| From | xxxxxx <[email protected]> |
| Subject | Ukraine, Israel and the Two Joe Bidens |
| Date | December 23, 2023 1:15 AM |
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[In Ukraine, Biden has spent two years articulating a stirring
argument for a rules-based order. In Israel, he set about burning that
argument to the ground. Is a morally consistent foreign policy
possible?]
[[link removed]]
UKRAINE, ISRAEL AND THE TWO JOE BIDENS
[[link removed]]
Matthew Duss
December 14, 2023
The New Republic
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]
_ In Ukraine, Biden has spent two years articulating a stirring
argument for a rules-based order. In Israel, he set about burning that
argument to the ground. Is a morally consistent foreign policy
possible? _
A bombed apartment building in Gaza,
Luke Skywalker woke me up and told me to go to the bomb shelter, so
there I was. It was 3:30-ish in the morning, in a conference room in
the basement of the Radisson in Odesa’s beautiful central district.
I had arrived in Ukraine several days before, after a 19-hour train
ride from Warsaw, to conduct a week of interviews and site visits to
learn more about the impact of the war. After about 45 minutes, he
gave us the all-clear. “The air alert is over. May the Force be with
you.” About an hour later, just after I’d managed to fall asleep
again, Luke once more rousted me, sending me back downstairs for
another hour of waiting.
Skywalker was speaking to me through the Air Alert app, to which actor
Mark Hamill lent his voice
[[link removed]] for
the English-language warning. The app allows you to input your
location in Ukraine and warns you when there are incoming strikes on
that area. Fortunately, for me at least, the strikes on Odesa were not
close to where I was that night.
The afternoon before, as I sat at lunch with a group of local
government officials and activists, all our phones went off. Every one
in the nearby park, too. I sat up, ready to get to cover, but no one
moved. They listened. They knew the telltale sounds of a nearing
strike, and they heard none. One in our group, a woman from Odesa who
had been a wine importer/exporter before February 2022 but since then
had become a local guide, translator, and community organizer,
characterized what she thought many Ukrainians were feeling at the
time. “We know we can have victory. We know the cost. We believed in
this victory when it made no sense, but now it’s within reach.”
Others around the table began tearing up as they nodded in agreement.
In 2022, I wrote
[[link removed]] a
piece for _The New Republic_ arguing that supporting Ukraine’s
defense is in line with progressive values and important for the U.S.
left. A year later, I wanted to follow it up with another piece, and
this time I felt it necessary to go to Ukraine, to at least get as
much of a feel for the situation as a week would allow. What I would
not do is spend a few days and then return to gravely opine on what
I’d learned “while on the ground.”
I arrived with a set of questions. Why is the counteroffensive going
so slowly compared to last year? Are Ukrainians still willing to
fight? How is morale? Do they see themselves as proxies? Are
negotiations to end the war possible? What should solidarity with
Ukrainians look like now? What are the stakes for U.S. security of the
outcome of this war that for nearly two years was the focus of the
Western world?
In Ukraine, Restraint
The Ukrainians I spoke with acknowledged that the 2023
counteroffensive was moving much slower
[[link removed]] than
the previous year’s, whose surprising effectiveness had convinced
many, Ukrainians and others, that complete victory was achievable.
Some explain this by noting that Russian troops were not as well dug
in last time, and its recruits were far greener. In the past year,
Russian forces have been able to dig into positions and create vast,
multilayered minefields
[[link removed]] in
the eastern portions of occupied Ukraine, all of which makes for much
slower going for Ukrainian forces. The people I talked to believed
that, with continued support—especially the provision of Army
Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, which President Joe Biden agreed
to send
[[link removed]] in
late September, after months of hesitation—they can slowly bring
more Russian-controlled territory in range and potentially force a
better outcome. How that exactly will happen is unclear.
According to Ukrainian and U.S. sources, cluster munitions—which,
because of the risks of harm to innocents, were controversial in the
United States when the Biden administration announced
[[link removed]] in
July that it would send them—made a difference in advancing the
Ukrainian counteroffensive, in holding off a Russian
countercounteroffensive, and as a demining tool. U.S. officials have
acknowledged concerns about the harm unexploded ordnance can do to
civilians, but they argued
[[link removed]] that
areas where the cluster munitions are being deployed are already
heavily mined, and they will be off-limits to civilians for a long
time.
Ukrainian government officials are treating oversight and end-use
monitoring of U.S. and allied military support as sacred, according to
one official. They know that the world is watching to make sure that
weapons supplied by the United States and its allies are not
proliferating into the black market, and that any evidence that this
was happening would diminish Western public support for continuing
those supplies. To date, there is no evidence of end-use diversion;
there have been efforts by Russians to take weapons lost
[[link removed]] on
the battlefield to try to prove diversion, officials say. Potential
smuggling is a concern, but right now the smuggling routes are going
into Ukraine, not out. That could change at some point.
Up until now, the theory of the case for the United States and the
European powers has been to support Ukraine as it gains the strongest
possible position on the battlefield, which will put the Ukrainians in
the best possible position for negotiations. With the war having
ground to effective stalemate, we appear to have reached that point,
with Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny, admitting as much
[[link removed]] in
an early November interview.
Those involved in the fighting were not saying any of that, at least
not in September. They were very clear on what was and was not needed
to win the war. “F-16s are expensive, need ammunition, easy to shoot
down, a waste of money,” said Mamuka Mamulashvili, the commander of
Ukraine’s Georgian legion, a unit of about 1,600 Georgians and a
collection of volunteers from a dozen other regions, including Japan
and Latin America. (The Americans and Brits don’t last long, he told
me. They like sleeping in beds.) What the war effort really needs
right now, he told me, are High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or
HIMARS, shells; ATACMS missiles; and other ammunition, not big, sexy
items like F-16 fighter jets.
We were sitting at a picnic table in a former summer camp on the
outskirts of Kyiv, near swings and a jungle gym. He’s been fighting
the Russians since he was a 14-year-old kid, he tells me. He’s in
his mid-forties now, a large man, who reminded me of a more fit Nick
Frost. Every few minutes, one of his troops whizzes by on an electric
scooter fitted with big off-road tires. The unit is testing them out
for use in the field, Mamuka said. They can go 50 miles on a single
charge, move quietly, and carry 300 pounds of weight, more than enough
for a soldier and gear. Another example of the innovations this war
has produced, in response to the requirement to do more with less.
In Kyiv, apart from a few armed troops, patriotic posters, and
recruiting stations, one would barely even know that there’s a war
on. In Odesa, the war is more in evidence: Various buildings in the
historic central downtown area were damaged or destroyed in missile
strikes. But in both cities, people are out, and the culture is
lively. Even on weeknights, bars and restaurants seemed crowded.
Saturday night in Odesa was downright festive, which was very striking
for what is essentially a frontline city, given its strategic
significance as a major port. Most of the people I spoke with reported
that the February 2022 invasion triggered a Ukrainian national
cultural renaissance, not just in civic and volunteer activity
responding to an internal displacement crisis, but in arts, culture,
restaurants, music. One of Vladimir Putin’s goals was to snuff out
Ukrainian national identity. He has achieved the opposite in
spectacular fashion.
All that aside, we are where we are: stalemate. All the Ukrainians I
spoke to felt strongly that they can achieve complete victory,
retaking all territory occupied by Russia since 2014, including
Crimea. (These views may be different in areas closer to the front
lines.) Any resolution of the war that does not satisfy this will be
extremely politically difficult for the Ukrainian government. A
recent _Time _profile of Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelenskiy described him
[[link removed]] as
increasingly frustrated with the state of the war and what he views as
foot-dragging on the part of Western allies, and singularly focused on
the goal of complete victory.
However, if a negotiated deal offered the possibility of a real and
durable (key word) end to the war, I think it would have to be
considered. (And we should have no illusions about what this would
mean for areas still occupied by Russia.) Those who argue that such a
deal could have been secured shortly after the war began ask us to
ignore the evidence that Putin still wants what he wanted when he
launched the invasion: the end of Ukraine as an independent political
entity, and its reabsorption into “Greater Russia.” There seems to
be a tendency among some to treat diplomacy as if it’s a button we
can just jam harder to make the peace elevator come faster, but
that’s not how either of these things works. It’s worth discussing
what such a deal might comprise, but until Putin indicates any
interest, we’d just be negotiating among ourselves.
The argument persists that the United States and NATO sought this war.
