they were not prepared for this. Right now, we’re hearing a lot about Israel’s incursion into Lebanon and the conflict with Hezbollah. But tell me a bit about Hezbollah early in the war.

 

Hassan Nasrallah learns about Oct. 7, and there’s no doubt that he’s happy with the achievement of having delegitimized Israel, of catching them with their pants down on Oct. 7. That gives him great satisfaction.

 

But on the other hand, he is irked that he got no heads-up about this, that essentially he’d hoped to execute, someday, a version of Hamas’s game plan. And he knew that he would never be able to go to that well again, because Israel would be prepared for that kind of attack. So at the same time, he’s under pressure from his own base to show that he’s willing to be strong in the face of this opportunity. And so he starts lobbing missiles, projectiles in the direction of northern Israel.

 

But he’s always calibrating his response because he knows that in the wider Lebanese polity, there’s no appetite for war. The traumas of the 2006 war are lingering, and he doesn’t feel like he’s in a position to fully join the fight. So from his perspective, he’s going through the steps; they’re terrible on the Israeli end, because there are a lot of people who are being driven from their homes. But he’s not escalating to his fullest capacity at the start of the war.

 

When you say he’s under pressure from his base — I don’t think the politics of Hezbollah are well understood here. It is sometimes spoken about as a terrorist group. It is sometimes spoken about as a direct Iranian client. It has been in Lebanon in a somewhat strange way. How would you describe what Hezbollah is?

 

It is an army, it is a religious organization, it is a quasi-governmental organization that presides over large stretches of Lebanon, and it is, indeed, a client of Iran. It’s all of these things. So there’s a balancing act that Nasrallah is constantly going through, where he’s trying to calibrate his interest in order to promote his long-term ideological and theocratic goals while he’s trying to maintain Hezbollah’s place within Lebanese society.

 

There’s a view among Israelis that all of these players — Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — are really working under the direct orders of Iran. The way this emerges in your reporting, though, is much more fractious.

 

You mentioned already that Nasrallah doesn’t have a heads-up from Hamas about the attack. But you also write that after Hezbollah begins launching rockets, McGurk received a message via back channel that he used to communicate with the Iranians. They wanted the White House to know that they opposed Hezbollah’s entry into the war and were trying to calm tensions.

 

Should I take that at face value? Should I take that as Iran playing a double game? At a number of points in your article, Iran seems to not want escalation. Did reporting the story change your view of Iran and its role and its desires here at all?

 

I think Iran does wish the destruction of Israel. Iran is a sworn enemy of the United States.

 

But I was pretty surprised to learn about the real activity that’s happening behind the scenes — that the back channel that you just alluded to is one of several back channels that are used to communicate between the United States and Iran. And there are these moments when Iran can see that the world is about to move in what, from its perspective, is a dangerous direction, and it’s trying to signal to the United States very clearly what its intentions are.

 

So the event that you’re alluding to was four days after Oct. 7, and Israel was convinced that it was seeing all of these signs that Hezbollah was about to do more than launch rockets in its direction, that it was about to launch a major campaign against the Israelis.

 

The Israelis could see that the Iranians were switching to tactical radios, which is a telltale sign. They felt that they could see significant mobilization that was happening close to the Israeli border. So they have to make a decision at that moment: Do they launch a pre-emptive attack against Hezbollah?

 

And they were distinctly not in a strategic frame of mind, four days after Oct. 7. And they were seeing shadows in that moment. Because they were so spooked by their failure to miss all the signals that preceded Oct. 7., they were determined not to let that happen again with Hezbollah. And so they call the White House. They say they’re about to launch this attack. And the United States is scanning the intelligence, and they’re just not seeing what the Israelis are seeing.

 

At that moment, McGurk gets this message from the Iranians saying: Look, we don’t want Hezbollah to attack at this moment. And the administration relays that to the Israelis. And the Israelis were so close, on Oct. 11, to launching an attack. The airplanes had been scrambled. They were just minutes away from launching this.

 

One of the telltale signs that they thought that they saw on that day was that they felt like paragliders were mimicking the attacks that Hamas had launched, but this time they were coming from southern Lebanon. They called the White House, and they said: Paragliders are flying into Israel. Well, as it turned out, those paragliders were a flock of birds.

