The Biden/Harris administration is inexplicably at it again, threatening Israel amid its ongoing fight for survival.
This is the same administration that has repeatedly scolded Israel not to aggressively enter portions of Gaza that it designated as off-limits, even while Israeli commandos conduct successful operations to free hostages from those same areas.
It’s also the same Biden/Harris administration that boasted one week before Hamas’s gruesome October 7, 2023 assault into Israel that it had achieved a “quieter” Middle East:
The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been for two decades now. Now, challenges remain – Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians – but the amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced.
More recently, Israel made international headlines by pulling off a masterful covert pager detonation operation that killed Hezbollah operatives, followed by additional decapitation of Hezbollah leadership. In so doing, they ignored the ritualistic Biden/Harris admonitions against “escalation,” and conspicuously chose not to tell the administration in advance of its pager attack.
Simply put, a Biden/Harris administration whose signature blunder in executing the Afghanistan withdrawal permanently discredited its pretense of competency is in no position to lecture Israel on the wisdom of its military operations.
Unchastened by its own record of failure, however, the administration is actually doubling down on its habit of attempting to micromanage Israeli security affairs.
In a joint letter from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Israel was informed that it must boost aid to Gaza within thirty days or risk cuts in military aid from the United States:
[T]he Departments of State and Defense must continually assess your government’s adherence to your March 24 assurances that Israel would “facilitate and not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance and U.S. government-supported international efforts to provide humanitarian assistance” to and within Gaza. The Department of State will need to conduct a similar assessment under Section 6201 of the Foreign Assistance Act in order to provide additional Foreign Military Assistance funding to Israel. We are now writing to underscore the U.S. government’s deep concern over the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza, and seek urgent and sustained actions by your government this month to reverse this trajectory.
In other words, the Biden/Harris administration seeks a show of force against Israel following its string of recent military successes by threating a cutoff of armaments crucial to those successes.
As former National Security Council official and current senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Richard Goldberg lamented, “I’m not sure which is worse to consider, that threatening an ally is a necessary pre-election political theater to pacify radical pro-Hamas leftists or that it’s actually U.S. policy to cut off arms to Israel if Israel doesn’t agree to feed, fuel and fund Hamas.”
Americans should be outraged that the Biden/Harris administration, which has spectacularly bungled every foreign policy hotspot from Afghanistan forward since its early days in office, considers itself equipped or entitled to dictate Israel’s permissible course in preserving its own survival. It’s worse that cheap electoral calculations might underlie that effort.
On that electoral theme, moreover, what suggests that Kamala Harris, who doesn’t even possess Joe Biden’s pre-presidency façade of foreign policy chops, would somehow bring improvement following four similarly bungling years under her incompetent mentor?
Even the most news-averse American voters recognize after four years that Trump’s administration presided over a far more peaceful and stable globe, so Harris faces the additional headwind of convincing them that she’d improve upon Trump’s record even if she could distinguish herself positively from Biden’s helmsmanship.
Her administration’s renewed effort to hamstring Israel as it continues to score impressive wins against the terrorist amalgam arrayed against it offers just the latest reason for doubt in that regard.
Timothy H. Lee is Senior Vice President of legal and public affairs at the Center for Individual Freedom.
Reprinted with Permission from CFIF.org – By Timothy H. Lee
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.