It’s worth remembering that Biden had a summit
[[link removed]] with
Putin in June 2021, for the purpose of bringing some clarity and
stability to the relationship. The administration’s goal was to park
the Russia problem out of the way and focus on China. But later, once
the Russian invasion started to look like a real possibility that
fall, Biden dispatched
[[link removed]] CIA
Director Bill Burns (unofficial special envoy for really tough stuff)
to talk to Putin. There was a Biden-Putin phone call
[[link removed]] the
following February, shortly before the invasion. German Chancellor
Olaf Scholz went to meet
[[link removed]] with
Putin, as did French President Emmanuel Macron, both making clear in
public remarks afterward that they sought a security arrangement
acceptable to Russia, which was understood by all as “we’re ready
to find a solution to your stated NATO concern.”
The growth of NATO was undoubtedly an irritant to Russia. We don’t
need to believe Putin on this; numerous U.S. officials have reported
it
[[link removed]] over
the years. But it turned out that, notwithstanding the continuing NATO
obsession in some quarters, Putin’s grievances and goals were far
broader than just that, as he has by now explained multiple times.
President Biden has continued to resist
[[link removed]] bringing
Ukraine into NATO, which should disprove claims that this war is a
plot to expand the U.S. empire. But for most of the people making that
claim, that U.S. goal is simply a given. It’s unfalsifiable.
Similarly, the fact that the United States and European allies are now
apparently urging the Ukrainians to consider ways to wrap it up should
complicate the argument
[[link removed]] that NATO is
“willing to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.” But that argument
was never based in reality.
Another argument, potentially the more dangerous one in my view, is
the one advanced by the triumphalist liberal interventionists
[[link removed]],
who saw in the February 2022 Russian invasion the return of a sense of
mission. I got an early taste of this in December 2021, when I
attended a conference in Berlin. Over wine and hors d’oeuvres, we
were treated to remarks from a very self-serious pundit who could
barely contain his excitement about the then-gathering Russian
operation in Ukraine. History was back. Meaning was back. War in
Europe. He was almost vibrating as he spoke.
Others in the room found his remarks, which could’ve been delivered
from a balcony, innervating and inspiring. There were grave, serious
nods all around. I found them terrifying.
In my 2022 piece, I cautioned
[[link removed]] against
reading too much into the war in Ukraine from an American standpoint.
Ukraine is not a manic pixie dream war that will restore our
democratic mojo. There have been numerous
[[link removed]] examples
[[link removed]] of
this argument
[[link removed]] over
the last two years: Russia’s war on Ukraine “marks a critical
juncture that will determine the course of global democracy”;
“everything we should care about is on the line there”; “Ukraine
is critical to rebuilding our democratic consensus”; the “future
of the democratic world will be determined by whether the Ukrainian
military can break a stalemate with Russia.”
Considering the massive surge in democratic political activism we saw
in the United States in the wake of Donald Trump’s election,
particularly in 2020 in response to the murder of George
Floyd—the largest protests
[[link removed]] in
U.S. history, supported by
[[link removed]] solidarity
protests around the world—the idea that we need a foreign war to
reinvigorate our democracy is just another symptom of our diseased
political class.
Ironically, Biden’s approach indicates an understanding of the
significant yet still not existential stakes of the war. Early on, he
put a hard ceiling on the level of direct U.S. involvement, quickly
tamped down
[[link removed]] calls
for a no-fly zone, made clear
[[link removed]] that
U.S. troops would not fight in Ukraine, and slowly elevated
[[link removed]] the
quantity and quality of military aid the United States and allies
provided, rightly watching Putin’s potential response. (His hawkish
critics have characterized
[[link removed]] this
caution as bowing to Putin’s nuclear blackmail. I would call it
wisely trying to avoid all of us dying in a nuclear holocaust.) His
administration’s decision to publicize
[[link removed]] its
intel about Russia’s movements was also a clever and effective
example of prioritizing results over militarism. Biden’s Ukraine
policy has been, by any reasonable definition, one of restraint.
It’s always been strange to me that my colleagues in the restraint
community are among the least likely to recognize this.
Nonaligned countries in the global south have been slow to join the
Western alliance in support of Ukraine. A Ukrainian foreign ministry
official outlined Ukraine’s general diplomatic strategy and
explained the complexity of trying to engage with Africa, Latin
America, and Southeast Asia. From the Ukrainian point of view, the
conflict between Russia and Ukraine is a postcolonial war. To discuss
it in such terms around representatives from the global south,
however, was liable to generate resentment because many in the
nonaligned world identified Ukraine’s allies (the United States and
Europe) with imperialism and colonialism, and the Russians with
support for the anti-colonialist cause. Invoking past imperialism
generated resistance rather than solidarity.
Less than a month later, this divide would be starkly illustrated. The
Biden administration, having spent two years articulating a stirring
argument for a rules-based order, would now set about burning that
argument to the ground.
I arrived with a set of questions. Why is the counteroffensive going
so slowly compared to last year? Are Ukrainians still willing to
fight? How is morale? Do they see themselves as proxies? Are
negotiations to end the war possible? What should solidarity with
Ukrainians look like now? What are the stakes for U.S. security of the
outcome of this war that for nearly two years was the focus of the
Western world?
In Ukraine, Restraint
The Ukrainians I spoke with acknowledged that the 2023
counteroffensive was moving much slower
[[link removed]] than
the previous year’s, whose surprising effectiveness had convinced
many, Ukrainians and others, that complete victory was achievable.
Some explain this by noting that Russian troops were not as well dug
in last time, and its recruits were far greener. In the past year,
Russian forces have been able to dig into positions and create vast,
multilayered minefields
[[link removed]] in
the eastern portions of occupied Ukraine, all of which makes for much
slower going for Ukrainian forces. The people I talked to believed
that, with continued support—especially the provision of Army
Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, which President Joe Biden agreed
to send
[[link removed]] in
late September, after months of hesitation—they can slowly bring
more Russian-controlled territory in range and potentially force a
better outcome. How that exactly will happen is unclear.
According to Ukrainian and U.S. sources, cluster munitions—which,
because of the risks of harm to innocents, were controversial in the
United States when the Biden administration announced
[[link removed]] in
July that it would send them—made a difference in advancing the
Ukrainian counteroffensive, in holding off a Russian
countercounteroffensive, and as a demining tool. U.S. officials have
acknowledged concerns about the harm unexploded ordnance can do to
civilians, but they argued
[[link removed]] that
areas where the cluster munitions are being deployed are already
heavily mined, and they will be off-limits to civilians for a long
time.
Ukrainian government officials are treating oversight and end-use
monitoring of U.S. and allied military support as sacred, according to
one official. They know that the world is watching to make sure that
weapons supplied by the United States and its allies are not
proliferating into the black market, and that any evidence that this
was happening would diminish Western public support for continuing
those supplies. To date, there is no evidence of end-use diversion;
there have been efforts by Russians to take weapons lost
[[link removed]] on
the battlefield to try to prove diversion, officials say. Potential
smuggling is a concern, but right now the smuggling routes are going
into Ukraine, not out. That could change at some point.
Up until now, the theory of the case for the United States and the
European powers has been to support Ukraine as it gains the strongest
possible position on the battlefield, which will put the Ukrainians in
the best possible position for negotiations. With the war having
ground to effective stalemate, we appear to have reached that point,
with Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny, admitting as much
[[link removed]] in
an early November interview.
Those involved in the fighting were not saying any of that, at least
not in September. They were very clear on what was and was not needed
to win the war. “F-16s are expensive, need ammunition, easy to shoot
down, a waste of money,” said Mamuka Mamulashvili, the commander of
Ukraine’s Georgian legion, a unit of about 1,600 Georgians and a
collection of volunteers from a dozen other regions, including Japan
and Latin America. (The Americans and Brits don’t last long, he told
me. They like sleeping in beds.) What the war effort really needs
right now, he told me, are High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or
HIMARS, shells; ATACMS missiles; and other ammunition, not big, sexy
items like F-16 fighter jets.
We were sitting at a picnic table in a former summer camp on the
outskirts of Kyiv, near swings and a jungle gym. He’s been fighting
the Russians since he was a 14-year-old kid, he tells me. He’s in
his mid-forties now, a large man, who reminded me of a more fit Nick
Frost. Every few minutes, one of his troops whizzes by on an electric
scooter fitted with big off-road tires. The unit is testing them out
for use in the field, Mamuka said. They can go 50 miles on a single
charge, move quietly, and carry 300 pounds of weight, more than enough
for a soldier and gear. Another example of the innovations this war
has produced, in response to the requirement to do more with less.
In Kyiv, apart from a few armed troops, patriotic posters, and
recruiting stations, one would barely even know that there’s a war
on. In Odesa, the war is more in evidence: Various buildings in the
historic central downtown area were damaged or destroyed in missile
strikes. But in both cities, people are out, and the culture is
lively. Even on weeknights, bars and restaurants seemed crowded.
