With an Israeli offensive in Rafah looming, the United States continues to face several dilemmas in addressing the evolving humanitarian disaster in Gaza. A growing chorus of American citizens and policymakers alike are asking how the U.S. can support Israeli security while also protecting Palestinian civilians.
Coercing allies is tricky diplomatic business—especially when it comes to pushing policies that restrict a partner’s approach to national defense. Plus, the long-standing U.S. commitment to Israel diminishes U.S. bargaining power further. Far from feeling that they owe the Americans any favors, Israeli decision-makers in crisis are likely wagering that U.S. interests in maintaining an established strategic partnership against shared and emboldened enemies, including the Houthis and Iranians, will prevent Washington from pressing too hard on Israeli policymakers.
The most-often discussed pathway for the U.S. to pressure partners is making aid conditional on reforms. Last week, following mounting pressures from prominent Democratic lawmakers including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen, President Joe Biden signed a “historic” directive that would require all U.S. strategic partners to submit written confirmation certifying that U.S.-provided military assistance was being used in compliance with international law. However, it is unclear how this will impact Israeli policy or how the Biden administration will respond to violations. Part of the lack of clarity over what, if anything, this action does for Palestinians in Gaza or for U.S.-Israeli relations is a failure to appreciate the complications involved in making aid conditional on reform.
American diplomats have been here before. The U.S. is aiming to broadly support its partner while also protecting its interests, a challenge it has previously encountered with local allies in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, those alliances of counterinsurgency occupation were very different from the U.S.-Israel partnership, as Kabul and Baghdad had far more limited institutional and military capacity compared to Israel. Nevertheless, despite significant differences in the dynamics of those partnerships, Washington has had to figure out how to support a key ally while maintaining U.S. norms and interests, such as promoting democracy and protecting human rights.
History shows that in pressuring Israel to moderate its policies in Gaza, conditional aid may not work as well as an often-overlooked diplomatic tool: the threat of unilateral U.S. action.
In theory, “tough love” in the form of conditional aid allows the U.S. to trade material for influence. However, in reality, the politics of such approaches are more complicated and riskier for the U.S. than they appear.
First, limiting aid risks weakening the partner, which almost always runs against U.S. interests. If the partner fails, the United States is also in a less secure position vis-à-vis the shared threats that motivate the partnership in the first place. This in turn limits the credibility of such threats, as partners understand that the U.S. will also suffer consequences if Washington follows through.
In 2009, then-President Barack Obama publicly called on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to crack down on corruption and the drug trade in Afghanistan. When asked why the U.S. did not withhold troops and aid to leverage said reforms, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan candidly called the argument “stupid.” This is because weakening Karzai risked emboldening the Taliban, extending the U.S. intervention, and setting back key nation-building benchmarks the U.S. had set for itself and its partners in Afghanistan.
Second, withdrawing aid potentially damages the future of the partnership. If partners decide that Washington has undermined their security, they may be motivated to seek alternative allies, including Russia in the case of Israel. The current Israeli mindset of insecurity and isolation means that unless it is done with exceptional skill, U.S. threats to significantly limit military aid during an ongoing Israel Defense Forces operation will likely be met with resentment and resistance by Israeli officials.
Third, unlike pundits, policymakers have the heavy responsibility of dealing with critical allies calling Washington’s bluff and refusing to comply with U.S. demands. Defiant allies create a lose-lose scenario for the U.S. Either American officials follow through on declared penalties and risk undermining strategic partners and possibly emboldening shared adversaries, or they fail to impose the costs and lose credibility and future leverage. Thus, despite reports that the Biden administration is willing to delay weapons delivery to Israel, it is unsurprising that the White House is yet to announce a clear plan.
These risks make aid conditionality a blunt tactic typically held in reserve by U.S. diplomats, as opposed to a sustainable diplomatic approach. The more the U.S. relies on a partner, the less attractive aid conditionality becomes. Admittedly, unconditional aid is also risky since it leaves the U.S. at least partially liable for the partner’s policies, even ghastly ones. For example, in Iraq, former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s determination to resist U.S. urges to incorporate Sunni political forces into his government was a contributor to the insurgency that took over parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014. Luckily, there is an alternative way to pressure partners.
Instead, the U.S. can shift partner behavior by threatening to implement policies that affect local politics unilaterally, with or without partner participation. The coercive message to partners is “either you implement X policy, or we will,” unlike the logic of aid conditionality that states “implement X policy, or the U.S. will cut your support.” The former message is focused on the specific policy in question, as opposed to threats of cutting key resources, which can harm the ally and alliance more broadly.
