WASHINGTON — Over the past five days, President Joe Biden has been engaged in a very public display of the difficulties of managing two of America’s most difficult allies, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, both leading countries that the president promised to defend, as long as necessary.
The conflicts in which they are involved could not be more different, born of grievances that go back decades. But coincidentally, both confrontations appear to be at critical turning points, at that moment when it becomes obvious how sharply national interests are diverging – not to mention the political interests of three leaders clearly concerned with their own maintenance of the power.
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Adding to the complexity of the problem, it is not clear in Washington exactly what an acceptable endgame would look like in Ukraine or the Gaza Strip. Officially, Ukraine still talks about total victory, expelling Russia from every inch of territory it has conquered since the February 2022 invasion. Israel still talks about the objective of “total destruction” of Hamas, the only way to guarantee that it will never be able to organize an attack like the one on October 7, which killed almost 1,200 Israelis and triggered seven months of brutal retaliation.
But in Washington, these calls seem increasingly unrealistic. Russia appears to be regaining momentum. The call for the total defeat of Hamas sounds like a justification for perpetual war – and, in fact, Israeli authorities have publicly stated that the war in Gaza will likely continue until the end of the year, if not longer.
Thus, Biden opted for crisis management, trying to prevent the worst, even if he cannot answer the question of how, exactly, these wars end.
“Neither Ukraine nor Israel are treaty allies,” said Aaron David Miller, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and longtime Middle East negotiator. He was referring to the status of the other 31 NATO members, who are obliged to defend each other, and the US’s formal pacts with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and others. “And yet we are fully committed to how to take these wars to the next phase, a phase in which we decrease the violence, even if we cannot articulate a realistic vision of how it will stop.”
In both cases, Biden has already made big bets.
On Thursday, with minimal public explanation, the White House revealed that Biden had won what it called a narrow exemption to his 27-month insistence that American weapons could never be fired on Russian territory. It’s a rule he established at the start of the war in Ukraine to “avoid World War III.”
One thing, Biden told his aides, was giving Ukrainians the weaponry they need to protect their own homeland. But letting them launch American artillery shells, rockets and missiles across the border, where they could take the lives of not only soldiers but civilians as well, and destroy Russian infrastructure, could escalate into a direct American confrontation with an adversary. with nuclear weapons.
That mandate made sense when time was on Ukraine’s side, one of Biden’s top advisers said over the weekend. But now, the momentum has reversed. Zelenskyy, who has repeatedly clashed with Biden and his team over their reluctance to provide him with long-range artillery, then tanks, and then F-16s, began a public pressure campaign to get Biden to ease his restrictions on firing American weapons across the Russian border. .
In an interview with The New York Times two weeks ago, Zelenskyy addressed Biden.
“Take down what is in the sky of Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said. “And give us the weapons to use against Russian forces on the borders.” He was making public what he had been saying most insistently to visiting U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the most recent senior official to visit Kiev.
Blinken came back convinced, and in an Oval Office meeting on Friday night with Biden, he and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, along with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, convinced Biden that he needed to lift the restrictions at least. in the border areas around Kharkiv. , the second largest city in Ukraine. Otherwise, they warned, Russia could very well begin to reclaim significant parts of the territory from which it was expelled in the fall of 2022.
Ukraine announced on Monday that it used Western-supplied weapons to destroy an air defense system on Russian territory, although it did not reveal the name of the weapon or provide details. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov then issued a warning that if Western-supplied weapons reached Russia, Moscow would draw “fatal consequences.”
Biden aides have insisted that the president has not so much reversed himself as created an exception to his no-escalation rule. But as Blinken himself suggested late last week, it may not be the last exception. He said the US strategy for responding to Russia would adapt to changes on the battlefield.
Zelenskyy spent the weekend arguing that it was not enough – that Biden should remove all restrictions on the use of American weapons, so that he could use them along all of Russia’s borders and deep into its territory. The White House got away with it.
“I don’t think it comes as a shock to anyone that President Zelenskyy is grateful on the one hand, but everyone is eager to continue to make his case,” said John F. Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council. But Kirby said U.S. policy against “long-range attacks inside Russia has not changed.”
Privately, Biden’s advisers admit that American and Ukrainian priorities differ. Right now, Ukraine has nothing left to lose from escalation with Russia. Biden still does: Inside the White House, the obvious concern is that President Vladimir Putin will launch nuclear weapons onto the battlefield, trying to convince the world that if Ukraine continues to launch American-made bombs and rockets on Russian territory, he will will not hesitate to use the ultimate weapon against Ukraine.
Zelenskyy, for his part, dismissed nuclear fears as exaggerated.
A day after Biden allowed limited strikes on Russian territory, he took a much more public step to force the hand of Netanyahu, with whom his relationship has become almost poisonous. Biden gave a public speech in which he endorsed what he called an Israeli plan to secure the release of hostages and end the fighting in Gaza. “It’s time for this war to end, for the next day to begin,” he said.
It was at least unusual for an American president to explain the details of an Israeli plan: diplomats are trained to avoid speaking on behalf of other countries. But in this case, that was the point. Biden spoke after months of frustration in which Netanyahu refused to heed American warnings to let in more vital aid, to create a plan to evacuate hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians from Rafah before military operations took place, and to prevent the use of 2,000- dropping bombs that injure or kill civilians.
Thus, the president was determined to get Netanyahu to admit ownership of a three-phase peace plan, which could last years.
In fact, the plan was approved by the War Cabinet – although not by the small right-wing parties that support Netanyahu and that he needs to keep his fragile coalition government in power. It appears that opponents of the agreement never even saw the offer to Hamas.
Netanyahu did not exactly deny that he had approved the plan, but he did not admit it either. “He’s dancing,” said Shalom Lipner, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who worked for seven Israeli prime ministers over 26 years, including Netanyahu. “He didn’t deny it. But he didn’t accept that either.”
“Making this proposal public — on Saturday, when he knew that the more right-wing religious parties might not hear it or might not respond — became a necessity because time is ticking,” Lipner said.
It’s falling, especially for Biden. Six weeks ago, the president and his advisers thought that a prisoner exchange and a ceasefire, even if temporary, were just days away. That moment came and went. Now, on top of the human tragedy of war is political reality: Biden knows that his campaign appearances, and the Democratic convention, could very well be marred by protesters from his party’s progressive wing who believe the United States should have cut all of Israel’s offensive weapons as civilian deaths increased.
But, as a strong supporter of Israel for the last 50 years – Biden is still talking about negotiating with Golda Meir at the end of his term as Israel’s prime minister – the president knows that he cannot appear to be threatening or abandoning the current government.
Thus, the two men made public statements that made clear their differences in strategy. It’s not the kind of quiet, attention-grabbing persuasion that Biden prides himself on, whether he’s empowering NATO leaders to spend more on defense or persuading the Japanese to reconcile their centuries-old differences with South Korea. But This is what the US and Israel have come to, out of distrust: public pronouncements to corner each other.
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