Saturday night in Odesa was downright festive, which was very striking
for what is essentially a frontline city, given its strategic
significance as a major port. Most of the people I spoke with reported
that the February 2022 invasion triggered a Ukrainian national
cultural renaissance, not just in civic and volunteer activity
responding to an internal displacement crisis, but in arts, culture,
restaurants, music. One of Vladimir Putin’s goals was to snuff out
Ukrainian national identity. He has achieved the opposite in
spectacular fashion.
All that aside, we are where we are: stalemate. All the Ukrainians I
spoke to felt strongly that they can achieve complete victory,
retaking all territory occupied by Russia since 2014, including
Crimea. (These views may be different in areas closer to the front
lines.) Any resolution of the war that does not satisfy this will be
extremely politically difficult for the Ukrainian government. A
recent _Time _profile of Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelenskiy described him
[[link removed]] as
increasingly frustrated with the state of the war and what he views as
foot-dragging on the part of Western allies, and singularly focused on
the goal of complete victory.
However, if a negotiated deal offered the possibility of a real and
durable (key word) end to the war, I think it would have to be
considered. (And we should have no illusions about what this would
mean for areas still occupied by Russia.) Those who argue that such a
deal could have been secured shortly after the war began ask us to
ignore the evidence that Putin still wants what he wanted when he
launched the invasion: the end of Ukraine as an independent political
entity, and its reabsorption into “Greater Russia.” There seems to
be a tendency among some to treat diplomacy as if it’s a button we
can just jam harder to make the peace elevator come faster, but
that’s not how either of these things works. It’s worth discussing
what such a deal might comprise, but until Putin indicates any
interest, we’d just be negotiating among ourselves.
The argument persists that the United States and NATO sought this war.
It’s worth remembering that Biden had a summit
[[link removed]] with
Putin in June 2021, for the purpose of bringing some clarity and
stability to the relationship. The administration’s goal was to park
the Russia problem out of the way and focus on China. But later, once
the Russian invasion started to look like a real possibility that
fall, Biden dispatched
[[link removed]] CIA
Director Bill Burns (unofficial special envoy for really tough stuff)
to talk to Putin. There was a Biden-Putin phone call
[[link removed]] the
following February, shortly before the invasion. German Chancellor
Olaf Scholz went to meet
[[link removed]] with
Putin, as did French President Emmanuel Macron, both making clear in
public remarks afterward that they sought a security arrangement
acceptable to Russia, which was understood by all as “we’re ready
to find a solution to your stated NATO concern.”
The growth of NATO was undoubtedly an irritant to Russia. We don’t
need to believe Putin on this; numerous U.S. officials have reported
it
[[link removed]] over
the years. But it turned out that, notwithstanding the continuing NATO
obsession in some quarters, Putin’s grievances and goals were far
broader than just that, as he has by now explained multiple times.
President Biden has continued to resist
[[link removed]] bringing
Ukraine into NATO, which should disprove claims that this war is a
plot to expand the U.S. empire. But for most of the people making that
claim, that U.S. goal is simply a given. It’s unfalsifiable.
Similarly, the fact that the United States and European allies are now
apparently urging the Ukrainians to consider ways to wrap it up should
complicate the argument
[[link removed]] that NATO is
“willing to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.” But that argument
was never based in reality.
Another argument, potentially the more dangerous one in my view, is
the one advanced by the triumphalist liberal interventionists
[[link removed]],
who saw in the February 2022 Russian invasion the return of a sense of
mission. I got an early taste of this in December 2021, when I
attended a conference in Berlin. Over wine and hors d’oeuvres, we
were treated to remarks from a very self-serious pundit who could
barely contain his excitement about the then-gathering Russian
operation in Ukraine. History was back. Meaning was back. War in
Europe. He was almost vibrating as he spoke.
Others in the room found his remarks, which could’ve been delivered
from a balcony, innervating and inspiring. There were grave, serious
nods all around. I found them terrifying.
In my 2022 piece, I cautioned
[[link removed]] against
reading too much into the war in Ukraine from an American standpoint.
Ukraine is not a manic pixie dream war that will restore our
democratic mojo. There have been numerous
[[link removed]] examples
[[link removed]] of
this argument
[[link removed]] over
the last two years: Russia’s war on Ukraine “marks a critical
juncture that will determine the course of global democracy”;
“everything we should care about is on the line there”; “Ukraine
is critical to rebuilding our democratic consensus”; the “future
of the democratic world will be determined by whether the Ukrainian
military can break a stalemate with Russia.”
Considering the massive surge in democratic political activism we saw
in the United States in the wake of Donald Trump’s election,
particularly in 2020 in response to the murder of George
Floyd—the largest protests
[[link removed]] in
U.S. history, supported by
[[link removed]] solidarity
protests around the world—the idea that we need a foreign war to
reinvigorate our democracy is just another symptom of our diseased
political class.
Ironically, Biden’s approach indicates an understanding of the
significant yet still not existential stakes of the war. Early on, he
put a hard ceiling on the level of direct U.S. involvement, quickly
tamped down
[[link removed]] calls
for a no-fly zone, made clear
[[link removed]] that
U.S. troops would not fight in Ukraine, and slowly elevated
[[link removed]] the
quantity and quality of military aid the United States and allies
provided, rightly watching Putin’s potential response. (His hawkish
critics have characterized
[[link removed]] this
caution as bowing to Putin’s nuclear blackmail. I would call it
wisely trying to avoid all of us dying in a nuclear holocaust.) His
administration’s decision to publicize
[[link removed]] its
intel about Russia’s movements was also a clever and effective
example of prioritizing results over militarism. Biden’s Ukraine
policy has been, by any reasonable definition, one of restraint.
It’s always been strange to me that my colleagues in the restraint
community are among the least likely to recognize this.
Nonaligned countries in the global south have been slow to join the
Western alliance in support of Ukraine. A Ukrainian foreign ministry
official outlined Ukraine’s general diplomatic strategy and
explained the complexity of trying to engage with Africa, Latin
America, and Southeast Asia. From the Ukrainian point of view, the
conflict between Russia and Ukraine is a postcolonial war. To discuss
it in such terms around representatives from the global south,
however, was liable to generate resentment because many in the
nonaligned world identified Ukraine’s allies (the United States and
Europe) with imperialism and colonialism, and the Russians with
support for the anti-colonialist cause. Invoking past imperialism
generated resistance rather than solidarity.
Less than a month later, this divide would be starkly illustrated. The
Biden administration, having spent two years articulating a stirring
argument for a rules-based order, would now set about burning that
argument to the ground.
While in Israel …
There’s a photo exhibit in the square by St. Michael’s, panels of
photos comparing bombed-out Warsaw in World War II to Mariupol in
2022. As I looked at the pictures, I thought, they could add Gaza to
this. That was in September, before the latest onslaught
[[link removed]] by
Israel in response to the savage Hamas attacks of October 7. The late
2023 violence is worse than anything before; indeed, even before the
October 7 massacres, 2023 was already the deadliest
[[link removed]] year for Palestinians since
2015.
I last visited Israel-Palestine in March. I recalled sitting in
Inshirah Khamus’s house in Huwara, just south of Nablus in the
occupied West Bank. The windows of Inshirah’s house were broken.
Outside the front door were several cars burned to carbonized husks.
Inshirah, who is in her mid-seventies, was telling us about the night
of February 26, 2023, when the home she shares with family members,
children and grandchildren, was attacked by a mob of Israeli settlers
who rampaged through the town
[[link removed]],
killing one person and injuring more than 100 others, burning homes
and property in revenge for the killing of two settlers earlier in the
day. According to
[[link removed]] Maj.
Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, the head of the Israel Defense Forces’ Central
Command, “What happened in Huwara was a pogrom.”
The February 26 pogrom was unique only in its size and intensity.
Israeli settler terrorism against Palestinians is a regular feature of
the Israeli occupation, carried out under the watchful eyes of the
IDF, which intervenes only when things get out of hand. Settler
terrorism in the occupied territories has been on the rise
[[link removed]] for years. It’s been
getting even more intense now, because settlers know they don’t just
have allies in government, they are the government
[[link removed]].
Inshirah was inside her home when the mob came on February 26. She had
watched the Israeli army driving back and forth in their jeeps as the
settlers massed for violence, doing nothing, as they almost always do.
The Israeli army’s violence is reserved for Palestinians. You may
have seen a picture of Inshirah being escorted
[[link removed]] out
of her burning home by Israeli troops. It was shared widely by Israeli
PR flacks to demonstrate the morality of the IDF. The reality is the
opposite. The IDF enabled the fire to be set in the first place.
You may have heard that the goal of the occupation is to provide
“security” for Israel. That talking point is strictly for American
tourists and members of Congress. The overriding goal of Israeli
policy in the occupied territories is to take control of Palestinian
land. Settler terrorism is one of the many tools of that policy.
