Joe Biden’s foreign policy approach, evident in both Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, raises questions about his leadership. While permitting Ukrainian use of American ordnance against Russian targets signifies a policy shift, it comes after prolonged urging and dithering, reflecting a reactive stance rather than proactive leadership. Similarly, Biden’s response to Israel’s actions in Gaza appears hesitant, lacking a decisive stance. Such reactive diplomacy poses challenges both domestically and internationally, necessitating a reevaluation of Biden’s approach.
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By Andreas Kluth
Joe Biden has done it again, in Ukraine as in the Gaza Strip. By finally allowing the Ukrainians to use American ordnance to shoot back at nearby enemy targets just inside Russia, the US president has made a sensible foreign policy change, but haltingly and on the down low, after prolonged pleading and urging by American allies, and after dithering and delay that have cost many lives. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Framing national security as a simple dichotomy between weak and strong — as Republicans try to do in attacking Biden — is primitive. But Biden does increasingly give the appearance of being driven by events rather than driving them. That bodes ill for his chances in November’s election, and ill for conflicts from Europe to the Middle East and Asia.
The Ukrainian situation has recently become dire. The defenders are struggling against a new Russian onslaught, and in particular against an attack on Kharkiv, which the Russians are pounding with artillery and missiles launched from just across the border inside Russia. The Ukrainians obviously need to return fire and take out the enemy launchers and airplanes. But Biden has so far prohibited them from using American missiles and munitions to shoot into Russia.
His reasoning was fathomable enough. Since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, Biden has had two goals: First, to prevent a Russian victory; but second, to prevent a direct confrontation between the US and Russia that could escalate into World War III. Cynically but by all appearances effectively, Putin has stoked Biden’s anxieties by repeatedly threatening to use nuclear weapons if cornered.
That has created a bad pattern. Again and again, the Ukrainians ask for weapons — missiles, battle tanks, fighter jets — but Biden demurs, fearing that providing them would cross one of Putin’s “red lines.” Some allies, such as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, duck behind Biden’s caution. Others, including the Brits, Poles, Danes, Estonians and more recently the French and Belgians, forge ahead. Eventually Biden also yields. But by this time he follows, rather than leading.
So it happened again this week. Jens Stoltenberg, the usually understated secretary general of NATO, had already come out to state the obvious — that the Western allies must not only supply Ukraine with weapons but also let the defenders use them against legitimate enemy targets inside Russia. The UK, France and a chorus of other allies said the same.
Biden, along with Scholz, was among the last to turn, this week. And he’s still adding enough fine print to drive Kyiv to distraction. The Ukrainians may only aim US ordnance at the Russian border region near Kharkiv, and only against weapons systems the Russians are already using to attack Ukraine. This is not how a hot war of national self-defense is waged.
A different but similar dynamic has developed in the war that Israel is waging against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Biden has supported Israel since the terrorist invasion on Oct. 7. Israel in turn has pounded the strip with American-made bombs and missiles, killing Hamas fighters but also causing unacceptable civilian death and suffering. After massive pressure from all sides — at the United Nations, on American college campuses, in Congress, among allies and of course from voters — Biden finally stopped one single shipment of the most explosive kind of US bombs, while continuing with others.
The result is that Biden is neither exerting enough pressure on the Israeli government to start planning for “the day after” or to end the humanitarian crisis, nor appeasing critics of Israel and the US in the courts of public opinion or The Hague. He is reacting, not steering.
It did not need to be this way. When Putin first threatened to use nukes in 2022, Biden secretly made clear that he would punish such outrageous escalation with overwhelming (if conventional) American force. The message to the Kremlin was: You nuke, you lose. And Putin heard it.
Since then, though, Biden has become more hesitant again (even as leaders such French President Emmanuel Macron have found their spine), and Putin and his cronies have resumed their nuclear intimidation. Putin showed that he’s a bluffer, says Kori Schake, a Republican veteran in Washington’s foreign policy circles. And Biden’s job was “not to vomit all of our anxiety in the public sphere.” At that, he’s failed.
Leading from behind only works for shepherds. The actors in international politics — from dictators to terrorists and even allies — aren’t sheep, though. To keep the world from descending further into chaos — and also to win reelection — Biden needs to be at the front, or let somebody else take his place. He could start by making clear that Kyiv can hit the Russians with all it’s got, and wherever it can draw a bead.
Read also:
- 🔒 Nuances and double standards: Ukraine needs the full support of the West – as does Israel: Niall Ferguson
- Assessing America’s hegemony: Get the troops out of the Middle East – Andreas Kluth
- If the US and Israel don’t follow the rules of war, then no one will: Andreas Kluth
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