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.

The Biden administration takes the same dogged attitude to the other theaters of the Israeli war. The Biden administration begged the Israelis to back off the mission that resulted in the death of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and then urged de-escalation after it succeeded: “In Gaza, we have been pursuing a deal backed by the UN Security Council for a cease-fire and the release of hostages. In Lebanon, we have been negotiating a deal that would return people safely to their homes in Israel and southern Lebanon.”

On a parallel track, the Biden administration is willing to supply defensive weapons to slow down the Russian advance in Ukraine, but unwilling to supply the Ukrainians with weapons that would allow them to attack the Russian facilities and weaponry located in Russia proper. All defense and no offense is the method of choice. It is a fatal mistake that both Israel and Ukraine have wisely decided to ignore, despite running the risk of a major break with the United States on matters of means.

Imagine a boxer trying to survive with a draw in the ring, blocking punches against his opponent without trying to land a knockout blow. Naturally, the other boxer will cut down on defense and go for the jugular. In the international realm, that fateful strategy necessarily means that nations with limited resources have to commit themselves to wars of attrition in which the United States will surely dole out limited weapons, coupled with restrictions on where and how they might be used. The Russians and the many Middle Eastern enemies of Israel will now know that they do not need to worry much about defense and instead can concentrate on offense, forcing Israel and Ukraine on the back foot, and requiring them to invest more heavily in defensive armaments.

The longer the conflicts last, the more likely there will be domestic political conflicts in both Ukraine and Israel as to what second-best strategy should be adopted when the prospect of a clean victory is denied. Does Israel cut a deal with Hamas for the release of the Israeli hostages? Does it try to push Hezbollah north of the Litani River, where the militia should have been if it had observed the 2006 cease-fire? Should it seek to disable key Iranian nuclear facilities or oil and gas fields, or should it, in President Biden’s famous phrase “take the win”? Should it now, in response to the latest Iranian assault, mount only a “proportionate response” to the latest missile attack, while ignoring the existential threat that an armed and nuclear Iran poses to Israel, not to mention the rest of the world? Similarly, Ukraine must bolster its ground game, playing into the Russian strength in constructing static defenses.

Sadly, the elusive Biden cease-fires would be on terms fatal to long-term peace, because they will encourage, for example, China’s pugnacious attitude toward Taiwan, the Philippines, and the rest of East Asia. The only response worth considering is an increase in combined military forces to keep the Chinese at bay, so that no cease-fire need be negotiated.

It follows, therefore, that Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky was right to ignore Biden’s advice when, at some obvious risk, he invaded Kursk and attacked (with great success) exposed Russian military targets inside Russia. He does not need our advice. Nor does Israel, which was right to take out Nasrallah and move into southern Lebanon, while planning attacks against Iran.

One example of some ill-conceived expert advice to both Israel and Ukraine is found in a recent article by Richard Haass, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writing recently in Foreign Affairs. In it, he makes the common objection that Israeli successes on the battlefield have led to a deterioration of its political position in the United Nations and everywhere else. No big surprise, for that hostility would arise with any effective Israeli actions. Nor was Haass any better in thinking it wise to deprive Ukraine of offensive weapons that “Washington thought would be insufficiently effective and potentially escalatory.” The entry and occupation into Kursk and the effective attacks on Russian bases and supplies remain risky ventures. But risk is better than certain defeat by exhaustion.

Similarly, in Gaza there is no sensible path to peace through a cease-fire, which would result in the release of hostages only if the Israelis agreed to a permanent pullout from Gaza. And there is no intermediate position that works. The United Nations, through the UNRWA, has intimate ties with Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority is corrupt. So long as Hamas survives, continued war is the only option. It is protested, by Haass among others, that the Israelis have no credible postwar plan, which is half true, but the same can be said in spades about any cease-fire deal that allows Hamas to survive. So, the better options are more likely to emerge only if Hamas is dispatched, where afterward the only viable terms turn Gaza into a demilitarized enclave subject to Israeli oversight. There is simply no two-state solution that can survive, now or ever, given the widespread Arab support to destroy Israel.

And what of the bad press? Don’t worry about what cannot be changed. Strong left-wing politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren, on the first anniversary of 10/7/23, treated that initial attack as an atrocity, only to pooh-pooh any strong Israeli military responses. She said, “Hamas must release the hostages and stop firing rockets at civilians in Israel. The Israeli government must stop the bombing in Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid.” This is a fantasy. The Israelis have, as John Spencer has reported, taken extraordinary steps to avoid collateral damages while Hamas continues to use human shields and build its facilities under hospitals and schools, which makes Warren’s efforts to create some kind of parity, as the Wall Street Journal writes, “a portrait in unreality.”

The current American political violence in support of Hamas may promise a political benefit not just to Joe Biden but also to Kamala Harris, who has not found any reason to deviate from Biden’s efforts to promote his cease-fire. But conditions make it imperative that both Netanyahu in Israel and Zelensky in Ukraine hang tough. The path of escalation lies through the failed efforts of de-escalation.

© 2023 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University