Establishing colonies, usually referred to as settlements, is one.
Expropriating Palestinian land under various security pretexts is
another. It’s a big toolbox.
When Inshirah was a child, her family fled Jaffa in the Nakba, Arabic
for “the catastrophe,” which refers to the mass displacement and
dispossession [[link removed]] of some
700,000 Palestinians at the creation of the state of Israel. Now
Israeli extremists are trying to make her a refugee again. This is
what millions of Palestinians have endured every day, even before
October 7. As of early December, around 1.8 million have been
displaced
[[link removed]] in
Gaza.
I had all of this in mind when I heard President Biden’s October 20
Oval Office speech positing an equivalence
[[link removed]] between
Israel and Ukraine, which I found misleading and, frankly, offensive.
The reality is that Russia is occupying Ukraine to end Ukrainian
self-determination, and Israel is doing the same to Palestine.
“They’re not a real people and the land is really ours by right”
is the position of both the Russian and Israeli governments regarding
Ukrainians and Palestinians. Israel’s methods are not as extreme as
Russia’s, and it’s very important to acknowledge that, but its
goal is nonetheless the same: the prevention of the other’s
independence. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said
explicitly
[[link removed]] that
he had helped sustain Hamas in power in Gaza precisely because it
served that goal. Many, including Israeli security officials, have
been warning for years that it would lead to exactly what we’re
seeing now: all-out war.
Hamas’s October 7 attack was abominable beyond description.
Continuing to fire rockets into Israeli communities is abominable.
Holding hostages is abominable. I’ll continue to insist on all those
things. I’ll continue to condemn those on the left, or anywhere, who
show any sympathy whatsoever for Hamas. I do not ignore the very real
security challenges Israel has faced and continues to face. I
acknowledge—more than that; I insist that we state
forthrightly—that the Palestinian people have been extremely poorly
served
[[link removed]] by
a corrupt, incompetent leadership that has made a series of bad
choices that have contributed to this situation. I deeply feel the
absolute horror of the October 7 attacks, the grief and rage and
trauma that Israelis continued to feel as more stories pour out about
that day. I have very close friends who have been called up into the
Israeli military reserves, pulled away from young families, now
deployed in places they can’t reveal, who are terrified of what is
coming. I am terrified for them.
I deeply feel the absolute horror of the October 7 attacks. I have
very close friends who have been called up into the Israeli military
reserves, terrified of what is coming. I am terrified for them. What
I won’t do is pretend that history began on October 7.
What I won’t do, what none of us should do, is pretend that history
began on October 7. I will not pretend that Israel is acting purely in
self-defense. Its occupation, the various acts of violence against
civilians, and the settlement/colonization project that the occupation
facilitates are a war crime—in fact, multiple war crimes
[[link removed]],
committed every single day, for years. The Israeli government is using
methods right now against Palestinians that no one hesitates to call
terrorism when used by Russia against Ukraine. (Indeed, not only do
many of our politicians not criticize it in Israel’s case;
they cheer it on
[[link removed]].)
When one understands the vast machinery of violence and control and
segregation
[[link removed]] that
Israel imposes on Palestinians, the suggestion that Israelis are the
ones in this relationship facing an existential threat just seems like
gaslighting.
“You know, history has taught us that when terrorists don’t pay a
price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their
aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction,”
Biden said from the Oval Office
[[link removed]].
“They keep going. And the cost and the threats to America and the
world keep rising.”
This is a remarkable passage. He’s so close to getting it! I
thought. He could be describing America’s decades-long refusal to
impose, and its ongoing diplomatic efforts to prevent, any
consequences whatsoever for Israeli aggression against Palestinian
civilians. To make sure Israel pays no price. Biden’s words about
adhering to international law are nice and welcome, but in the absence
of any genuine accountability, that’s all they are. Biden
has regularly voiced concern
[[link removed]] about
the right-wing threat to Israeli democracy, but the irony is that the
unconditional U.S. support he championed in the aftermath of October
7, as he has for his entire political career
[[link removed]],
has been wind at the back of the Israeli far right. And importantly:
It has not made Israel secure.
And even though this speech was intended for a domestic audience, the
whole world was obviously watching. The United States has put a great
deal of effort in appealing to the global south/nonaligned world on a
range of issues, including support for Ukraine. That effort was
mortally wounded when the whole global south saw the West’s blatant
double standard. (“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the
International Criminal Court.”) Biden’s speech probably put that
effort in the grave. To that extent, it was a propaganda victory for
Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, and other
anti-U.S. leaders who have long claimed that appeals to international
law, and to a so-called rules-based order, are simply a self-righteous
gloss on the jealous pursuit of U.S. interests. The weeks after
October 7 have proved them correct in the eyes of much of the world.
“Nothing about you without you” is a U.S. slogan reserved for
Ukrainians
[[link removed]],
with the Palestinians still treated as objects to be acted upon by
great powers, their fate presumably to be determined by others, their
national rights barely meriting a remark.
“American leadership is what holds the world together,” Biden
said, as the world burned. “We are, as my friend Madeleine Albright
said, ‘the indispensable nation.’” Those lines show how, despite
his administration’s admirable capacity to assimilate some of the
progressive left’s energy and ideas, Biden remains stuck in the
past. While Biden has taken some pragmatic foreign policy steps, such
as the Afghanistan withdrawal
[[link removed]],
the weeks after October 7 revealed that he is still a deeply
ideological president, committed to a very particular vision of
American primacy. U.S. policy for Ukraine and Israel-Palestine offers
opportunities for a new and more consistently principled approach to
the world, if only we had an administration that was interested. The
rehabilitation of Cold War liberal interventionism, and its mutant
twin neoconservatism, is perhaps as much a threat to American
democracy as Trumpism. The former, after all, gave birth to the
latter.
June 2, 2020, was the day I started to think that Biden’s presidency
might be more than just a lesser evil. Until then, he was the
candidate of restoration, the guy who would let you go back to not
paying attention to politics. The candidate who promised
[[link removed]] wealthy
donors that “nothing would fundamentally change.” But that day in
June, he gave the most important speech
[[link removed]] of
his campaign, maybe of his political career, during the massive
nationwide protests in response to the murder of George Floyd by
former police officer Derek Chauvin. It was his fullest acknowledgment
to that point of the deep-seated problems in American society and an
assertion that a return to the status quo was insufficient.
“The battle for the soul of this nation has been a constant
push-and-pull for more than 240 years,” he said. “A tug-of-war
between the American ideal that we are all created equal and the harsh
reality that racism has long torn us apart.”
I thought of that speech one recent autumn day as I sat in a meeting
with several leaders of U.S. civil rights organizations. Alicia Garza,
co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, referred to the
response to the post–October 7 assault on Gaza as “an
international George Floyd moment.”
Throughout his political career, Biden has been less a shaper of
consensus than a reflection of it. This is not necessarily a
criticism. Such politicians play an important role in both
accelerating and consolidating a new consensus, as Biden did in
responding to protests against anti-Black violence during the
campaign, as he previously did on gay marriage
[[link removed]] in
the Obama administration, and is currently doing
[[link removed]] around
the post-neoliberal economic order since taking office.
Thus far, Biden has not risen to this moment as he did to the other.
He shows no indication of understanding that his approach to the
region, which consigned
[[link removed]] Palestinians
and other Arab publics to a future of repression, helped lay the
kindling for this conflagration. While administration officials have
insisted
[[link removed]] that
we cannot return to the pre–October 7 status quo in Gaza (as if that
were even an option now that Israel’s relentless bombing, which
Biden admitted
[[link removed]] was
“indiscriminate,” has made Palestine’s largest city an
uninhabitable ruin
[[link removed]]),
they have yet to signal any meaningful shift in that approach.
But a shift in approach is desperately needed. It feels absurd to
propose ideas for “the day after” while the casualties continue to
mount in Gaza. Biden needs to genuinely commit to a real process to
end the occupation and ensure Palestinian liberation and
self-determination. He doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel
here—there’s an entire body of international law and U.N. security
resolutions charting a path. If Biden really wants to show the world
that he stands behind the words of racial and social justice that he
beautifully articulated in the summer of 2020, if he wants to show
that he is genuinely interested in strengthening the principles of
international law that have undergirded his admirable support for the
defense of Ukraine, then Palestine would be a good place to finally
start.