 

It was really by the thinnest of margins that a wider war was averted four days after Oct. 7.

 

This is a moment where the support seemed, to me, to have been very consequential. As you say, Iran has a stated goal of destroying Israel. I don’t think there’s any real reason to doubt that they believe that sincerely. The Biden administration is extremely clear and moves warships into place to make clear that if there is a significant Iranian-driven effort to open up a northern front, that they’re not just fighting Israel; they’re fighting the U.S.

 

Can you talk a bit about the role the Biden administration played and what it did materially to shift the balance of power and threat that Hezbollah or Iran might have been seeing at that moment?

 

The administration shifted carrier groups into the region, and the administration had been practicing in anticipation of a confrontation with Iran.

 

There were military exercises that they had conducted at the beginning of the year called Juniper Oak. They figured out how to best message to the Iranians that there would be a serious cost that the Iranians would pay for escalation. So they go through those steps right after Oct. 7. And I think that that does have an effect of deterring Hezbollah, deterring Iran, that’s meaningful.

 

On the other side, the administration sends a message to Israel. And so I just described to you Oct. 11. One thing that Biden told Netanyahu very, very directly was: If Hezbollah pre-emptively attacks you, we’re with you. If you go and pre-emptively attack Hezbollah, well, then you’re on your own.

 

That’s a message that the administration delivers repeatedly to Israel over the course of the year. And I think it’s one of those places where the administration’s leverage actually is, as you say, successful in deterring Israel from going deeper and deeper into the regional war that the United States is determined to avoid.

 

You say that an agenda emerges inside the Biden administration fairly quickly and that there’s a set of tensions, really, at the heart of it. They want to fully support Israel, particularly that early moment that Israel has been attacked in a genuinely brutal, horrific way. They want to avoid a regional war. They want to liberate the hostages, and Americans are among the hostages.

 

They also believe that there is no long-term answer for Israeli security that is not a peace deal and a self-determination deal for Palestinians. So they want to build out some kind of political horizon here so that there is some answer for Palestinians, and they want to revive the Saudi deal. That’s, pretty quickly, a lot of different goals that maybe don’t all fit together.

 

I think the question that gets asked of Israeli officials and that basically everybody in the world starts to ask themselves as it becomes clear is: OK, Israel is going to respond to Oct. 7. The question is, how is this going to end? And what’s the escape from this war? Does it result in Israel reoccupying Gaza, which is a terrible outcome that not even the Israelis seem prepared to entertain? Does it result in Hamas, the perpetrators of this attack, staying in power at the end of this war?

 

I spent a lot of time with diplomats over the course of the last five or six months as I reported this story, and being in the bubble of diplomacy is kind of an incredible thing because diplomats are essentially paid to be optimistic. And this very dire question of “How does it end?” is something that almost immediately starts to stoke elaborate blueprints, elaborate visions for how there can be a better world on the other side of this conflict.

 

And that’s the thing that, I think, ultimately stokes U.S. policy — that they know that they’re looking for the short-term wins very early in the war. They want to reduce the scale and scope of Israeli’s invasion plans so that it’s not just 30,000 troops barreling through Gaza. But they want to get to this place where there’s some way to reconstruct Gaza, to get a better government there, to restore the possibilities of this Saudi normalization deal. Because that’s the prize at the end for the United States, for the Israelis and, in their view, for the Palestinians, because it revives the prospect of a Palestinian state, which has languished for so many years.

 

Let me pick up on that, because now we’re back in this early period. Israel’s deciding what kind of response to do in Gaza. The administration wants them to do something more limited and counterterrorism oriented. Israel basically doesn’t do that. But what they do — and I guess I hadn’t read this before — is, Netanyahu tries to signal he’s taking a middle path. And what he tells the Americans, according to you, is that Israel would send a fraction of the soldiers it initially intended in order to capture Gaza City. After a pause there, the army would continue to Khan Yunis, which they thought of as the epicenter of the tunnel network. And the war would be over by Christmas.

 

In your reporting, this is what the Biden administration is hearing in late October — that Israel is planning a ground invasion that will be over within, functionally, eight weeks?

