Does the Biden admin really want to end the war?
A response to Philippe Lemoine's essay.
Philippe Lemoine recently published an essay, “The Israel Lobby as a Collective Action Problem,” that tackles the domestic politics of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. His argument is that the “US officials face a well-funded and well-organized lobby willing and able to impose a significant cost on them should they withhold support from Israel and on the other hand they don’t face any pressure to do that” because the costs are “distributed relatively equally over the population and spread over many years while being relatively limited in the short term.”
The same could be said about a lot of U.S. foreign policy issues, where the hawks are well-organized and able to inflict acute political pressure, while the general population is passively dovish but doesn’t care too much because they don’t bear direct costs. (I’ve written about this very dynamic before.) The irony is that these pressures encourage American leaders to sleepwalk into wars that do cost a lot, or as Lemoine writes, “the incentives that US officials face are misaligned with the interests of the US and the only thing that could align them is precisely what their alignment would have been useful to prevent in the first place.”
However, I think that Lemoine misunderstands the Biden administration’s own view of U.S. interests, and the degree to which it’s not just motivated by domestic political pressure. He writes that the idea of President Joe Biden supporting Israel’s current “rampage” is just not:
plausible though, because Israel’s policy has few if any benefits for Washington, whereas it exposes the US a high risk of being dragged into a very costly regional war and will cause massive reputational damage to the US even if that doesn’t happen, not to mention that it has already cost the US billions of dollars in direct and indirect assistance to Israel. Protests by US officials are also consistent with standard US policy and doctrine about Israel, so to assume that in fact they fully back Israel’s rampage in Gaza and Lebanon, one would have to assume that a complete doctrinal reversal has taken place in Washington after October and that’s just not plausible.
Lemoine and I would agree on this view of U.S. interests, but that doesn’t mean the current U.S. leadership does. There is quite strong evidence that the Biden administration — and, of course, the American elite writ large — see Israel crushing its enemies as an end in itself rather than a means to some greater end. They are willing to pay steep costs to accomplish this goal in the same way they would be willing to pay steep costs to defend the territorial integrity of the United States, because they believe that this situation is what having resources is for.
President Joe Biden himself identifies with Israel on a personal, emotional level, and he has repeatedly said so. He thinks that prosecuting this war is a sort of higher moral duty for Americans, and Biden is not the only one to feel that way. (I just got out of a speech in which Trump spokesman turned Biden surrogate Anthony Scaramucci said basically that; he kept bringing World War II, the Holocaust, and his own personal tours of Israel into it.) Meanwhile, figures like White House adviser Brett McGurk have long been attracted to ambitious schemes for reshaping the Middle East as a path to personal glory.
The idea that Washington has undergone more than one “complete doctrinal reversal” over the past few months is not so far fetched. The October 7 attacks had a deep emotional impact on the Biden administration. And in the beginning of the war, U.S. officials were mostly focused on protecting Israel from itself, preventing it from biting off more than it can chew. As they grew more and more confident that Israel’s enemies were on the back foot, they came to embrace more ambitious war goals.
These shifts also point to Lemoine overestimating how much of a coherent, unitary actor “Washington” is. By Politico’s account, which I have no reason to disbelieve, McGurk and U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein quietly, privately encouraged Israel to pursue war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, against the opposition of those in “the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community who believed Israel’s move against the Iran-backed militia could drag American forces into yet another Middle East conflict.”
In other words, U.S. policy emerged from a factional competition in the administration, unrelated to the kind of domestic politics where the Israel Lobby plays a role. Within a Democratic administration, there were hawks more confident that Israel could get away with aggressive military action and doves who were more wary. None of them disagreed fundamentally that Israel’s wars are America’s wars and Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies, because once Israel inflicted started inflicting damage on Hezbollah without taking damage in return, doves lined up behind the hawkish strategy. Or in Politico’s words:
The internal administration division seems to have dissipated somewhat in recent days, with top U.S. officials convening Monday at the White House with President Joe Biden to discuss the situation on the ground. Most agreed that the conflict, while fragile, could offer an opportunity to reduce Iran’s influence in Lebanon and the region.
Of course, the top levels of the administration also hedged its bets. (Or as Politico described it, “what looks like a rift is just the United States pursuing multiple routes at once.”) Keeping rhetoric about diplomacy and de-escalation alive allows Biden to avoid taking the blame for the war’s negative consequences. Indeed, now that Israel is running into serious friction from Hezbollah and Iran, the Biden administration is once again making a show of demanding Israeli restraint.
No one said that they were good at long-term planning or matching actions to consequences. Never underestimate the degree to which “strap-hangers,” the guys in suits who get shuttled around in military helicopters, like to bask in their own importance. The Biden administration seems particularly prone to the illness of “being too clever by half.”
What Lemoine calls “standard US policy and doctrine about Israel” reflects a few things. On one hand, the two-state solution is baked in from the 1990s — a bygone era when Washington was still focused on Israel but not as fanatically hawkish, and Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking was a solid career path for ambitious young strap-hangers — even if political leaders don’t really believe in it anymore. On the other hand, the mid-level professionals in the Pentagon, State Department, and intelligence community do have a more pragmatic view of U.S. interests than the political echelon. They push back through the bureaucracy to the extent that they can.
Finally, the political leaders find the rhetoric about deescalation and human rights a useful shield. As Lemoine acknowledges, they “have political incentives to pay lip service to the importance of achieving a ceasefire even if they actually were on board with Israel’s policy.” This lip service allows Washington to play “good cop” in a game of “good cop, bad cop.” Both domestically and internationally, the Biden administration can present itself as a reasonable actor that really wants to help Palestinians, if only they’ll take this offer, because our buddy Israel is not feeling so forgiving right now…
Lemoine is right to point out that “publicly and clearly stat[ing] their opposition to a particular step just before Israel takes it on such a regular basis” has left the Biden administration “humiliated” and “makes their problem with pro-Palestine Democrats even worse.” Again, no one said that Biden is particularly good at it. But he also probably sees Israel the same way indulgent parents see a bratty teenager, rather than an opponent that he can even be humiliated by.
None of this is to deny that the Israel Lobby is a real and significant actor. I have written about how well-funded pro-Israel organizations help reproduce elite foreign policy ideology and police the boundaries of the debate. And on the margins, the incentive structure that Lemoine describes does shape the political calculus around this issue. However, the idea that the Biden administration is unwillingly being dragged into Israeli wars is wrong. Whether it’s because of an emotional attachment or delusions of grandeur, a lot of people near the top want this.