_Matthew Duss
[[link removed]] @mattduss
[[link removed]] is executive vice president at the
Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to
Senator Bernie Sanders._
_The New Republic was founded in 1914 to bring liberalism into the
modern era. The founders understood that the challenges facing a
nation transformed by the Industrial Revolution and mass immigration
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[[link removed]]_
* U.S. foreign policy
[[link removed]]
* foreign policy
[[link removed]]
* Ukraine
[[link removed]]
* Russia
[[link removed]]
* Gaza
[[link removed]]
* Israel
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
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[[link removed]]
INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT
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argument for a rules-based order. In Israel, he set about burning that
argument to the ground. Is a morally consistent foreign policy
possible?]
[[link removed]]
UKRAINE, ISRAEL AND THE TWO JOE BIDENS
[[link removed]]
Matthew Duss
December 14, 2023
The New Republic
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]
_ In Ukraine, Biden has spent two years articulating a stirring
argument for a rules-based order. In Israel, he set about burning that
argument to the ground. Is a morally consistent foreign policy
possible? _
A bombed apartment building in Gaza,
Luke Skywalker woke me up and told me to go to the bomb shelter, so
there I was. It was 3:30-ish in the morning, in a conference room in
the basement of the Radisson in Odesa’s beautiful central district.
I had arrived in Ukraine several days before, after a 19-hour train
ride from Warsaw, to conduct a week of interviews and site visits to
learn more about the impact of the war. After about 45 minutes, he
gave us the all-clear. “The air alert is over. May the Force be with
you.” About an hour later, just after I’d managed to fall asleep
again, Luke once more rousted me, sending me back downstairs for
another hour of waiting.
Skywalker was speaking to me through the Air Alert app, to which actor
Mark Hamill lent his voice
[[link removed]] for
the English-language warning. The app allows you to input your
location in Ukraine and warns you when there are incoming strikes on
that area. Fortunately, for me at least, the strikes on Odesa were not
close to where I was that night.
The afternoon before, as I sat at lunch with a group of local
government officials and activists, all our phones went off. Every one
in the nearby park, too. I sat up, ready to get to cover, but no one
moved. They listened. They knew the telltale sounds of a nearing
strike, and they heard none. One in our group, a woman from Odesa who
had been a wine importer/exporter before February 2022 but since then
had become a local guide, translator, and community organizer,
characterized what she thought many Ukrainians were feeling at the
time. “We know we can have victory. We know the cost. We believed in
this victory when it made no sense, but now it’s within reach.”
Others around the table began tearing up as they nodded in agreement.
In 2022, I wrote
[[link removed]] a
piece for _The New Republic_ arguing that supporting Ukraine’s
defense is in line with progressive values and important for the U.S.
left. A year later, I wanted to follow it up with another piece, and
this time I felt it necessary to go to Ukraine, to at least get as
much of a feel for the situation as a week would allow. What I would
not do is spend a few days and then return to gravely opine on what
I’d learned “while on the ground.”
I arrived with a set of questions. Why is the counteroffensive going
so slowly compared to last year? Are Ukrainians still willing to
fight? How is morale? Do they see themselves as proxies? Are
negotiations to end the war possible? What should solidarity with
Ukrainians look like now? What are the stakes for U.S. security of the
outcome of this war that for nearly two years was the focus of the
Western world?
In Ukraine, Restraint
The Ukrainians I spoke with acknowledged that the 2023
counteroffensive was moving much slower
[[link removed]] than
the previous year’s, whose surprising effectiveness had convinced
many, Ukrainians and others, that complete victory was achievable.
Some explain this by noting that Russian troops were not as well dug
in last time, and its recruits were far greener. In the past year,
Russian forces have been able to dig into positions and create vast,
multilayered minefields
[[link removed]] in
the eastern portions of occupied Ukraine, all of which makes for much
slower going for Ukrainian forces. The people I talked to believed
that, with continued support—especially the provision of Army
Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, which President Joe Biden agreed
to send
[[link removed]] in
late September, after months of hesitation—they can slowly bring
more Russian-controlled territory in range and potentially force a
better outcome. How that exactly will happen is unclear.
According to Ukrainian and U.S. sources, cluster munitions—which,
because of the risks of harm to innocents, were controversial in the
United States when the Biden administration announced
[[link removed]] in
July that it would send them—made a difference in advancing the
Ukrainian counteroffensive, in holding off a Russian
countercounteroffensive, and as a demining tool. U.S. officials have
acknowledged concerns about the harm unexploded ordnance can do to
civilians, but they argued
[[link removed]] that
areas where the cluster munitions are being deployed are already
heavily mined, and they will be off-limits to civilians for a long
time.
Ukrainian government officials are treating oversight and end-use
monitoring of U.S. and allied military support as sacred, according to
one official. They know that the world is watching to make sure that
weapons supplied by the United States and its allies are not
proliferating into the black market, and that any evidence that this
was happening would diminish Western public support for continuing
those supplies. To date, there is no evidence of end-use diversion;
there have been efforts by Russians to take weapons lost
[[link removed]] on
the battlefield to try to prove diversion, officials say. Potential
smuggling is a concern, but right now the smuggling routes are going
into Ukraine, not out. That could change at some point.
Up until now, the theory of the case for the United States and the
European powers has been to support Ukraine as it gains the strongest
possible position on the battlefield, which will put the Ukrainians in
the best possible position for negotiations. With the war having
ground to effective stalemate, we appear to have reached that point,
with Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny, admitting as much
[[link removed]] in
an early November interview.
Those involved in the fighting were not saying any of that, at least
not in September. They were very clear on what was and was not needed
to win the war. “F-16s are expensive, need ammunition, easy to shoot
down, a waste of money,” said Mamuka Mamulashvili, the commander of
Ukraine’s Georgian legion, a unit of about 1,600 Georgians and a
collection of volunteers from a dozen other regions, including Japan
and Latin America. (The Americans and Brits don’t last long, he told
me. They like sleeping in beds.) What the war effort really needs
right now, he told me, are High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or
HIMARS, shells; ATACMS missiles; and other ammunition, not big, sexy
items like F-16 fighter jets.
We were sitting at a picnic table in a former summer camp on the
outskirts of Kyiv, near swings and a jungle gym. He’s been fighting
the Russians since he was a 14-year-old kid, he tells me. He’s in
his mid-forties now, a large man, who reminded me of a more fit Nick
Frost. Every few minutes, one of his troops whizzes by on an electric
scooter fitted with big off-road tires. The unit is testing them out
for use in the field, Mamuka said. They can go 50 miles on a single
charge, move quietly, and carry 300 pounds of weight, more than enough
for a soldier and gear. Another example of the innovations this war
has produced, in response to the requirement to do more with less.
In Kyiv, apart from a few armed troops, patriotic posters, and
recruiting stations, one would barely even know that there’s a war
on. In Odesa, the war is more in evidence: Various buildings in the
historic central downtown area were damaged or destroyed in missile
strikes. But in both cities, people are out, and the culture is
lively. Even on weeknights, bars and restaurants seemed crowded.
Saturday night in Odesa was downright festive, which was very striking
for what is essentially a frontline city, given its strategic
significance as a major port. Most of the people I spoke with reported
that the February 2022 invasion triggered a Ukrainian national
cultural renaissance, not just in civic and volunteer activity
responding to an internal displacement crisis, but in arts, culture,
restaurants, music. One of Vladimir Putin’s goals was to snuff out
Ukrainian national identity. He has achieved the opposite in
spectacular fashion.
All that aside, we are where we are: stalemate. All the Ukrainians I
spoke to felt strongly that they can achieve complete victory,
retaking all territory occupied by Russia since 2014, including
Crimea. (These views may be different in areas closer to the front
lines.) Any resolution of the war that does not satisfy this will be
extremely politically difficult for the Ukrainian government. A
recent _Time _profile of Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelenskiy described him
[[link removed]] as
increasingly frustrated with the state of the war and what he views as
foot-dragging on the part of Western allies, and singularly focused on
the goal of complete victory.
However, if a negotiated deal offered the possibility of a real and
durable (key word) end to the war, I think it would have to be
considered. (And we should have no illusions about what this would
mean for areas still occupied by Russia.) Those who argue that such a
deal could have been secured shortly after the war began ask us to
ignore the evidence that Putin still wants what he wanted when he
launched the invasion: the end of Ukraine as an independent political
entity, and its reabsorption into “Greater Russia.” There seems to
be a tendency among some to treat diplomacy as if it’s a button we
can just jam harder to make the peace elevator come faster, but
that’s not how either of these things works. It’s worth discussing
what such a deal might comprise, but until Putin indicates any
interest, we’d just be negotiating among ourselves.
The argument persists that the United States and NATO sought this war.