 

Yes. It’s actually one of the things that really stunned me the most as I was reporting this story. When I talked to Israeli officials, they kept going back to this conversation that Netanyahu and Biden had, where Biden told Netanyahu not to go in, where he insisted on a counterterrorism model of fighting this war.

 

And I was really surprised that he had been that direct. It was clear when he went to Israel right after Oct. 7 that he was telling them to avoid all the mistakes that the United States had made in Afghanistan and Iraq. But I assumed that he wanted Israel to launch some sort of invasion against Hamas, because he talked about dismantling Hamas.

 

So I was kind of dumbfounded that this conversation had happened. And American officials were really somewhat reluctant to talk about that conversation because, I guess, in some sense, it shows that there was this bigger gap there between the United States and Israel at the very earliest phases of the war. And Biden was direct sometimes, but so much of his approach right after Oct. 7. and, I think, throughout a lot of that first stage of the war was to conduct his foreign policy through Socratic questions. He would give Netanyahu advice. It was pointed advice, and it was clear what he wanted, but it was mostly done in the way of nudging him in the right direction, as opposed to insisting or dictating or lecturing or any of the other alternatives. So there is this scaled-back version.

 

The other thing that dumbfounded me is that Israel didn’t have a plan on the shelves for invading Gaza. Israel had spent all of this time clearly thinking in a very deep way about what a war with Hezbollah would look like. They were planning for that war. They were thinking what it would be like to engage in a full-scale conflict with Iran. But they’d overlooked this major strategic question. So they were wildly improvising in the aftermath of Oct. 7. In the state of shock and of trauma and of exhaustion, they were drawing up plans for invading Gaza. And there were major omissions. They never talked about how they would end up shutting down the smuggling tunnels that resupplied Hamas. It’s a very, very glaring omission in their war plan, but their war plans were just not that well conceived.

 

I don’t believe the Biden administration really believed — or should have believed — that they had some path to Palestinian statehood on Oct. 6. If they did, I think they were working with an out-of-date understanding of Israeli politics. And maybe that’s true.

 

When the ground invasion began, nobody I talked to thought it was going to be over by Christmas. You have Israel going into Gaza, into urban fighting. They are never going to allow Hamas to rule there. They have no day-after plan. They’re going to have all kinds of unforeseen things happen.

 

I think hearing that the Biden administration, at least in your reporting, was told — and maybe even bought — that this would be over by Christmas, even though nobody would tell them how it would be over. Which part of the administration is fooling itself here?

 

I think you’re pointing out this contradiction or this naïveté in a way that’s extremely persuasive, especially in retrospect. The one thing that I could say in the administration’s defense here is that foreign policy is conducted by human beings, and it’s conducted in this cauldron where the United States and this administration — because of emotional attachments, because of strategic attachments — is kind of locked in this alliance with the Israelis. And it is a naïve, wishful optimism that they have about Israel’s capacity to pivot to its next phase.

 

I think that the administration always harbored this sense that once Israel got over the shock and trauma of Oct. 7, there would be a moment where the country would start to recalibrate and would start to achieve some sort of equilibrium that would permit strategic thinking. And they would be able to think about the way that the country is perceived in the wider world. And they would be able to recognize that the possibility of completing this grand project of reconciling with the Sunni gulf states was such a powerful enticement that they would be able to at least go through the process of starting to establish the scaffolding for Palestinian statehood.

 

And so in their head, they thought: OK, they’re going to win these two battles that they’ve promised that they’re going to fight. They’re going to exact all of this damage against Hamas, maybe at a terrible cost, in the matter of two months. And then they’re going to pivot to what we’ve been telling them they should do all along, which is counterterrorism, and they will continue to prosecute this war, but in a much more targeted and strategic sort of way.

 

The relationship between the United States and Israel at the level of a military to military relationship is so deep, it’s so intertwined. And so it’s not just Netanyahu telling Biden this, it’s the Israel Defense Forces telling Centcom this. So there are a lot of relationships there that are fully trusting and that are professional. They’re not political.

 

There’s this moment in March when Israel is considering invading Rafah. Biden gives an interview to Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC, and he says that invading Rafah would, for him, cross a red line.

