Remember that $230 million ‘humanitarian pier’ that the Americans moored off the coast of Gaza? It was announced with great fanfare in Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in March. But earlier this month, the White House quietly mothballed the project. It had not been built to withstand inclement weather, you see, so sections of the causeway broke off and washed up among the sunbathers on Tel Aviv’s Frishman Beach. During the first week in which the pier had been operational, three-quarters of the aid it delivered had been stolen by unspecified Palestinians on the way to a UN warehouse.
Who would have thought that the administration responsible for the chaotic Afghan withdrawal would botch this project too? But if the pier succeeded in one way, it was in providing us with a metaphor for much of Joe Biden’s foreign policy.
Biden’s appeasement of Iran has led the regime to become more powerful than ever. It is now just a week or two from producing enough fissile material for a bomb, as Antony Blinken confessed in Aspen last week, and has learned that it can attack Israel with huge force and expect the free world to restrict itself to defence. He failed to deter Russia from invading Ukraine, and his limited support for Kyiv has locked the country in a cycle of degradation. The war in Gaza – which could have been over long ago had the White House shown some leadership – wears on. Across the world, autocracies, terrorists and troublemakers have learned to see the United States as a gorgon identifying as a runt.
Israel has moved Biden’s passions powerfully ever since his father instilled in him the belief that it was a profoundly just response to the Holocaust. So it is his legacy regarding the Jewish state that best provides the historical yardstick by which Biden can be measured.
In the months since 7 October, commentators like me have vented our frustration often with the increasingly decrepit leader of the free world. There was the time he withheld shipments of arms, then released them, then got dragged into an unseemly row with Benjamin Netanyahu. There was the relentless, public finger-wagging at America’s supposed ally, including during his State of the Union address, eroding the perception of unity and emboldening the enemy. There was the one-track desire for a hostage deal, the surest way to make your opponent withhold it. There was the escalating rhetoric, beginning with suggestions that the Jewish state had gone ‘over the top’ and ending with accusing it of ‘indiscriminate bombing’ when the very weaponry his country was providing was designed for maximum precision.
Yet the most infuriating part was that interspersed with these missteps, blunders and examples of unfairness were expressions of true support for Jerusalem. Biden was sharply critical of the ‘outrageous’ International Criminal Court’s pursuit of an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, ultimately allowed deliveries of vital armaments to continue and, in the aftermath of the October pogroms, moved two aircraft carrier strike groups to the Eastern Mediterranean, deterring Hezbollah and Iran. Let’s not forget the international military coalition he assembled to defend the Jewish state from more than 300 projectiles last April. Without Biden, that night could have been very dark.
These are profound gestures of allyship. They are indicative of a lifetime of support for Israel that Biden’s erratic handling of the Gaza war can by no means eclipse. He commenced his career in the Senate in 1973, against the backdrop of the Yom Kippur War; Israel’s leader at the time, Golda Meir, famously told the young senator that the secret to her people’s courage was that ‘we have no place to go’, an observation that clearly stayed with him. But his support for the Jewish state was not just principled, it relied on a fulsome understanding of America’s global strategic needs. In 1986, when he was a senator for Delaware, he remarked: ‘Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.’
His heart has always ended up in the right place. Despite his difficult relationship with Netanyahu – he famously scrawled on an old photograph of the two men, ‘Bibi, I love you, but I don’t agree with a damn thing you had to say’ – he always retained a commitment to the country, insisting as recently as last year: ‘I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist and I am a Zionist’.
Contrast this with Biden’s expected successor, Kamala Harris. She was the first senior member of the administration to demand an ‘immediate ceasefire’. In March, with the debate about Rafah dominating the headlines, she insisted that it was impossible to move the civilians from the city. ‘I have studied the maps’, she told ABC. ‘There’s nowhere for those folks to go.’ A million people were then evacuated to an expanded safe zone in central Gaza in ten days. Oops.
Harris is not even the worst. In November, the representative for the swing state of Michigan, Rashida Tlaib, abstained in a vote for Israel’s right to exist, while the lunatic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez famously wept when funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system was approved. Whether she shed a tear for the 1,200 Israeli civilians who were butchered on 7 October is unknown. These women, and their fellow members of the progressive ‘Squad’, no longer stand a chance of getting on the ticket at the Democratic convention in August, but in Harris they will find a more sympathetic figure than President Biden. Come November, Americans may find themselves with a nightmare choice between an orange ogre who threatens to subvert the norms of liberal democracy and roll out a shamefully isolationist foreign policy, particularly in Ukraine, and a radical progressive proxy who will sell one of their greatest allies down the river.
Biden, by contrast, is a Democrat of the old school. Humanitarian pier or no humanitarian pier, appeasement or no appeasement, Afghan withdrawal or no Afghan withdrawal, we disregard the strengths of his legacy at our peril. When he was bad, he was bad. But with Kamala Harris and worse waiting in the wings, we may miss the old man when he’s gone.
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