It’s worth remembering that Biden had a summit
[[link removed]] with
Putin in June 2021, for the purpose of bringing some clarity and
stability to the relationship. The administration’s goal was to park
the Russia problem out of the way and focus on China. But later, once
the Russian invasion started to look like a real possibility that
fall, Biden dispatched
[[link removed]] CIA
Director Bill Burns (unofficial special envoy for really tough stuff)
to talk to Putin. There was a Biden-Putin phone call
[[link removed]] the
following February, shortly before the invasion. German Chancellor
Olaf Scholz went to meet
[[link removed]] with
Putin, as did French President Emmanuel Macron, both making clear in
public remarks afterward that they sought a security arrangement
acceptable to Russia, which was understood by all as “we’re ready
to find a solution to your stated NATO concern.”
The growth of NATO was undoubtedly an irritant to Russia. We don’t
need to believe Putin on this; numerous U.S. officials have reported
it
[[link removed]] over
the years. But it turned out that, notwithstanding the continuing NATO
obsession in some quarters, Putin’s grievances and goals were far
broader than just that, as he has by now explained multiple times.
President Biden has continued to resist
[[link removed]] bringing
Ukraine into NATO, which should disprove claims that this war is a
plot to expand the U.S. empire. But for most of the people making that
claim, that U.S. goal is simply a given. It’s unfalsifiable.
Similarly, the fact that the United States and European allies are now
apparently urging the Ukrainians to consider ways to wrap it up should
complicate the argument
[[link removed]] that NATO is
“willing to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.” But that argument
was never based in reality.
Another argument, potentially the more dangerous one in my view, is
the one advanced by the triumphalist liberal interventionists
[[link removed]],
who saw in the February 2022 Russian invasion the return of a sense of
mission. I got an early taste of this in December 2021, when I
attended a conference in Berlin. Over wine and hors d’oeuvres, we
were treated to remarks from a very self-serious pundit who could
barely contain his excitement about the then-gathering Russian
operation in Ukraine. History was back. Meaning was back. War in
Europe. He was almost vibrating as he spoke.
Others in the room found his remarks, which could’ve been delivered
from a balcony, innervating and inspiring. There were grave, serious
nods all around. I found them terrifying.
In my 2022 piece, I cautioned
[[link removed]] against
reading too much into the war in Ukraine from an American standpoint.
Ukraine is not a manic pixie dream war that will restore our
democratic mojo. There have been numerous
[[link removed]] examples
[[link removed]] of
this argument
[[link removed]] over
the last two years: Russia’s war on Ukraine “marks a critical
juncture that will determine the course of global democracy”;
“everything we should care about is on the line there”; “Ukraine
is critical to rebuilding our democratic consensus”; the “future
of the democratic world will be determined by whether the Ukrainian
military can break a stalemate with Russia.”
Considering the massive surge in democratic political activism we saw
in the United States in the wake of Donald Trump’s election,
particularly in 2020 in response to the murder of George
Floyd—the largest protests
[[link removed]] in
U.S. history, supported by
[[link removed]] solidarity
protests around the world—the idea that we need a foreign war to
reinvigorate our democracy is just another symptom of our diseased
political class.
Ironically, Biden’s approach indicates an understanding of the
significant yet still not existential stakes of the war. Early on, he
put a hard ceiling on the level of direct U.S. involvement, quickly
tamped down
[[link removed]] calls
for a no-fly zone, made clear
[[link removed]] that
U.S. troops would not fight in Ukraine, and slowly elevated
[[link removed]] the
quantity and quality of military aid the United States and allies
provided, rightly watching Putin’s potential response. (His hawkish
critics have characterized
[[link removed]] this
caution as bowing to Putin’s nuclear blackmail. I would call it
wisely trying to avoid all of us dying in a nuclear holocaust.) His
administration’s decision to publicize
[[link removed]] its
intel about Russia’s movements was also a clever and effective
example of prioritizing results over militarism. Biden’s Ukraine
policy has been, by any reasonable definition, one of restraint.
It’s always been strange to me that my colleagues in the restraint
community are among the least likely to recognize this.
Nonaligned countries in the global south have been slow to join the
Western alliance in support of Ukraine. A Ukrainian foreign ministry
official outlined Ukraine’s general diplomatic strategy and
explained the complexity of trying to engage with Africa, Latin
America, and Southeast Asia. From the Ukrainian point of view, the
conflict between Russia and Ukraine is a postcolonial war. To discuss
it in such terms around representatives from the global south,
however, was liable to generate resentment because many in the
nonaligned world identified Ukraine’s allies (the United States and
Europe) with imperialism and colonialism, and the Russians with
support for the anti-colonialist cause. Invoking past imperialism
generated resistance rather than solidarity.
Less than a month later, this divide would be starkly illustrated. The
Biden administration, having spent two years articulating a stirring
argument for a rules-based order, would now set about burning that
argument to the ground.
I arrived with a set of questions. Why is the counteroffensive going
so slowly compared to last year? Are Ukrainians still willing to
fight? How is morale? Do they see themselves as proxies? Are
negotiations to end the war possible? What should solidarity with
Ukrainians look like now? What are the stakes for U.S. security of the
outcome of this war that for nearly two years was the focus of the
Western world?
In Ukraine, Restraint
The Ukrainians I spoke with acknowledged that the 2023
counteroffensive was moving much slower
[[link removed]] than
the previous year’s, whose surprising effectiveness had convinced
many, Ukrainians and others, that complete victory was achievable.
Some explain this by noting that Russian troops were not as well dug
in last time, and its recruits were far greener. In the past year,
Russian forces have been able to dig into positions and create vast,
multilayered minefields
[[link removed]] in
the eastern portions of occupied Ukraine, all of which makes for much
slower going for Ukrainian forces. The people I talked to believed
that, with continued support—especially the provision of Army
Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, which President Joe Biden agreed
to send
[[link removed]] in
late September, after months of hesitation—they can slowly bring
more Russian-controlled territory in range and potentially force a
better outcome. How that exactly will happen is unclear.
According to Ukrainian and U.S. sources, cluster munitions—which,
because of the risks of harm to innocents, were controversial in the
United States when the Biden administration announced
[[link removed]] in
July that it would send them—made a difference in advancing the
Ukrainian counteroffensive, in holding off a Russian
countercounteroffensive, and as a demining tool. U.S. officials have
acknowledged concerns about the harm unexploded ordnance can do to
civilians, but they argued
[[link removed]] that
areas where the cluster munitions are being deployed are already
heavily mined, and they will be off-limits to civilians for a long
time.
Ukrainian government officials are treating oversight and end-use
monitoring of U.S. and allied military support as sacred, according to
one official. They know that the world is watching to make sure that
weapons supplied by the United States and its allies are not
proliferating into the black market, and that any evidence that this
was happening would diminish Western public support for continuing
those supplies. To date, there is no evidence of end-use diversion;
there have been efforts by Russians to take weapons lost
[[link removed]] on
the battlefield to try to prove diversion, officials say. Potential
smuggling is a concern, but right now the smuggling routes are going
into Ukraine, not out. That could change at some point.
Up until now, the theory of the case for the United States and the
European powers has been to support Ukraine as it gains the strongest
possible position on the battlefield, which will put the Ukrainians in
the best possible position for negotiations. With the war having
ground to effective stalemate, we appear to have reached that point,
with Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny, admitting as much
[[link removed]] in
an early November interview.
Those involved in the fighting were not saying any of that, at least
not in September. They were very clear on what was and was not needed
to win the war. “F-16s are expensive, need ammunition, easy to shoot
down, a waste of money,” said Mamuka Mamulashvili, the commander of
Ukraine’s Georgian legion, a unit of about 1,600 Georgians and a
collection of volunteers from a dozen other regions, including Japan
and Latin America. (The Americans and Brits don’t last long, he told
me. They like sleeping in beds.) What the war effort really needs
right now, he told me, are High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or
HIMARS, shells; ATACMS missiles; and other ammunition, not big, sexy
items like F-16 fighter jets.
We were sitting at a picnic table in a former summer camp on the
outskirts of Kyiv, near swings and a jungle gym. He’s been fighting
the Russians since he was a 14-year-old kid, he tells me. He’s in
his mid-forties now, a large man, who reminded me of a more fit Nick
Frost. Every few minutes, one of his troops whizzes by on an electric
scooter fitted with big off-road tires. The unit is testing them out
for use in the field, Mamuka said. They can go 50 miles on a single
charge, move quietly, and carry 300 pounds of weight, more than enough
for a soldier and gear. Another example of the innovations this war
has produced, in response to the requirement to do more with less.
In Kyiv, apart from a few armed troops, patriotic posters, and
recruiting stations, one would barely even know that there’s a war
on. In Odesa, the war is more in evidence: Various buildings in the
historic central downtown area were damaged or destroyed in missile
strikes. But in both cities, people are out, and the culture is
lively. Even on weeknights, bars and restaurants seemed crowded.
