2023-10-29 17:40:11
US President Joe Biden with Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to Israel, October 18, 2023. EVELYN HOCKSTEIN / REUTERS
Joe Biden likes to present himself as a “inveterate optimist”. However, he hardly expressed this quality in foreign policy, preferring a cold realism. At the dawn of his mandate, his roadmap favored the revitalization of alliances and competition with China. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was considered a lost cause, a gnawing crisis that simply had to be contained because it could not be resolved. But just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine upended American priorities, Hamas’s attack on Israel forced the White House to refocus on the Middle East. By remaining prisoner of ancient prisms.
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The new open war between Israel and the Palestinian armed factions is a catastrophe of many dimensions for Washington. It presents serious risks of regional expansion, with the possible entry on the scene of Lebanese Hezbollah, or even Iran. The White House has deployed impressive forces to the Eastern Mediterranean as a preemptive measure that could assist in Israel’s defense.
President Biden wanted to make his mark by ending the endless war in Afghanistan in 2021. Here he is on the doorstep of another door licked by flames. Already, American bases in Syria and Iraq are harassed by armed militias, both autonomous and linked to Tehran, who have carried out around twenty mainly symbolic attacks.
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Diplomatically, the United States finds itself isolated in its unconditional public support for Israel. The normalization process between the latter country and Saudi Arabia is frozen. However, the Biden administration had devoted a lot of effort to it, to the point of assuming the legacy of Donald Trump, who had refused to consider the resolution of the conflict as a prerequisite for this historic rapprochement. After a disengagement from the Middle East, symbolized by Barack Obama’s refusal to strike the Syrian regime in 2013, the Americans are caught up in a new diagnostic error: trade and investment projects do not form a highway to peace . Russia, and to a lesser extent China, are stepping into the breach. These states pose as defenders of Gazan civilians and promoters of a balanced approach to the Middle East. Although Westerners are choking at Moscow’s hypocrisy, after so many Russian war crimes in Ukraine, they are losing ground in the region.
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The exasperation of Arab countries
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