Joe Biden likes to call himself an "inveterate optimist." Yet he has hardly expressed this quality in foreign policy, instead preferring a cold realism. At the start of his term of office, Biden's policy roadmap put emphasis on revitalizing US alliances and competing with China. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was seen as a lost cause, a nagging crisis that simply had to be contained if it could not be resolved. But in the same way that Russia's invasion of Ukraine shifted US priorities, Hamas's attack on Israel forced the White House to turn its attention back to the Middle East. And the US is still trapped in its old ways.
The new open war between Israel and the armed Palestinian factions is a catastrophe of multiple dimensions for Washington. It presents a serious risk of regional escalation, with Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, or even Iran, potentially getting involved. The White House has deployed impressive forces in the eastern Mediterranean as a preventive measure, likely to help defend Israel.
Biden wanted to make his mark by wrapping up the endless war in Afghanistan in 2021. But here he is, in the face of another simmering conflict. American bases in Syria and Iraq have already been harassed by armed militias, both autonomous and linked to Tehran, who have carried out around 20 attacks, most of them symbolic.
Diplomatically, the United States has found itself isolated in its unconditional public support for Israel. The normalization process between Israel and Saudi Arabia is frozen, despite the fact that the Biden administration devoted a great deal of effort to this, to the point of assuming the legacy of Donald Trump, who had refused to consider the resolution of the conflict as a prerequisite for this historic rapprochement. After disengaging from the Middle East, as symbolized by Barack Obama's refusal to strike the Syrian regime in 2013, the US is now caught up in another misjudgment: trade and investment projects do not form a highway to peace. Russia, and to a lesser extent China, have filled in the gap the US has left. Moscow and Beijing are posing as the defenders of Palestinians and the promoters of a balanced approach to the Middle East. The West may highlight Moscow's hypocrisy, particularly after so many Russian war crimes in Ukraine, but it is losing ground in the Middle East.
As US officials multiply their warnings behind the scenes to Israel about its hasty invasion plan with no achievable objectives, their public rhetoric has been deemed partisan and hypocritical and has exasperated the Arab countries. A ceasefire? It could never happen as long as it would benefit Hamas, retorted the White House. Israel has Washington's backing to "destroy Hamas," according to the terminology used. What does this objective mean? Nobody knows, as if it were enough to cut off a few heads, or a hundred, or a thousand, for the beast to perish.
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