POLITICO (“Democrats fear Netanyahu may have undermined Biden’s image among voters“):
When the Israel-Hamas war broke out six months ago, it represented the kind of global crisis that President Joe Biden told voters he is uniquely equipped to confront.
But as the U.S. struggled to prevent the conflict from spiraling into a humanitarian catastrophe, some of Biden’s close advisers and allies began worrying that rather than bolstering his image as an experienced global leader, the president’s steadfast support for Israel’s offensive risked further complicating his argument that the election is a choice between his competent moral clarity and former President Donald Trump’s chaos.
Those concerns have been echoed in a series of interviews and statements from prominent Democratic and Democratic-aligned senators, including Tim Kaine and Bernie Sanders, in recent days. And they have been an unstated undercurrent to the White House’s decision this past week to issue a stark threat to Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu that U.S. support could evaporate without major changes following a strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers.
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“It has undermined one of his most important assets against Trump,” Matt Duss, a former top foreign policy adviser to Sanders now at the Center for International Policy, said of Biden’s handling of the war up until this week. “Biden’s reputation was — agree or disagree with him — he’s a decent guy, he’s an empathetic guy, he’s an honest guy. But this policy has been a cruel policy.”
The Israel-Hamas conflict is not the first complex Middle East crisis to challenge Biden’s political and diplomatic skills. The White House faced mounting criticism in 2021 over its pullout from Afghanistan, with Biden facing questions over the planning as well as, more broadly, whether he was fulfilling his own pledge to be a force for global stability. His poll numbers stumbled badly and have never fully recovered.
The parallels are not exact, not least because U.S. troops are not involved in the war in Gaza. But nearly three years later, Democrats fear once more that the president is being hampered by his handling of a conflict overseas.
“I applaud President Biden for successfully urging Prime Minister Netanyahu to open another border crossing from Israel to allow robust delivery of humanitarian aid,” said Kaine, a leading Democratic voice on foreign policy. “But this was an obvious solution that should have happened months ago.”
Biden’s “current approach,” Kaine added, “is not working.”
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Still, there is persistent worry in Democratic circles that the visceral images emerging from Gaza each day are denting enthusiasm among Biden voters. Most visibly, the worsening humanitarian situation has angered an important part of Biden’s base — young voters, Arab and Muslim Americans and progressives — outraged by the U.S.’s inability to stop the unfolding horrors. Biden now faces protests nearly everywhere he travels, as well as concerns that a Democratic Convention this summer will be consumed by voter anger in the streets.
There are also indications that Americans are souring on Biden’s handling of the conflict more broadly. Just 47 percent of Democrats approved of Biden’s Middle East strategy in March, according to a Gallup poll, down from 60 percent last November. Among independents, the president’s Middle East approval rating sat at 21 percent.
Those warning signs permeated Biden’s inner circle in recent weeks. One senior adviser, granted anonymity to discuss confidential conversations, said leading up to Biden’s confrontational call with Netanyahu on Thursday that there was worry Biden’s difficulty in controlling his Israeli counterpart could undermine his claim to steady competence in voters’ eyes, and elevate Trump’s arguments for projecting a brasher — if far more erratic — image on the world stage.
“I think there’s great awareness that the U.S. position [toward the war] has been damaging to its standing internationally,” said Ivo Daalder, CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Daalder, who is close to senior administration officials, added that up until now, Biden has viewed his support of Israel as a deep-seated principle. “But the fact is, Bibi has provoked him so much that he may finally change.”
Liberal Washington Post‘s Karen DeYoung (“Six months into Gaza war, Biden confronts the limits of U.S. leverage“) adds:
International support for Israel in the immediate wake of Hamas’s invasion — which saw the killing of about 1,200 Israelis and the taking of around 250 hostages — has turned to outrage and charges of Israeli war crimes. To much of the world, the U.S. backing for Israel’s war effort has left the administration morally compromised, even complicit in the destruction and death.
At home, in what is already a contentious election year, Biden is stuck between a Republican Party demanding support for Israel at all costs, and increasing numbers of Democrats demanding he stop the steady stream of weapons sent to Jerusalem. His campaign stops are frequently disrupted by pro-Palestinian protests.
Administration officials maintain that things, as bad as they are, would be worse still had they not successfully pushed for changes in Israel’s war tactics, and persuaded Netanyahu to lift his government’s embargo on all supplies of food, water and fuel into Gaza. The negotiation that won a week-long cease-fire in November and brought about half the hostages home was a bright spot, one they had hoped would be followed by a longer and more significant pause in the fighting.
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“The influence of any outside party — even one that has theoretically on paper an enormous amount of influence on Israel — is limited,” said Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a former diplomat who spent nearly three decades working on Israeli-Palestinian relations in both Republican and Democratic administrations.
“The Middle East is literally littered with the remains of great powers who believed they could impose their limits” on the actions of those who live there, Miller said.
Many factors make this situation unique. Though Biden has had a complicated relationship with Netanyahu, the president is said to have a deep-seated, personal commitment to Israel that goes back to his first years as a U.S. senator. But Netanyahu “is trying to save his political skin by performative opposition to Biden in his approach to Gaza,” said Jeffrey Feltman of the Brookings Institution, who served as top official on the Middle East at the Obama administration’s State Department before becoming U.N. undersecretary for political affairs.
Losing U.S. support in the past “would be an almost insurmountable obstacle for an Israeli politician,” Feltman said. And unlike Washington’s prior interventions to make peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the United States has no leverage at all against Hamas, a terrorist organization that is still holding upward of 100 hostages, including a handful of Americans.
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Miller, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, sees little way out for the administration. Asked where the war would be six months from now, with the U.S. election just weeks away, he said, “I would like to think the kinetic phase of Israel’s ground campaign is over. More hostages are out, more humanitarian aid is in. But you still can’t get around the reality that Israel is determined to kill the leadership of Hamas.”
I remain skeptical that Biden’s handling of this crisis will have much of an impact on November’s election. With rare exceptions, American voters simply don’t care much about foreign policy. While polls are great at showing the direction of sentiment, they typically don’t tell us much about intensity and salience.
The exception, perhaps, is Michigan, with its huge Arab population. Once a reliable Republican state, it has gone for the Democratic nominee in every election since 1992 except 2016, when it went incredibly narrowly (47.5% to 47.3%) for Trump over Hillary Clinton. It flipped back blue in 2016, going 50.6% for Biden and 47.8% for Trump. It’s possible that anger over what’s happening in Gaza could put the state back in Trump’s column.
In a rational world, the fact that Trump is considerably more bellicose in his support of Netanyahu than Biden should mitigate whatever damage the war has done. We do not live in that world.
Further, Miller is right: there’s really only so much Biden can do to shape Israeli policy. We could, I suppose, refuse to provide more military support. But, first, Congress may well not allow that to happen. And, second, that would likely be more politically damaging than the current stance.
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Author: James Joyner
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