Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once explained his famous quote — “Never let a serious crisis go to waste” — by defining a crisis as “an opportunity to do things you didn’t think you could do before.” And now there is strong reason to believe this approach explains the linkage of Ukraine and Israel in President Biden’s Oct. 19 speech proposing a $105 billion foreign aid package.
On Oct. 4, the White House announced a forthcoming “major speech” on Ukraine, with a clear indication that it was intended to counter increasing skepticism among some in Congress about the amounts of money and weapons the U.S. is funneling into a proxy war with Russia. The disagreement in Congress has potential to cause serious strains within the NATO alliance and generally complicate relations with friends and foes worldwide.
On that date, there was no suggestion of Israel being a significant element in the president’s speech. But three days later, Hamas launched its barbaric attacks in southern Israel and, within a week, the ramifications of that assault, and the Israeli response, had rattled the Middle East and sent shock waves around the world.
By no means least among these ramifications is the dramatic transformation of America’s foreign policy profile as circumstances change. Events are outpacing the capacity of governments, including our own, to deal with them in a fully coherent manner. Accordingly, the president’s proposal has become a casualty of these developments.
On the one hand, by its specifics, it was a clear articulation of the administration’s true foreign policy priorities. However, it also revealed that these priorities contradict major tenets of the foreign policy initiatives the Biden team has pursued for nearly three years.
Most awkwardly, it comes at a time when all U.S. priorities must be re-examined, and some redesigned, in light of the Israel-Hamas war.
Illustrative of these dislocations is an Oct. 23 New York Times article, “War has smashed assumptions about Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” which describes four fundamental elements of U.S. policy that no longer exist, or are at least currently inoperative:
(1) “Hamas could be contained and the conflict managed” — in fact, the terrorist organization is more lethal and unpredictable than ever;
(2) “America can ignore the Middle East” and pivot to Asia or other world trouble spots;
(3) “The Arab world is moving on, despite the Palestinian cause” — which no longer applies while volatility envelops the Middle East at what is perhaps a historic level; and
(4) “Israeli military superiority,” once a constant of the Middle East equation, is now in doubt, with the Jewish state under attack on multiple fronts by organizations with sophisticated weaponry and is consuming its own munition stockpiles at an alarming rate.
A major goal of Biden’s foreign policy has been expanded outreach to the Global South, particularly with regard to rallying the developing world to support Ukraine and oppose the Russian invasion. Here, results have been disappointing—and they have now been further undermined by war in the Middle East, as the New York Times recently reported.
The NYT cited Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s denunciation of “ongoing injustices against the Palestinian people” and Brazilian President Lula de Silva’s declaring that U.S. weapons supplies to Ukraine were “encouraging” the war, as well as criticism at the recent Cairo peace summit, where the contrasting U.S. attitudes toward Russia’s occupation of Ukraine and Israel’s so-called occupation of Palestine were widely decried by Arab leaders, including the Egyptian and Saudi heads of state.
The inconsistencies in Biden’s foreign aid package were graphically illustrated by the varying amounts of money allocated to different priorities. The relatively small $4 billion for “countering China’s influence in developing countries and the Indo-Pacific” demonstrates persistent unwillingness to view Beijing as America’s principal global opponent or to make a serious military investment in our much-touted commitment to Taiwan.
Consistent with Rahm Emanuel’s aphorism about the usefulness of crises, while the $14 billion for Israel was clearly an afterthought, since Biden’s speech had been planned, it was timed serendipitously to leverage the proposal through Congress while there is great sympathy for Israel following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.
By contrast with the two relative pittances above, the whopping $61 billion requested for Ukraine reveals what has been the central priority of Biden’s foreign policy from the start: the all-in, “as long as it takes” goal of bleeding Russia and degrading its military capacity to a point where it ceases to be a great power, even at the risk of nuclear war.
As of now, however, the Biden aid package is ill-proportioned and outdated. It simply cannot pass in anything remotely like its present form.
For the foreseeable future, democratic Israel — our greatest ally in a region that has been central to America’s strategic interest for 75 years — must again become the centerpiece of American foreign policy, not Ukraine, which hasn’t been a locus of U.S. national interest. Our country’s democratic and moral values should require nothing less.
William Moloney is a senior fellow at Colorado Christian University’s Centennial Institute who studied history and politics at Oxford and the University of London and received his doctorate at Harvard University.