As Jim Geraghty’s extensive coverage of the comically ungainly Gaza pier leads his readers to conclude, the operation that produced the improvisatory gangway into the Strip “has all the makings of a Joe Biden op.”
Even as a proposal, the pier made no sense save as a response to Biden’s domestic political headaches. As a method for introducing and distributing humanitarian aid, it was never going to be more efficient than the land-based corridors into Gaza via Israel and Egypt, through which aid was already flowing. But Biden could not admit that lest he risk correcting the misapprehensions of the monomaniacal anti-Israel voices on his party’s left flank, so he chose to flatter their misguided pretensions instead.
While it was never clear that the pier would measurably alleviate Palestinian suffering, it was all but certain that it would complicate Israeli initiatives and put Americans in a position of risk. Shortly after its construction, a “marshaling area” for the pier came under attack — an assault that compelled the IDF to redouble its efforts to protect the pier, directing resources and personnel away from Gaza’s front lines.
The pier was never going to be anything other than a logistical nightmare and, ultimately, an embarrassment. For all the U.S. military’s engineering acumen, it was never going to be able to construct a dock that would operate indefinitely. That high winds and tides and swells of three feet or more would defeat the pier was known in advance, and that’s precisely what happened. In early May, the pier had to be carted off to the Israeli port of Ashdod for repairs after the thing started breaking apart. It returned to service days ago, but the thing is already set to be temporarily decommissioned once again.
“It would be the second time in a matter of weeks that the fragile pier and causeway system, known as Joint Logistics over the Shore or JLOTS, has had to be moved back to the Israeli port of Ashdod,” CNN reported:
To date, the pier has been used to move thousands of tons of aid into Gaza, officials have said. But the pier’s ability to operate effectively is heavily dependent on favorable sea conditions, CNN has previously reported, and officials said on Thursday that current forecasts indicate that the waters will be rough on Friday and into the weekend.
Officials have told CNN that sea conditions in the eastern Mediterranean will only worsen as fall and winter approach, raising questions about the pier’s realistic lifespan.
“The operations will remain paused pending a risk assessment, which is ongoing,” the report concluded. Following an inter-agency assessment of the pier’s structural integrity, its utility, and the risks it poses to U.S. personnel, the pier may be redeployed to Gaza’s coast. Or it may not. Its fate, much like Joe Biden’s, is precarious.
As Jim has observed, the pier is almost too perfect a metaphor for Joe Biden’s geopolitical instincts. The president has a bad habit of assuming that his own outside-the-box thinking on foreign affairs is a function of the intellectual sclerosis of the policy-making class rather than his own ignorance of the circumstances that produce consensus among policy-makers. His foreign-policy prescriptions are reliably calibrated to produce what he believes will be a desirable domestic political effect. If they yield an outcome that advances American national interests, that’s a secondary consideration — if it is a consideration at all.
From its inception to its bungled execution, the Gaza pier is an inadvertent illustration of the illogic to which Biden has devoted his whole political career. Its breakdown is a fitting — indeed, inevitable — end to this folly and an administration-defining emblem.