The Biden administration’s plan to build a temporary port to receive aid in Gaza is the worst in a long line of bad decisions with respect to the Israel-Hamas war.
If anything is true about Joe Biden, it’s that he has, in the words of the former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” To give just one representative example, then-Vice President Biden argued against the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 – one of the few signal foreign policy achievements of the Obama administration. So his failures with respect to Afghanistan, Iran, China, the Houthis, and Ukraine are entirely fitting with this personal history. But perhaps the most disappointing foreign policy issue during the past few years has been his approach to the Israel-Hamas war.
I say disappointing because his initial response to the Hamas barbarities was actually quite good. The administration rhetorically supported Israel to the hilt, ramped up military aid and sales, and sent carrier groups to the region to deter a broadening of the conflict by other Iranian proxy groups. Over the past few months, however, that early resolve has steadily eroded under consistently increasing left-wing and international pressure. We have seen it with the steady push for a ceasefire that would only serve Hamas’s interests, the choice to work closely with Qatar (a primary sponsor of Hamas) on negotiations, the constant badgering of Israel about civilian casualties (which are quite low for an operation of this scale and complexity), and the drawing of a ‘red line’ on Israel entering Rafah, the last stronghold of Hamas in Gaza. Still, the most frequent refrain the administration uses against Israel in this conflict revolves around its obsession with humanitarian aid.
The White House and its Democratic supporters have pushed for increased aid to Gaza, blaming Israel for the parlous state of the Gazan population. This runs counter to the facts – that Israel has allowed a large number of aid trucks through border crossings that are sitting in Gaza awaiting distribution by NGOs, that Hamas and other armed gangs are stealing much of this aid, and that in no other war situation is the outside power responsible for the basic needs of the populace whose government began the conflict. Still, the administration has repeatedly upbraided the Israeli government – unfairly and inaccurately singling out Benjamin Netanyahu, who is but one member of a triumvirate War Cabinet – over this issue and has gone out of its way to insinuate itself into it. This was evident when the White House insisted on airdropping aid into Gaza, a tactic that gained the administration few plaudits, resulted in some of the food being thrown away out of anti-American spite, and caused the deaths of several people from falling aid with faulty parachutes.
Now, the Biden team has landed on an even worse idea that they’ve rushed to implement after its announcement during the State of the Union address last week: a floating pier in Gaza meant to deliver humanitarian aid by sea.
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