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De-escalation’s Empty Promises
The past two years have witnessed sustained and bitter differences between the Biden administration and two Western democracies that it has pledged to protect against foreign attack and invasion: Israel and Ukraine. The differences in these ongoing conflicts are not over ends but over means. Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, about six months after the Biden administration executed its botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, a move that went against the advice of all the president’s military and civilian advisers. And then, on October 7, 2023, Hamas broke its tenuous cease-fire with Israel with a full-scale assault on both Israeli settlements and the Nova music peace festival near the Gazan border. The one element that links these three conflicts is not just the perceived weakness of the three target nations, but also the inescapable perception that the United States cares more about short-term peace than long-term security in these vital theaters of war.
That perception has hardened over recent years as it becomes possible to extract a consistent, if disastrous, policy pursued by the Biden administration. The dominant impulse is to make sure that these localized conflicts will not expand into an open war that will lead to intensification of the current hostilities, followed by further entanglements with other nations, followed by an increase in the amount of death, injury, and property destruction. To achieve that end, the consistent Biden trope is to always play defense, never offense. The supposed logic of this position is that it will prevent Russia (along with, as it turns out, its allies China, Iran, and North Korea) from taking over Ukraine, even though it will not be enough to stop the continued bloody encroachment into key towns and cities in the Donbas, located in the far southeast of Ukraine. Similarly, the Biden administration has put a go-slow sign on Israel, seeking to delay its military efforts to remove the last elements of Hamas from Rafah by negotiating a cease-fire that could not, definitionally, result in the decapitation of Hamas, which would have to be a signatory to any such agreement. Any proposed deal might be for a short hiatus, or, as seems more likely, one that would insensibly morph into a permanent arrangement—at least until a rebuilt Hamas renewed its efforts to obliterate Israel and its citizenry.