• Foreign & Public Diplomacy
• Geopolitics
• United States

A year ago, in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, U.S. President Joe Biden traveled to Tel Aviv and met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reiterate his administration’s unwavering support for Israel. Biden’s embrace of Netanyahu was rooted in the belief that only positive inducements and constant reassurances—both militarily and diplomatically—could restrain Israel’s actions in Gaza. In reality, though, this “bear hug” diplomacy has resulted in an unmitigated failure.

Since the onset of Israel’s offensive campaign in Gaza, the Biden administration has pursued four policy objectives: supporting Israel’s military campaign to eliminate the security threat posed by Hamas; helping to secure the release of hostages held in Gaza; mitigating harm to Palestinian civilians; and preventing an all-out war in the region.

A year later, however, more than 42,000 Palestinians are dead, and most of Gaza is in ruins, with its 2 million inhabitants facing one of the worst humanitarian disasters of this century. Israel has failed to achieve its stated goal of completely eliminating Hamas, and some 100 hostages remain captive in Gaza. Meanwhile, U.S.-sponsored cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas have all but collapsed, even as the war has now spread to Lebanon, and the threat of a wider war with Iran looms on the horizon.

Although Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran clearly bear responsibility for the ongoing violence, the Biden administration must also accept blame as the most powerful foreign-policy actor in the region and the chief enabler of the war. Despite the Biden administration’s often public frustration with Israel at being repeatedly defied and left in the dark, by continuing to provide Israel with unrestricted political and military support it has undermined its own diplomacy and brought us to the brink of an all-out regional war.

While previous U.S. administrations, both Democrat and Republican, have been highly deferential to Israel, Biden has been unique in his uncompromising, almost fundamentalist, refusal to use U.S. leverage or apply any meaningful pressure on Israel. This has resulted in an incoherent U.S. policy that is jarringly disconnected from realities on the ground—as well as the administration’s own policy objectives.

Biden’s bear hug approach toward Israel has gone through various iterations over the past year. For the first few months of the war, Washington offered unconditional support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza, while rejecting any and all calls for a cease-fire, including vetoing three separate cease-fire resolutions at the United Nations Security Council.

Despite a skyrocketing death toll and what human rights observers deemed a “shocking disregard for civilian lives” by Israeli forces, the Biden White House repeatedly stressed that the United States would not draw any “red lines” when it came to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Even as U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned Israel that the massive civilian toll risked replacing a “tactical victory with a strategic defeat,” Washington continued to fast-track weapons to Israel. So grave were Israeli excesses that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that there was a “plausible” case for genocide in Gaza.

One month into the war, the U.S. State Department dutifully laid out its postwar vision for Gaza—no forcible displacement, no reoccupation of Gaza or reduction of its territory, and returning control to a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority—while pretending Netanyahu’s words and Israeli bombs were not already foreclosing almost all of these. The administration’s lack of urgency stemmed, in part, from Israeli assurances that the war would be wrapped up by early 2024.

However, as the war dragged on and the humanitarian conditions in Gaza worsened dramatically, the Biden administration had to readjust. By February, the United States had shifted away from its overt opposition to any cease-fire to embracing a limited cease-fire-for-hostages deal. At the same time, U.S. officials became more vocal in their frustrations with Israel’s conduct, occasionally warning of implicit consequences, though without any meaningful follow-through. Even as Biden described Israel’s bombing campaign as “over the top” and “indiscriminate” (implicitly invoking the two standards of international humanitarian law: distinction and proportionality), his administration continued to fast-track weapons to Israel.

As U.S. officials pleaded for Israel to do more to protect civilians and allow aid to Gaza’s devastated population, humanitarian groups such as Human Rights Watch and Save the Children concluded that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war. To bypass Israeli restrictions, the United States resorted to extraordinary measures including aid airdrops and the construction of a $230 million floating pier—however both of these were eventually abandoned.

Then, in early April, following Israeli airstrikes on a World Central Kitchen convoy that killed seven international aid workers, including a U.S. citizen, the Biden administration issued an unusually harsh ultimatum—if the United States did not see changes in Israel’s conduct, there would be a change in U.S. policy. Apart from a brief uptick in aid, however, very little changed.

Two decisive moments further confirmed that the U.S. government was never serious about consequences for Israel. The first was the administration’s report on National Security Memorandum-20, which required cuts in military assistance to countries that used U.S.-made weapons in violation of international humanitarian law and U.S. law. Despite overwhelming evidence of Israel’s widespread and egregious violations of international law, including the blocking of humanitarian aid, the report evaded the issue by saying it was simply too hard to make “definitive assessments” about Israel’s compliance. (A week later, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim A.A. Khan, announced he would seek arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant as well as three Hamas leaders for war crimes.)