 

That’s strong language for the U.S. president to use in public. Then Israel invades Rafah, and nothing happens. In some very straightforward way, isn’t that a weakening of America’s influence, a sort of signal the words are empty?

 

I can explain to you what happened, from the perspective of the administration, which is that when they delivered the red line to Netanyahu, it was delivered as: You need to come up with a plan for protecting civilians. In the course of invading Rafah, it wasn’t that the invasion itself was the red line.

 

Now, I think the president expressed it differently in this interview with Capehart, and there’s no resolving that disjunction. But when I would talk to people in the administration, their response would be: You know what? Actually, Israel altered its invasion plans. Instead of going into the city and clearing the city in a block-by-block, neighborhood sort of way, they did it in this much more pinpoint way, where they encircled, they focused on the smuggling tunnels and battling Hamas battalions without the same sort of casualties that they had in Khan Yunis, in Gaza City.

 

And I think that there’s a case that they could make to themselves, plausibly, that they were successful in reshaping that plan. And the problem is that they were very sympathetic to the aim, ultimately. They felt like: OK, we don’t want this war to continue, but we do want them to deal with these smuggling tunnels.

 

There’s no getting around the fact that this is all extremely muddled policy that makes the United States look weak because they are establishing these limits, and then those limits are being transgressed.

 

I think sometimes people overstate the leverage America has over Israel. My view is that if Biden had said, “You can do counterterrorism operations in Gaza if you can’t invade. If you invade, we’re not arming you.” Even if Biden had the capacity congressionally to do that, I think Israel still invades Gaza.

 

I think something that the Biden administration is endlessly balancing here is the fear that they will just rupture the relationship, and then they don’t have influence over Israel at all.

 

That said, my critique is, from my reporting, talking to people with all kinds of different foreign policy views on this, the view is, really: America has demanded nothing. Small alterations to war plans, maybe.

 

To give a good example, throughout this whole disaster, one of America’s and Biden’s continued views is that one of the only plausible answers to Gaza is a revived Palestinian Authority — that there needs to be Palestinian governing partners that America can work with, that Israel can work with. During this period, Israel, under Smotrich, is withholding tax revenues from the P.A. and allowing for quite a lot of settler violence and doing quite a bit more to break them.

 

And one thing that America never just does, which I think it was well within its power, is to say: If you keep doing this, then we are not behind you. We’re not going to arm you while you foreclose the political horizon and the political partners that are core to — in this case — Joe Biden’s long-term view.

 

But America doesn’t do that. In the end, it seems like it functionally was a blank check. And now the Biden administration or anybody else looks around, and there’s nothing of what they wanted to build out some kind of alternative political pathway out of this. We were committed to their strategy, but we were never committed to our own.

 

Yeah. I called my piece an “anatomy of a failure” because, despite all of the energetic, earnest diplomacy that the administration has committed over the course of the last year, they don’t have, really, anything to show for it.

 

I kept thinking about the counterexamples, and I agree with you that America’s leverage over Israel is vastly overstated. We have some counterexamples where the U.S. cut off military aid in Egypt and Bahrain and we weren’t able to achieve any of the policy ends that we wanted to achieve in either of those instances.

 

I keep thinking about past chapters of American diplomacy, and whether it’s Kissinger, Baker, Holbrook or many others, when you have diplomacy that is forceful, you’re able to thread needles. You’re able to achieve multiple ends.

 

And what’s especially painful to me, after having done all of this reporting, is that there is a vision of a better world on the other side of this war. It may not be the most plausible vision, but it beats all of the alternatives, having that vision in your head.

 

It seems to me that it’s incumbent upon the administration to use every tool, every bludgeon, every wrench and screwdriver in their diplomatic tool kit to achieve those sorts of results. And sometimes that would mean having very contentious arguments in public with the Israelis. But it doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning the alliance. I think that there is — it’s not even a middle ground. There is an alternative path. It’s hard to imagine, and it would be hard to achieve. But I refuse to believe that it doesn’t exist.

 

This is an excerpt from my conversation with Franklin Foer for “The Ezra Klein Show.” In the rest of the conversation, we continue to discuss the Biden administration’s relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel, what has happened with cease-fire and hostage negotiations, Israel’s ground invasion in Lebanon, the state of the day-after plan and more.

 

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.