WASHINGTON — Over the past five days, President Joe Biden has been involved in a very public demonstration of the battle for the management of 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 has pledged to defend for as long as necessary.
The conflicts in which they are embroiled could not be more different, stemming from grievances that go back decades. But coincidentally, both confrontations appear to be at a crucial turning point, a moment when it becomes clear how sharply divergent national interests are – not to mention the political interests of three leaders clearly concerned about their own hold on power .
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Adding to the complexity of the problem, it is unclear in Washington what exactly an acceptable endgame might look like in Ukraine or the Gaza Strip. Officially, Ukraine is still talking about a total victory, driving Russia out of every inch of territory it has seized since the February 2022 invasion. Israel still talks about its goal of “total destruction” of Hamas, the only way to ensure it can never again carry out an attack like the October 7 attack, which killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and triggered seven months of brutal retaliation.
But in Washington these calls sound increasingly unrealistic. Russia appears to be gaining momentum again. The call for the total defeat of Hamas sounds like a case for forever war – and in fact, Israeli officials have publicly stated that the war in Gaza will likely continue until the end of the year, if not longer.
So Biden has turned to crisis management and is trying to prevent the worst, even if he cannot answer the question of how exactly these wars end.
“Neither Ukraine nor Israel are an ally of the treaty,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a longtime Middle East negotiator. He was referring to the status of NATO’s other 31 members, who are obligated to defend each other, and the formal U.S. pacts with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and others. “And yet we are fully invested in how to take these wars to the next phase, a phase where we reduce violence even if we cannot formulate a realistic vision of how to stop it.”
In both cases, Biden has now made some big bets.
On Thursday, the White House revealed, with the barest of public explanations, that Biden had made a so-called limited exception to his 27-month insistence that U.S. weapons should never be fired on Russian soil. It is a rule he introduced at the beginning of the war in Ukraine to ‘avoid World War III’.
It was one thing, Biden told his aides, to give Ukrainians the weapons they need to protect their own homeland. But if they were to launch American artillery shells, missiles and rockets across the border, where they could take the lives of not only soldiers but also civilians, and wipe out Russian infrastructure, this could escalate into a direct American confrontation with a nuclear armed opponent.
That mandate made sense when time was on Ukraine’s side, one of Biden’s top advisers said this weekend. But now the momentum has reversed. Zelenskyy, who has repeatedly clashed with Biden and his staff over their reluctance to give him long-range artillery, then tanks, then F-16s, began a public pressure campaign to get Biden to reconsider his restrictions on firing U.S. weapons across the border. Russia to relax. .
In an interview with The New York Times two weeks ago, Zelenskyy addressed Biden.
“Shoot whatever is in the sky over Ukraine,” Zelensky said. “And give us the weapons we can use against Russian troops on the borders.” He made public what he had said more emphatically to visiting US officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the most recent senior official to visit Kiev.
Blinken came back convinced, and during an Oval Office meeting with Biden on Friday evening, he and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, along with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, convinced Biden that he should lift restrictions at least in the border areas around Kharkiv . , the second largest city in Ukraine. Otherwise, they warned that Russia could take back large parts of the territory it was expelled from in the fall of 2022.
Ukraine announced on Monday that it had used Western-supplied weapons to destroy an air defense system on Russian territory, although it did not name the weapon or provide details. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov then warned that if Western-supplied weapons hit Russia, Moscow would face “fatal consequences.”
Biden’s aides insisted that the president had not so much reversed himself as made an exception to his no-escalation rule. But as Blinken himself hinted late last week, this might not be the last exception. He said the U.S. strategy to push back Russia would adapt to changes on the battlefield.
Zelenskyy spent the weekend arguing that it wasn’t enough — that Biden needed to lift all restrictions on the use of American weapons so he could use them across all borders with Russia and deep into its territory. The White House shrugged it off.
“I don’t think it should come as a shock to anyone that on the one hand President Zelensky would be grateful, but on the other hand he would be eager to continue making his case,” said John F. Kirby, a 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 diverge. At this point, Ukraine has nothing left to lose from an escalation with Russia. Biden is still doing that: Inside the White House, the obvious concern is that President Vladimir Putin will roll out nuclear weapons on the battlefield, trying to convince the world that if Ukraine continues to let American-made bombs and missiles onto Russian soil fall, he will not hesitate to use it. the ultimate weapon against Ukraine.
Zelenskyy, for his part, has dismissed nuclear fears as exaggerated.
The day after Biden authorized limited strikes on Russian territory, he took a much more public action to force the hand of Netanyahu, with whom his relationship has become less than toxic. Biden gave a public speech in which he expressed support for what he called an Israeli plan to secure the release of hostages and end the fighting in Gaza. “It is time for this war to end and the next day to begin,” he said.
It was unusual, to say the least, for an American president to lay out 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 US exhortations to allow more lifesaving aid, draw up a plan for the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians from Rafah before military operations take place, and prevent 2,000 Palestinian civilians would be deployed. bomb bombs that injure or kill civilians.
So the president was determined to get Netanyahu to admit he had a three-phase peace plan, one that could take years.
In fact, the plan was approved by the War Cabinet – but 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 the deal’s opponents never even saw the offer to Hamas.
Netanyahu didn’t exactly deny signing the plan, but he didn’t admit it either. “He dances,” said Shalom Lipner, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who has worked for seven Israeli prime ministers, including Netanyahu, for 26 years. “He didn’t turn it down. But he hasn’t embraced it either.”
“Making this proposal public — on the Sabbath, when he knew the more right-wing religious parties might not hear it or be unable to respond — became a necessity as time passes,” Lipner said.
Things are slipping, especially for Biden. Six weeks ago, the president and his aides believed that a prisoner swap and a ceasefire, even temporary, was just days away. That moment came and went. On top of the human tragedy of the war, now comes the political reality: Biden knows that his campaign appearances, and the Democratic convention, could well be marked by protesters from the progressive wing of his party who believe that the United States has all Israel’s offensive weapons while the number of civilian deaths increased.
But as a strong supporter of Israel over the past 50 years — Biden still talks about dealing with Golda Meir at the end of her time as Israel’s prime minister — the president knows he can’t appear to be threatening the current administration or abandon.
That’s why the two men have made public statements that make clear their differences in strategy. It’s hardly the kind of quiet, one-friend-apart flattery that Biden prides himself on, whether he’s strong-arming NATO leaders into spending more on defense or convincing the Japanese to reconcile their age-old differences with South Korea . But it is what the US and Israel have come to out of distrust: public statements to corner the other.
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