The second decisive factor was Israel’s offensive campaign in Rafah, the border town in southern Gaza where most of the strip’s population had been ordered to relocate, following the destruction of Gaza City and Khan Younis. Fearing a humanitarian disaster, Biden declared that an assault on Rafah would cross a “red line” and warned of consequences if Israel went ahead with the invasion. When Israeli tanks entered Rafah in early May, the administration announced that it was withholding thousands of 2,000- and 500-pound bombs that had turned most of Gaza’s infrastructure to rubble. After months of tension over Gaza, the stage was now set for a major showdown between Biden and Netanyahu—or so it seemed.

Just two weeks into the operation, the administration folded. The Rafah invasion, the White House insisted, was in fact not an invasion but rather a “more targeted and limited” operation—albeit one in which nearly half of all structures were destroyed. Having successfully called Biden’s bluff on Rafah and repeatedly defied the U.S. president with impunity, Netanyahu and his far-right government understood that they would now have a free hand to prosecute and even escalate the war as they saw fit.

While Hamas has repeatedly dragged its feet in cease-fire negotiations, it is widely believed that Netanyahu has sought to prolong and even expand the war in order to maintain his grip on power—including by authorizing the assassination of head Hamas negotiator Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran as well as adding new demands to a potential deal.

Israel’s expansion of the war into Lebanon throughout the summer and especially in the last few weeks is the latest example of Biden’s self-undermining approach. On one hand, Biden had repeatedly warned Israel against an all-out invasion of Lebanon, which could push Iran over the edge and drag the region into a disastrous conflict. At the same time, U.S. officials assured Israeli leaders that they would continue to back Israel no matter what. This muddled message has been a godsend for Netanyahu, who has consistently ignored the former while embracing the latter.

Since mid-September, Israeli operations in Lebanon, including the exploding pagers attack and the airstrikes that killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, have proceeded at an almost dizzying pace and left more than 2,100 people dead and nearly a million displaced.

Though miffed at once again being left in the dark, U.S. officials welcomed Nasrallah’s death as a “measure of justice” while making no mention of Lebanese civilians or the laws of war. Still, Israeli officials insisted they did not seek an all-out war with Hezbollah but rather were pursuing “de-escalation through escalation,” a rather Orwellian turn of phrase the Biden White House nevertheless embraced.

When Iran’s inevitable retaliation came, a barrage of some 180 missiles fired at various targets across Israel, U.S. officials responded with both outrage and dismissal, calling the attack ineffectual while joining Israel in promising “severe consequences.”

The Biden administration has now become an active participant in the very outcome it had spent months warning against and working to prevent. Whereas only weeks ago it had been frantically working to negotiate a cease-fire in Lebanon, the administration has now openly embraced an Israeli bombing campaign and invasion that it once cautioned against.

This result was probably inevitable. Biden’s overriding impulse to align U.S. objectives with Israel’s, even when it was clear that the two diverged, invariably led to an incoherent and failed U.S. policy. By working to ensure that Israel enjoyed total impunity, even when it acted in ways the United States strongly opposed, the administration consistently undercut its own cease-fire diplomacy while allowing Netanyahu to expand the war.

The one area where Biden’s policy could claim a measure of success—helping Israel to restore its deterrent against its enemies—is likely to be short-lived given the unparalleled death, destruction, and generational trauma inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza and now being extended to Lebanon. Although Israel has severely degraded the military capabilities of both Hamas and Hezbollah, this has come at enormous cost—in human, material, reputational, moral, and even security terms—to the Middle East, the United States, and even itself.

Lest we forget, Hezbollah and Hamas did not emerge in a vacuum but as a response to conditions on the ground, namely the Israeli occupation and repression of Palestinians and Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The idea that Israelis could bomb their way into security has never panned out, as history has shown.

The Biden administration’s single-minded focus on Israeli demands, needs, and pain has blinded it not only to the humanity of Palestinians and Lebanese but to the long-term damage done to the region, U.S. interests, and even Israeli security.

It is not too late to prevent further damage, including an all-out regional war. But this will require a fundamental shift away from the current administration’s approach. Given the Biden administration’s rigidity and inability to adapt to realities on the ground over the past year, the current regional turmoil will almost certainly continue into the next U.S. administration. No matter the outcome of the upcoming U.S. presidential election, Washington will need to use the vast leverage it already has—most notably by conditioning weapons transfers and other military assistance to Israel on its compliance with the basic tenets of international law as required by U.S. law.

More importantly, U.S. officials should make clear to all parties that there is no military solution to this conflict and that genuine Israeli security could only come via a political settlement that addresses the root causes of the conflict—namely the systematic denial of Palestinian rights under an increasingly violent occupation. Otherwise, the very “strategic defeat” that Austin warned of will apply not just to Israel but to the United States as well.