Political Cynic on a revelatory portion of Jonathan Guyer’s political encyclical.

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In a Box With Biden

Unless President Biden is willing to kick down the sides of the box—checking his own assumptions about Israel, facing down the realities of the electorate, turning to new advisers with a broader perspective, and seeing the Middle East as it is—he will remain constrained.

Many policies to ensure human rights and accountability are already enshrined in law. They are lying in wait, unused. “If we’re going to keep arming Israel then there’s not that much to talk about,” Yager told me.

On most topics in any presidential administration, credit or blame can be broadly distributed. But in this case, the pro-Israel directives are coming from the president himself, with his instincts from another era. “Biden has a multi-decade career where he has proudly stood with Israel at every turn,” Zaha Hassan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told me. “The idea that now, in his later years, he is going to want to distract from that legacy is unlikely.”

The most powerful foreign-policy officials in the Biden administration are negotiating with Israel about getting more flour into Gaza, tweaking rhetoric in press conferences, urging their boss to adjust small policies on the margin, like holding Israeli settlers to account, while failing to make the bigger adjustments needed to deal with the gravity of the crisis at hand. The story is not really one of foreign policy, but of the ideology and psychology of President Biden.

Jonathan Guyer is a foreign-policy reporter and editor based in New York. He worked as managing editor of the Prospect from 2019 to 2021.

Political Cynic