Biden confronts the limits of US leverage in two conflicts

After four weeks of terror and retaliation in Israel and Gaza, and twenty months of war in Ukraine, President Biden is confronted with the limits of his influence in the two international conflicts that define his presidency.

For 10 days, the Biden administration has urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to grant ‘humanitarian pauses’ in the bombing of Gaza, hoping the $3.8 billion a year in US security aid would have enough impact on the Israeli leader’s tactics.

It’s not. Mr. Netanyahu rejected Mr. Biden’s request for greater efforts to prevent civilian casualties in a phone call on Monday. And he has continued with what he has called “mighty revenge” for the October 7 attacks, using huge bombs to collapse Hamas’s tunnel network, even as they also collapse entire neighborhoods in Gaza.

In Ukraine, the country’s top military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, last week uttered the word that U.S. officials have carefully avoided for the better part of a year: stalemate. Many of Mr. Biden’s aides agree that Ukraine and Russia are entrenched and unable to move the front lines of the battle in any significant way.

But they fear that General Zaluzhny’s outspokenness will make it harder to get Republicans to vote for aggressive financing of the war — and could embolden President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to intervene, hoping that former President Donald J. Trump or a Republican with similar views will be elected next year and withdraw American support.

In either case, Biden’s influence over how his allies prosecute these wars appears much more limited than expected, given his central role as a supplier of weapons and intelligence. But because the United States is so tied to both struggles, as Israel’s most powerful ally and Ukraine’s best hope to remain a free and independent nation, the president’s legacy is tied to how those countries act and how the wars end.

“There’s a long history of American presidents realizing they don’t have as much influence over Israel as they thought,” said Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat and former Marine who served four tours of Iraq. And he said the same goes for Ukraine, “where this is primarily their fight, even though we have major stakes in the outcome.”

History, geography and American national interests separate these two radically different conflicts, although it was Mr Biden himself who joined them in an address to the nation two weeks ago, after returning from a visit to Israel, where he mourned the loss of 1,400 people in Israel. the October 7 attacks and promised to participate in the dismantling of Hamas.

“Hamas and Putin represent different threats,” he said that evening, “but they have this in common: They both want to completely destroy – completely destroy – a neighboring democracy.”

Mr. Biden brings a passion to these two fights that dates back to his days as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as vice president. His aides report that he believes history will remember him for the way he defended democracy against forces of chaos, terror and dictatorship.

At the same time, the president is a cautious player, and in both conflicts he has repeatedly said that U.S. troops will not enter direct combat as long as the Americans in the Middle East or NATO countries are not the subject of sustained attacks. He entered politics when America was deep in the Vietnam War, a searing experience for him, and he spent much of the Obama presidency advocating, without success, for a much faster American withdrawal in Afghanistan.

Determined not to let the United States be drawn into direct conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia, he has spent the first two years of his presidency trying to withdraw from the Middle East and focus more on the Indo-Pacific .

And while American weapons and intelligence are central to both wars, Mr. Biden lives with the reality that military decisions must be made in Israel and Ukraine, not the United States. That often puts Washington in an odd position, able to provide techniques to collapse Gaza’s vast tunnel networks or penetrate Russian defense lines, but distance itself from the decisions and their aftermath.

“We are not going to sit with them as they develop the target lists,” John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, told reporters on Monday, when asked whether the United States, as a supplier of many of Israel’s weapons take responsibility for civilian casualties. “This is their fight.”

Some of Mr. Biden’s aides say the president is surprised by Mr. Netanyahu’s unwillingness to address the issue of attacks on densely populated urban areas. When Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken arrived in Israel late last week and again argued for humanitarian pauses — the best way to get aid into Gaza, civilians out of the line of fire and perhaps to facilitate the release of some prisoners — Mr. Netanyahu firmly rejected the call.

They say he and his war cabinet have sometimes responded to U.S. military advice on how to conduct urban fighting while limiting civilian casualties by saying they fight with the weapons they have at hand — 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs, some of which are the largest in any military arsenal. These weapons were never intended for use in a dense urban area, and the United States is trying to rush many smaller bombs to Israel, better suited to penetrating the tunnels without causing as much collateral damage.

But with each new set of images of injured or killed children, pressure on Mr. Biden is mounting, with some members of his own party urging him to embrace a ceasefire — which is very different and longer-lasting than episodic “humanitarian pauses” . These calls are likely to intensify after Gaza’s Health Ministry estimated on Monday that Israeli strikes had killed about 10,000 Palestinian civilians, including about 4,000 children and teenagers. The ministry is controlled by Hamas, so the figures are impossible to confirm.

Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser, claimed in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the United States is using its influence, but quietly. “We build safeguards under the law of armed conflict whenever we transfer security assistance to any country, including Israel,” he said.

“And when we see circumstances and events that concern us, we raise them very directly with the government of Israel. And again, we will continue to do that as this conflict plays out.”

The challenge of the war in Ukraine is very different, but equally complex. Here the pressure on Mr. Biden is not coming from the left; even some of his party’s most progressive members support sending tens of billions more in weapons and other aid to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government to enable it to repel the Russian invasion of 20 months ago .

But on the right, support for that help is quickly eroding. And the administration is struggling to articulate what the next step is after the long-promised “spring offensive” against Russia failed to move the battle lines more than a few kilometers.

General Zaluzhny said major technological advances in weapons would be needed to break the stalemate on the ground, adding that “most likely there will not be a deep and beautiful breakthrough.” But it is unclear what that technological leap would look like.

Mr. Biden’s aides say they have now given Mr. Zelensky every weapons system he requested, most recently ATACMS, the long-range missile systems that Mr. Biden had long opposed because he feared they would cross a “red line” which could lead Mr Putin wants to get nuclear weapons. Now the fear for the ATACMS is that they won’t make that much of a difference as the Russians learn how to park their planes out of range of the weapons.

Mr. Zelensky chided his own general last weekend for the “stalemate” characterization, complaining again that much of the American equipment arrived too late to make the kind of impact he needed. (Mr. Biden’s aides dispute that, saying they supplied weapons when Ukrainian forces could use them.) But Ukraine, U.S. officials say, has ignored Pentagon advice about concentrating its forces to either to break through two strongholds in the Russian trench network. and minefields, instead of spreading them thinly.

So now Mr. Biden is trying to channel the fatigue and frustration over the war in Ukraine, born of the growing sense that billions of dollars in American weapons, aid and intelligence gathering have simply failed to overcome the accumulated weight of entrenched Russian citizens. army.

“What I’m concerned about,” Douglas Lute, a retired general who was central to crafting the Afghanistan strategy in the Bush and Obama administrations, said last week at an event at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, “ is that we have enough to stay in the fight, but not enough to win.”