No foreign-policy issue has been as divisive among Democrats as U.S. President Joe Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war. As the Democratic Party’s now-presumptive candidate for president, Vice President Kamala Harris has an opportunity to lay out a different course, and in doing so reenergize some of the key Democratic constituencies that have been angered and alienated by Biden’s nearly unconditional support for Israel’s indiscriminate destruction of Gaza.
No foreign-policy issue has been as divisive among Democrats as U.S. President Joe Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war. As the Democratic Party’s now-presumptive candidate for president, Vice President Kamala Harris has an opportunity to lay out a different course, and in doing so reenergize some of the key Democratic constituencies that have been angered and alienated by Biden’s nearly unconditional support for Israel’s indiscriminate destruction of Gaza.
There’s no question that in terms of domestic policy, Biden will be remembered as an extraordinarily successful president. The list of accomplishments is long: guiding the country through the COVID-19 pandemic, creating millions of new jobs, aggressively enforcing antitrust laws for the first time in decades, dramatically scaling up investments in clean energy and U.S. manufacturing, and more.
Biden’s foreign policy is more of a mixed bag, although it has had some clear wins. He broke from the neoliberal theology that deindustrialized the U.S. heartland, exacerbated domestic and global inequality, and fed international corruption and ethnic nationalism, pointing the way toward a more equitable and sustainable global economic order. His administration’s efforts around Brazil’s October 2022 presidential elections, which possibly helped avert a military coup, are an unsung victory for the protection of democracy in one of the world’s most important rising powers. His rallying of allies to support Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s full-scale invasion demonstrated both diplomatic skill and military restraint.
But his global approach has, at times, seemed schizophrenic. On the one hand, Biden recognized that the United States, with its relative share of global power declining, needed to reform its international approach, shore up important partnerships and alliances, and make a more effective appeal to countries in the global south. On the other hand, he’s still been unwilling to break from the American exceptionalist theology that views U.S. military hegemony as the necessary condition of global stability, despite its drain on the country’s resources and corrosion of its politics. It’s an approach that treats the United States and its partners as above the rules that Washington insists others follow—and it inflicts an enormous cost in human lives and U.S. credibility.
Nowhere is this contrast starker than in the administration’s handling of the war in Gaza, where Biden has basically deferred to an unpopular ultra-right-wing Israeli government’s preferences even as egregious, systemic violations of international law and human rights have clearly occurred. The blatant U.S. double standard toward collective punishment and civilian suffering when done by Russia versus when done by Israel may not receive as much attention in the hermetically sealed discourse of Washington, but it is clearly noticed outside the Beltway and throughout the world.
Polling over months has shown that Biden’s Gaza policy was doing serious damage to Democrats’ chances in November. Michigan’s Uncommitted movement, which garnered more than 100,000 votes in a must-win state for Democrats, should have been a wake-up call. Biden eventually decided to withhold 2,000-pound bombs from Israel and press for a permanent cease-fire but undermined his own efforts by refusing to further condition military aid as required by U.S. law.
According to a report published earlier this month by the Century Foundation, “Many core constituencies—including independents, swing state likely voters, and Democratic Party activists—are angry at Biden’s unqualified support for the Israeli assault on Gaza. … Nationwide, nearly 4 in 10 voters (38 percent) say they are less likely to vote for President Biden because of his handling of the war in Gaza.”
In case anyone was under the impression that this is a fringe view, on July 23, seven major labor unions sent a joint letter to Biden calling on him to “immediately halt all military aid to Israel.”
While no one expects Harris to dramatically distance herself from Biden, there are steps that she can take to show that she speaks for the Democratic Party of today and not 40 years ago. She can announce that as president, she will immediately suspend the U.S.-supplied military aid being used in violation of U.S. law. She can publicly make clear that she agrees with the assessment of countless Israelis—including Israeli opposition lawmakers and top sitting security officials—that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is stalling hostage release and cease-fire efforts in order to cling to power. She can reject the baseless and inflammatory claims that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the largest and most important relief agency in Gaza, is a “Hamas front,” and state that she’ll work to see UNRWA funding resumed as soon as legally possible. In doing so, she would join U.S. partners—such as Britain, France, and Germany—that have already resumed their contributions.
In response to Netanyahu’s repeated rejection of any possibility of Palestinian statehood, including his government’s passage last week in the Knesset of an unprecedented resolution ruling out any Palestinian state west of the Jordan River, Harris should say that while the final contours of a Palestinian state are a matter for negotiations, Palestinians’ right to a state is, like Israelis’, nonnegotiable.
The November election is a chance to offer a real foreign-policy contrast. Despite U.S. pundits’ constant use of the “isolationist” epithet against Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance, the reality is they don’t offer an isolationist foreign policy, but rather a unilateralist and militarist one, where the United States and its partners are free to use violence unbound by any of the international norms that Washington insists must be followed by governments that don’t buy its weapons.
Unfortunately, U.S. policy toward the war in Gaza reflects this same approach and reinforces the kind of systemic discrimination that the United States’ own civil right movement—in which the vice president has her roots—fought against. Harris has the opportunity to end this dissonance and offer a U.S. foreign-policy vision that upholds a universal set of rules and norms for the global community, instead of different ones for partners and adversaries.
In doing so, she would be arguing boldly and correctly for an approach that will ultimately enable us all to live in security, prosperity, and dignity.
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