Saturday night in Odesa was downright festive, which was very striking
for what is essentially a frontline city, given its strategic
significance as a major port. Most of the people I spoke with reported
that the February 2022 invasion triggered a Ukrainian national
cultural renaissance, not just in civic and volunteer activity
responding to an internal displacement crisis, but in arts, culture,
restaurants, music. One of Vladimir Putin’s goals was to snuff out
Ukrainian national identity. He has achieved the opposite in
spectacular fashion.
All that aside, we are where we are: stalemate. All the Ukrainians I
spoke to felt strongly that they can achieve complete victory,
retaking all territory occupied by Russia since 2014, including
Crimea. (These views may be different in areas closer to the front
lines.) Any resolution of the war that does not satisfy this will be
extremely politically difficult for the Ukrainian government. A
recent _Time _profile of Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelenskiy described him
[[link removed]] as
increasingly frustrated with the state of the war and what he views as
foot-dragging on the part of Western allies, and singularly focused on
the goal of complete victory.
However, if a negotiated deal offered the possibility of a real and
durable (key word) end to the war, I think it would have to be
considered. (And we should have no illusions about what this would
mean for areas still occupied by Russia.) Those who argue that such a
deal could have been secured shortly after the war began ask us to
ignore the evidence that Putin still wants what he wanted when he
launched the invasion: the end of Ukraine as an independent political
entity, and its reabsorption into “Greater Russia.” There seems to
be a tendency among some to treat diplomacy as if it’s a button we
can just jam harder to make the peace elevator come faster, but
that’s not how either of these things works. It’s worth discussing
what such a deal might comprise, but until Putin indicates any
interest, we’d just be negotiating among ourselves.
The argument persists that the United States and NATO sought this war.
It’s worth remembering that Biden had a summit
[[link removed]] with
Putin in June 2021, for the purpose of bringing some clarity and
stability to the relationship. The administration’s goal was to park
the Russia problem out of the way and focus on China. But later, once
the Russian invasion started to look like a real possibility that
fall, Biden dispatched
[[link removed]] CIA
Director Bill Burns (unofficial special envoy for really tough stuff)
to talk to Putin. There was a Biden-Putin phone call
[[link removed]] the
following February, shortly before the invasion. German Chancellor
Olaf Scholz went to meet
[[link removed]] with
Putin, as did French President Emmanuel Macron, both making clear in
public remarks afterward that they sought a security arrangement
acceptable to Russia, which was understood by all as “we’re ready
to find a solution to your stated NATO concern.”
The growth of NATO was undoubtedly an irritant to Russia. We don’t
need to believe Putin on this; numerous U.S. officials have reported
it
[[link removed]] over
the years. But it turned out that, notwithstanding the continuing NATO
obsession in some quarters, Putin’s grievances and goals were far
broader than just that, as he has by now explained multiple times.
President Biden has continued to resist
[[link removed]] bringing
Ukraine into NATO, which should disprove claims that this war is a
plot to expand the U.S. empire. But for most of the people making that
claim, that U.S. goal is simply a given. It’s unfalsifiable.
Similarly, the fact that the United States and European allies are now
apparently urging the Ukrainians to consider ways to wrap it up should
complicate the argument
[[link removed]] that NATO is
“willing to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.” But that argument
was never based in reality.
Another argument, potentially the more dangerous one in my view, is
the one advanced by the triumphalist liberal interventionists
[[link removed]],
who saw in the February 2022 Russian invasion the return of a sense of
mission. I got an early taste of this in December 2021, when I
attended a conference in Berlin. Over wine and hors d’oeuvres, we
were treated to remarks from a very self-serious pundit who could
barely contain his excitement about the then-gathering Russian
operation in Ukraine. History was back. Meaning was back. War in
Europe. He was almost vibrating as he spoke.
Others in the room found his remarks, which could’ve been delivered
from a balcony, innervating and inspiring. There were grave, serious
nods all around. I found them terrifying.
In my 2022 piece, I cautioned
[[link removed]] against
reading too much into the war in Ukraine from an American standpoint.
Ukraine is not a manic pixie dream war that will restore our
democratic mojo. There have been numerous
[[link removed]] examples
[[link removed]] of
this argument
[[link removed]] over
the last two years: Russia’s war on Ukraine “marks a critical
juncture that will determine the course of global democracy”;
“everything we should care about is on the line there”; “Ukraine
is critical to rebuilding our democratic consensus”; the “future
of the democratic world will be determined by whether the Ukrainian
military can break a stalemate with Russia.”
Considering the massive surge in democratic political activism we saw
in the United States in the wake of Donald Trump’s election,
particularly in 2020 in response to the murder of George
Floyd—the largest protests
[[link removed]] in
U.S. history, supported by
[[link removed]] solidarity
protests around the world—the idea that we need a foreign war to
reinvigorate our democracy is just another symptom of our diseased
political class.
Ironically, Biden’s approach indicates an understanding of the
significant yet still not existential stakes of the war. Early on, he
put a hard ceiling on the level of direct U.S. involvement, quickly
tamped down
[[link removed]] calls
for a no-fly zone, made clear
[[link removed]] that
U.S. troops would not fight in Ukraine, and slowly elevated
[[link removed]] the
quantity and quality of military aid the United States and allies
provided, rightly watching Putin’s potential response. (His hawkish
critics have characterized
[[link removed]] this
caution as bowing to Putin’s nuclear blackmail. I would call it
wisely trying to avoid all of us dying in a nuclear holocaust.) His
administration’s decision to publicize
[[link removed]] its
intel about Russia’s movements was also a clever and effective
example of prioritizing results over militarism. Biden’s Ukraine
policy has been, by any reasonable definition, one of restraint.
It’s always been strange to me that my colleagues in the restraint
community are among the least likely to recognize this.
Nonaligned countries in the global south have been slow to join the
Western alliance in support of Ukraine. A Ukrainian foreign ministry
official outlined Ukraine’s general diplomatic strategy and
explained the complexity of trying to engage with Africa, Latin
America, and Southeast Asia. From the Ukrainian point of view, the
conflict between Russia and Ukraine is a postcolonial war. To discuss
it in such terms around representatives from the global south,
however, was liable to generate resentment because many in the
nonaligned world identified Ukraine’s allies (the United States and
Europe) with imperialism and colonialism, and the Russians with
support for the anti-colonialist cause. Invoking past imperialism
generated resistance rather than solidarity.
Less than a month later, this divide would be starkly illustrated. The
Biden administration, having spent two years articulating a stirring
argument for a rules-based order, would now set about burning that
argument to the ground.
While in Israel …
There’s a photo exhibit in the square by St. Michael’s, panels of
photos comparing bombed-out Warsaw in World War II to Mariupol in
2022. As I looked at the pictures, I thought, they could add Gaza to
this. That was in September, before the latest onslaught
[[link removed]] by
Israel in response to the savage Hamas attacks of October 7. The late
2023 violence is worse than anything before; indeed, even before the
October 7 massacres, 2023 was already the deadliest
[[link removed]] year for Palestinians since
2015.
I last visited Israel-Palestine in March. I recalled sitting in
Inshirah Khamus’s house in Huwara, just south of Nablus in the
occupied West Bank. The windows of Inshirah’s house were broken.
Outside the front door were several cars burned to carbonized husks.
Inshirah, who is in her mid-seventies, was telling us about the night
of February 26, 2023, when the home she shares with family members,
children and grandchildren, was attacked by a mob of Israeli settlers
who rampaged through the town
[[link removed]],
killing one person and injuring more than 100 others, burning homes
and property in revenge for the killing of two settlers earlier in the
day. According to
[[link removed]] Maj.
Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, the head of the Israel Defense Forces’ Central
Command, “What happened in Huwara was a pogrom.”
The February 26 pogrom was unique only in its size and intensity.
Israeli settler terrorism against Palestinians is a regular feature of
the Israeli occupation, carried out under the watchful eyes of the
IDF, which intervenes only when things get out of hand. Settler
terrorism in the occupied territories has been on the rise
[[link removed]] for years. It’s been
getting even more intense now, because settlers know they don’t just
have allies in government, they are the government
[[link removed]].
Inshirah was inside her home when the mob came on February 26. She had
watched the Israeli army driving back and forth in their jeeps as the
settlers massed for violence, doing nothing, as they almost always do.
The Israeli army’s violence is reserved for Palestinians. You may
have seen a picture of Inshirah being escorted
[[link removed]] out
of her burning home by Israeli troops. It was shared widely by Israeli
PR flacks to demonstrate the morality of the IDF. The reality is the
opposite. The IDF enabled the fire to be set in the first place.