The threat of select unilateral action is not meant to propose wide-scale U.S. intervention but can instead be tailored to impact local policies that are specifically harmful to U.S. interests. Though allies will likely perceive it as a coercive threat to their autonomy and not welcome this message, the goal is to raise the stakes and pressure allies into reaching a compromise.
Threatening unilateral U.S. action in response to partner inaction often motivated local allies in Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan to comply with U.S. demands, at least in part, because unilateral action would have undermined local elites and put them in an increasingly isolated position. In Iraq, for instance, the U.S. was able to successfully use this approach to coerce Maliki into further engaging with Sunni groups in 2010 because the U.S. was credibly threatening to continue its engagement with amenable Sunni leaders—with or without the support of Shiite leaders in Baghdad. (However, Washington lost this leverage when it no longer threatened to support Sunni militias unilaterally as part of the 2011 U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.)
The U.S. was also able to pry concessions out of local partners in Saigon during the U.S. withdrawal because of credible threats that the U.S. would move forward with compromises to North Vietnam with or without South Vietnamese participation. In 2010, the U.S. was able to promote moderate anti-corruption reforms in Afghanistan by bringing in U.N. officials to report on progress. Rather than be sidelined, the Afghan government compromised and joined the oversight process, in part to keep tabs on it and shape policy along the way.
While taking unilateral action has a record of successfully nudging critical allies toward meeting U.S. demands, it can only be applied when the U.S. has the sole capacity to implement the requested policy. It cannot be used, for example, to coerce partners to change their domestic laws or disengage from offensive operations, because those are reforms that the U.S. cannot implement without partner participation.
This means the U.S. cannot use this approach to coerce Israel to be more selective with strikes in Gaza. However, Washington can, for example, threaten to unilaterally release detailed information regarding targeting in Gaza to motivate the Israelis to increase transparency and accountability in their campaign. U.S. policymakers can also propose to set up an independent inquiry into civilian deaths in Gaza as a form of oversight and monitoring or use American institutions to address the conflict. The recent U.S. decision to impose financial sanctions on four Israelis who incited violence against Palestinians in the West Bank is a step in this direction.
Regarding the current emergency in Gaza, the U.S. can threaten to unilaterally provide humanitarian aid should Israel impede this critical assistance. It can do so, for example, by dispatching a disaster response naval vessel such as the USNS Mercy or USNS Comfort to join the carrier strike groups assigned to the region. Naturally, there will be critics arguing that this measure may undermine Israel’s military campaign, but those positions are too comfortable with Israeli failures to distinguish between Palestinian civilians and Hamas militants. The U.S. can signal its displeasure for the current offensive by offering to help civilians in Gaza secure their basic needs and survival. Sending U.S. unilateral aid to Gaza and informing the Israelis this will happen with or without their cooperation would send three important messages.
First, the historical record suggests that a credible threat of unilateral U.S. action can nudge Israel to move closer to U.S. positions to avoid being subverted by the U.S. Second, it boosts U.S. bargaining credibility regionally and reinforces that the U.S. is an autonomous actor in the conflict, as well as a committed Israeli ally. This may be increasingly important as the U.S. may need to press against sustained Israeli occupation of Gaza and strengthen its ties to key Arab partners such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Lastly, unilateral action will allow the U.S. to do more than just lament Palestinian civilian deaths. Just as the U.S. sprang into action to defend Israeli civilians brutally slaughtered on Oct. 7, the U.S. can also spring into action to defend Palestinian civilians currently facing what the U.N. calls “apocalyptic” conditions.
Like all tools of statecraft, this is only one of many approaches in the U.S. diplomatic toolkit. Even though it is rarely discussed compared to aid conditionality, threatening unilateral policy action to coerce a strategic partner to participate can be more subtle and less risky because it maintains the security alliance and material support for a partner, while also taking issue with specific partner policies. Additionally, threatening unilateral policy implementation in Gaza does not preclude the U.S. from also considering selective aid conditionality or additional pathways of pressure, including reconsidering blocking U.N. action that challenges Israeli positions.
Washington will need to be agile and purposeful in its diplomatic approaches as the U.S. seeks to both support and influence Israel—even as its policies, including the offensive in Gaza, violate U.S. interests. The U.S. can and should do more.