In the United States, presidential elections are rarely won or lost on foreign policy. Domestic matters like the economy, crime, and the overall state of the country are far more relevant to candidates. Even so, incumbents can’t allow the world to degenerate in front of them. Just ask Jimmy Carter, whose 1980 campaign against challenger Ronald Reagan shriveled away in part to the lingering Iranian hostage crisis.
As Joe Biden looks to 2024, his administration is juggling a cornucopia of conflicts, challenges and crises. Whether events outside America’s borders will help or hurt him at the polls next November is anyone’s guess. But there is a sense that the next year could be pivotal both for the status of these conflict as well as for Biden’s capacity to help resolve them.
The most immediate conflict is the one currently boiling in Gaza. Israel’s military operations against the Hamas terrorist group is at its deadliest phase since the war began eleven weeks ago. At the time of writing, almost 21,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of whom are women and children. Israeli evacuation orders have done little to alleviate the civilian casualties, with dozens and sometimes more than a hundred civilians dying on a daily basis. Benjamin Netanyahu, a political survivalist, has apparently come to the conclusion that the only way he can hang onto power is to continue the war with full force. American entreaties to Netanyahu, whether they concern casualty mitigation or post-conflict arrangements for Gaza, have largely fallen on deaf ears. It took more than two and a half months of US pleadings before Israel re-opened the Kerem Shalom crossing point with Gaza to speed up humanitarian assistance to civilians caught in a war zone.
Through it all, Biden has sought to balance three objectives simultaneously: support Israel’s right to self-defense and protect Palestinian civilians to the greatest extent possible. On the first, nobody can accuse him of dilly-dallying; the US has been Israel’s sole protector in international fora, vetoing a UN Security Council Resolution in October that called for a ceasefire and watering down another this month. Biden’s record on the second item, however, is poor. He has done little to reprimand Israel for its tactics in Gaza, which have killed far more civilians than Hamas militants, reduced the northern half of the enclave into a sea of debris and helped create what is indisputably the world’s most pressing humanitarian emergency. Biden himself acknowledged that Israel’s bombing campaign was “indiscriminate,” yet remains unwilling to condition US military assistance to Tel Aviv. This is grating on the Democratic Party, whose younger members don’t approve of the Biden administration’s handling of the war, and is leading Arab American voters in a key presidential swing state to reassess their original support for the president.
He has done little to reprimand Israel for its tactics in Gaza
The war in Ukraine is another flashpoint on Biden’s docket heading into the New Year. If 2022 was a banner year for the Ukrainians, 2023 was the exact opposite: a long, rough slog that produced small results at a big cost. The Ukrainian army remains poised and resolute yet the battlefield has barely moved since June, when Kyiv launched its much-talked about counteroffensive against Russian-occupied territory. While Ukraine keeps its casualties secret, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility to assume that tens of thousands have been killed and wounded in last six months. A sense of despair is creeping into the Ukrainian political establishment, who sold their constituents on the most optimistic scenario available: that of Russian oppressors tucking tale and running for the hills back to the motherland. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is no longer walking on water with foreign audiences.
Washington is no exception. In the past, Zelensky and his senior advisors could bank on the fact that its military aid requests would be granted (even if they would complain incessantly about the US holding back certain weapons systems). This is no longer the case. Zelensky’s short visit to the US capital in December didn’t do much to move the needle. Republican lawmakers see the White House as increasingly desperate for another Ukraine aid package and are exploiting it to press Biden into signing onto tougher immigration laws he would have denounced during his 2020 campaign. If Biden is hopping mad about how Republicans have acted, he should be just as mad as himself for insisting time and again that the US would support Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” This was never a promise Biden could keep, if only because the American Republic operates on a system of independent and coequal branches of government that disagree more often than not. With military aid no longer a sure thing and Russian president Vladimir Putin turning Russia’s economy into one that prioritizes his Ukraine obsession, 2024 could make 2023 look mild in comparison.
Biden also faces other problems bubbling beneath the surface. Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria have conducted more than 100 attacks against US forces stationed in both countries since mid-October, strikes that show no signs of abating. Over the weekend, another volley of rocket fire was directed at US troops stationed at the Erbil Air Base in northern Iraq, which wounded three US soldiers. Biden authorized limited precision airstrikes against militia facilities more than twenty-four hours later. Yet just as previous US strikes didn’t deter further militia attacks, it’s downright irrational to believe the retaliatory strike on Christmas Day will succeed where others failed. Luck, in essence, separates the US from a regional confrontation Biden himself claims he doesn’t want.
Biden will spend much of the coming year on the stump. His responsibilities as commander-in-chief will obviously interfere with his rallies, speeches and donor meetings. For better or worse, we shall see.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