You may have heard that the goal of the occupation is to provide
“security” for Israel. That talking point is strictly for American
tourists and members of Congress. The overriding goal of Israeli
policy in the occupied territories is to take control of Palestinian
land. Settler terrorism is one of the many tools of that policy.
Establishing colonies, usually referred to as settlements, is one.
Expropriating Palestinian land under various security pretexts is
another. It’s a big toolbox.
When Inshirah was a child, her family fled Jaffa in the Nakba, Arabic
for “the catastrophe,” which refers to the mass displacement and
dispossession [[link removed]] of some
700,000 Palestinians at the creation of the state of Israel. Now
Israeli extremists are trying to make her a refugee again. This is
what millions of Palestinians have endured every day, even before
October 7. As of early December, around 1.8 million have been
displaced
[[link removed]] in
Gaza.
I had all of this in mind when I heard President Biden’s October 20
Oval Office speech positing an equivalence
[[link removed]] between
Israel and Ukraine, which I found misleading and, frankly, offensive.
The reality is that Russia is occupying Ukraine to end Ukrainian
self-determination, and Israel is doing the same to Palestine.
“They’re not a real people and the land is really ours by right”
is the position of both the Russian and Israeli governments regarding
Ukrainians and Palestinians. Israel’s methods are not as extreme as
Russia’s, and it’s very important to acknowledge that, but its
goal is nonetheless the same: the prevention of the other’s
independence. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said
explicitly
[[link removed]] that
he had helped sustain Hamas in power in Gaza precisely because it
served that goal. Many, including Israeli security officials, have
been warning for years that it would lead to exactly what we’re
seeing now: all-out war.
Hamas’s October 7 attack was abominable beyond description.
Continuing to fire rockets into Israeli communities is abominable.
Holding hostages is abominable. I’ll continue to insist on all those
things. I’ll continue to condemn those on the left, or anywhere, who
show any sympathy whatsoever for Hamas. I do not ignore the very real
security challenges Israel has faced and continues to face. I
acknowledge—more than that; I insist that we state
forthrightly—that the Palestinian people have been extremely poorly
served
[[link removed]] by
a corrupt, incompetent leadership that has made a series of bad
choices that have contributed to this situation. I deeply feel the
absolute horror of the October 7 attacks, the grief and rage and
trauma that Israelis continued to feel as more stories pour out about
that day. I have very close friends who have been called up into the
Israeli military reserves, pulled away from young families, now
deployed in places they can’t reveal, who are terrified of what is
coming. I am terrified for them.
I deeply feel the absolute horror of the October 7 attacks. I have
very close friends who have been called up into the Israeli military
reserves, terrified of what is coming. I am terrified for them. What
I won’t do is pretend that history began on October 7.
What I won’t do, what none of us should do, is pretend that history
began on October 7. I will not pretend that Israel is acting purely in
self-defense. Its occupation, the various acts of violence against
civilians, and the settlement/colonization project that the occupation
facilitates are a war crime—in fact, multiple war crimes
[[link removed]],
committed every single day, for years. The Israeli government is using
methods right now against Palestinians that no one hesitates to call
terrorism when used by Russia against Ukraine. (Indeed, not only do
many of our politicians not criticize it in Israel’s case;
they cheer it on
[[link removed]].)
When one understands the vast machinery of violence and control and
segregation
[[link removed]] that
Israel imposes on Palestinians, the suggestion that Israelis are the
ones in this relationship facing an existential threat just seems like
gaslighting.
“You know, history has taught us that when terrorists don’t pay a
price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their
aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction,”
Biden said from the Oval Office
[[link removed]].
“They keep going. And the cost and the threats to America and the
world keep rising.”
This is a remarkable passage. He’s so close to getting it! I
thought. He could be describing America’s decades-long refusal to
impose, and its ongoing diplomatic efforts to prevent, any
consequences whatsoever for Israeli aggression against Palestinian
civilians. To make sure Israel pays no price. Biden’s words about
adhering to international law are nice and welcome, but in the absence
of any genuine accountability, that’s all they are. Biden
has regularly voiced concern
[[link removed]] about
the right-wing threat to Israeli democracy, but the irony is that the
unconditional U.S. support he championed in the aftermath of October
7, as he has for his entire political career
[[link removed]],
has been wind at the back of the Israeli far right. And importantly:
It has not made Israel secure.
And even though this speech was intended for a domestic audience, the
whole world was obviously watching. The United States has put a great
deal of effort in appealing to the global south/nonaligned world on a
range of issues, including support for Ukraine. That effort was
mortally wounded when the whole global south saw the West’s blatant
double standard. (“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the
International Criminal Court.”) Biden’s speech probably put that
effort in the grave. To that extent, it was a propaganda victory for
Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, and other
anti-U.S. leaders who have long claimed that appeals to international
law, and to a so-called rules-based order, are simply a self-righteous
gloss on the jealous pursuit of U.S. interests. The weeks after
October 7 have proved them correct in the eyes of much of the world.
“Nothing about you without you” is a U.S. slogan reserved for
Ukrainians
[[link removed]],
with the Palestinians still treated as objects to be acted upon by
great powers, their fate presumably to be determined by others, their
national rights barely meriting a remark.
“American leadership is what holds the world together,” Biden
said, as the world burned. “We are, as my friend Madeleine Albright
said, ‘the indispensable nation.’” Those lines show how, despite
his administration’s admirable capacity to assimilate some of the
progressive left’s energy and ideas, Biden remains stuck in the
past. While Biden has taken some pragmatic foreign policy steps, such
as the Afghanistan withdrawal
[[link removed]],
the weeks after October 7 revealed that he is still a deeply
ideological president, committed to a very particular vision of
American primacy. U.S. policy for Ukraine and Israel-Palestine offers
opportunities for a new and more consistently principled approach to
the world, if only we had an administration that was interested. The
rehabilitation of Cold War liberal interventionism, and its mutant
twin neoconservatism, is perhaps as much a threat to American
democracy as Trumpism. The former, after all, gave birth to the
latter.
June 2, 2020, was the day I started to think that Biden’s presidency
might be more than just a lesser evil. Until then, he was the
candidate of restoration, the guy who would let you go back to not
paying attention to politics. The candidate who promised
[[link removed]] wealthy
donors that “nothing would fundamentally change.” But that day in
June, he gave the most important speech
[[link removed]] of
his campaign, maybe of his political career, during the massive
nationwide protests in response to the murder of George Floyd by
former police officer Derek Chauvin. It was his fullest acknowledgment
to that point of the deep-seated problems in American society and an
assertion that a return to the status quo was insufficient.
“The battle for the soul of this nation has been a constant
push-and-pull for more than 240 years,” he said. “A tug-of-war
between the American ideal that we are all created equal and the harsh
reality that racism has long torn us apart.”
I thought of that speech one recent autumn day as I sat in a meeting
with several leaders of U.S. civil rights organizations. Alicia Garza,
co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, referred to the
response to the post–October 7 assault on Gaza as “an
international George Floyd moment.”
Throughout his political career, Biden has been less a shaper of
consensus than a reflection of it. This is not necessarily a
criticism. Such politicians play an important role in both
accelerating and consolidating a new consensus, as Biden did in
responding to protests against anti-Black violence during the
campaign, as he previously did on gay marriage
[[link removed]] in
the Obama administration, and is currently doing
[[link removed]] around
the post-neoliberal economic order since taking office.
Thus far, Biden has not risen to this moment as he did to the other.
He shows no indication of understanding that his approach to the
region, which consigned
[[link removed]] Palestinians
and other Arab publics to a future of repression, helped lay the
kindling for this conflagration. While administration officials have
insisted
[[link removed]] that
we cannot return to the pre–October 7 status quo in Gaza (as if that
were even an option now that Israel’s relentless bombing, which
Biden admitted
[[link removed]] was
“indiscriminate,” has made Palestine’s largest city an
uninhabitable ruin
[[link removed]]),
they have yet to signal any meaningful shift in that approach.
But a shift in approach is desperately needed. It feels absurd to
propose ideas for “the day after” while the casualties continue to
mount in Gaza. Biden needs to genuinely commit to a real process to
end the occupation and ensure Palestinian liberation and
self-determination. He doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel
here—there’s an entire body of international law and U.N. security
resolutions charting a path. If Biden really wants to show the world
that he stands behind the words of racial and social justice that he
beautifully articulated in the summer of 2020, if he wants to show
that he is genuinely interested in strengthening the principles of
international law that have undergirded his admirable support for the
defense of Ukraine, then Palestine would be a good place to finally
start.
_Matthew Duss
[[link removed]] @mattduss
[[link removed]] is executive vice president at the
Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to
Senator Bernie Sanders._
_The New Republic was founded in 1914 to bring liberalism into the
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[[link removed]]_
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[[link removed]]
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