Biden’s meddling in the gaza war shows the impotence of omnipotence  | thearticle

The trouble with being the most powerful man in the world is that somebody is always trying to test you. The President of the United States is supposed to speak softly and carry a big stick,

as Teddy Roosevelt advised; but what if the stick is either too big to be used — nuclear weapons — or not big enough to deter the world’s monsters? And what do you do about allies? No

American President has dared to wage a full-scale war against a foreign country since George W Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Barack Obama could take revenge for the 9/11 attacks by

killing Osama Bin Laden, but he could not prevent Bashir Assad from destroying Syria. Donald Trump could kill Islamic State’s “Caliph”, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and even deploy the largest

non-nuclear bomb ever used, but he could not intimidate anyone who really mattered, not even “Little Rocket Man” (Kim Jong-Un). Neither Obama nor Trump even tried to force Vladimir Putin or

Xi Jinping to desist from their aggressions and crimes. Now Joe Biden, too, is coming up against the limits of his power. He has just been forced to concede that the companies behind the

Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, a controversial project in the Baltic Sea financed by Russia and Germany, will face no sanctions. Neither America’s rival nor its ally was deterred from deepening

their mutual energy dependence by threats of dire consequences if they went ahead. Instead, Ukraine has been thrown under a bus by the Biden Administration. In the Kremlin, they notice such

things. The most obvious example of Biden’s bluff being called is, however, Israel. The President has called Benjamin Netanyahu three times in five days to put pressure on the Israeli Prime

Minister to call off his airstrikes on Gaza. The conflict with Hamas has now lasted nearly two weeks and in their last conversation Biden demanded a “significant de-escalation”. Netanyahu,

however, politely declined his request. Even if a ceasefire is agreed in the coming day or two, the fact that Biden was rebuffed by a man he knows well but cordially detests will be noted

throughout the Middle East and beyond. The truth is that Biden’s first diplomatic démarche was thoroughly ill-judged. He has intervened merely to appease the Left-wing of the Democratic

Party in Congress, while his counterpart in Jerusalem is fighting for political survival. In such a contest, Netanyahu had far more to lose by backing down and far more to gain by standing

firm. Biden not only hectored Bibi in person but had the media briefed accordingly. Big mistake. The lame-duck leader of a country smaller than New Jersey was able to defy POTUS with

impunity. Prestige is a precious commodity — but it is also an evanescent one. The strategy pursued by the Israel Defence Force has been well-disguised but highly successful: it is to

degrade as far as possible the vast network of underground tunnels and bunkers beneath the Gaza Strip known as “the Metro”. So far, the IDF claims to have destroyed some 60 miles of the Gaza

Metro, burying scores of Hamas terrorists in the process. Despite claims of “disproportionate” Palestinian casualties, it seems that only about a quarter of them are civilians; the rest

belong to Hamas. That is a better ratio than other air forces, including the USAF, usually achieve. The IDF has been using precision weapons in Gaza, rather than the indiscriminate

“bunker-busters” deployed in Syria and elsewhere — let alone the Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb dropped by American forces on IS tunnels in Afghanistan, which annihilates everything within

a 1000 yard radius. Many of the civilians killed in Gaza are victims either of Hamas’s own rockets and depots, or of buildings collapsing because they had been underminded by the Metro. The

purpose of the IDF strategy, as Netanyahu has no doubt tried to explain to Biden, is not only to deter Hamas from attacking Israeli cities, but also to send a warning to Hezbollah and Iran.

The former has a much larger arsenal of missiles deployed in Lebanon, while the latter is developing an underground nuclear capability. The IDF is determined to prove to these enemies that

it can destroy even the most sophisticated subterranean facilities. The present conflict has also demonstrated that Israel’s defensive systems, notably the Iron Dome, have kept pace with

Hamas’s Iranian-supplied rocket science. Even so, Israeli civilian losses are in double figures — in proportion to its population, the equivalent of several hundred Americans. Netanyahu’s

need to show Israel’s enemies that it is still ahead of the game in this struggle for survival explains why Biden’s cajoling fell on deaf ears. The President needs to consider more carefully

when to intervene — and why. Letting himself be bullied by the media or by his party into risking his prestige projects an image not of strength, but of weakness. Where American interests

are directly involved — as is the case in South Korea or Taiwan, for example — it is entirely appropriate for Biden to wield the big stick. He is also right to protest against clear-cut and

egregious abuses of human rights, whether collective — as in the case of China or Burma — or individual, as in the case of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. But the President

should beware of getting drawn into complex, long-standing and lethal disputes such as that between Israel and the Palestinians. If and when the two sides are ready to do a deal and require

an honest broker, he should stand ready to oblige. But that is not where we are. The best thing that Biden can do is to leave well alone. All he has done so far is to demonstrate the

impotence of omnipotence. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now

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