Biden, Through The Devastation of Gaza, Argues For His Legacy

Edited by Sam Thielman 

I'M WRITING IRON MAN FOR MARVEL COMICS! IF YOU PUT IT ON YOUR PULL LIST AT A COMIC STORE (AN ONGOING SUBSCRIPTION WHERE THE STORE RESERVES EACH ISSUE FOR YOU), I'LL SEND YOU FREE STUFF! EMAIL SOME KIND OF RECEIPT TO FOREVERWARS.BULLPEN@GMAIL.COM AND THE SWAG WILL BE YOURS! 

IT'S HARD FOR ME TO IMAGINE U.S. FOREIGN POLICY WITHOUT JOE BIDEN. 

Biden is the only president I've personally interviewed. That's not a flex—back when Biden was a senator, any member of the mainstream national press who couldn't get a couple minutes with Joe Biden wasn't trying that hard. In 2004, when I was 23, 60 Minutes hired me to turn my first New Republic cover story, a reported piece on the intelligence around the Iraq War, into an hour-long special. The way 60 Minutes works, I learned, is that people like me pre-interview the on-camera interviewees and prepare notes on what they say, so the on-camera interviewers know what and how to ask. I interviewed Biden for several cumulative hours over what I recall as three installments, often at what he proudly related was Wayne Morse's desk in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. While waiting for Biden to emerge for those interviews, I shot the breeze with two of his top foreign-policy aides. One of them was Puneet Talwar, who became the senior State Department official for political-military affairs (arms sales) during Obama's presidency. The other was Antony Blinken, now the secretary of state. 

I think it was Tom Ricks who said Joe Biden was the most reliably wrong U.S. politician when it came to foreign policy. You could always quibble with the application to this-or-that position of Biden's—I recall Tom coming up with that line when Biden opposed Obama's escalation in Afghanistan, something Biden was right about —but for as long as I've been covering this stuff, Biden has gotten the biggest things wrong. Often, even when Biden was right he couldn't help but add some wrongness. Biden loathed the neoconservatives, and then voted as they wanted on Iraq in 2002. As vice president, his alternative to escalation on the ground in Afghanistan was not to end the war, but to wage it from the air. The biggest thing Biden ever got right was to abide by the Afghanistan withdrawal deal negotiated by the Trump administration, and the way he went about it produced a catastrophe. I would say that the withdrawal reflected the catastrophe of the lost, long war, but it certainly produced a catastrophe as well. And then Biden stole impoverished Afghanistan's sovereign wealth.  

The biggest thing Biden ever got wrong—the thing that makes everything else feel like a detail—is his ongoing facilitation of Israel's genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza. I want very badly for a ceasefire to be announced shortly, as was widely expected today, but I don't imagine it will deviate from the contours of the reprieve hinted at last June. 

Last week, The Lancet estimated that the Gaza Health Ministry is severely undercounting Palestinian deaths, despite how you've often read mainstream U.S. publications refer to the "Hamas-controlled" Health Ministry, with the implication that the ministry is inflating its 45,000 death toll. During the first nine months of the war—so remember, this isn’t even an up-to-date estimate—The Lancet assesses that Israel actually killed more like 64,260 people. As it happens, I recently came across a page in Sam Dagher's 2019 book Assad or We Burn The Country that found at around the 15 month mark, roughly where we are with the Israeli genocide in Gaza (between "June 30, 2012" and "the start of the [Syrian] uprising in March 2011," Dagher writes), "civilian deaths…were approaching 13,000." So at comparable points in their wars, Israel has killed nearly five times as many people as Bashar al-Assad did. If The Lancet is wrong, and the 45,000-dead count is accurate, then Israel has killed more than three times as many people as Assad did. 

THIS AFTERNOON, at the State Department, Biden argued for his foreign policy legacy in a valedictory address. Biden's conception of that legacy is a primacist one: "The United States is winning the world-wide competition." 

Biden's favored accomplishments—the ones he boasted about like AUKUS; increased defense spending amongst an enlarged NATO; and the U.S.-South Korea-Japan trilateral accords—are alliance management. Alliance management is an accomplishment. Coalitions require cultivation, and Biden can truthfully say he enlarged NATO after Vladimir Putin's aggression in Ukraine. 

But just to look at this on its own terms for a moment, Ukraine revealed the difficulties that the regnant global hegemon has in bringing those not already bandwagoning with Washington on board Washington's agenda. The inability of the U.S. to rally the non-Atlantic world for Ukraine after February 2022—something Biden denied in his speech but which others are more honest about—was a harbinger. Biden's relentless support for Israel, sustained while the non-Atlantic world watches in horror, has caused a broad revulsion to Biden's cherished "Rules-Based International Order." Pankaj Mishra's forthcoming book The World After Gaza makes this point better than I will, but to the majority of the world, whose experience of the 20th century was framed by decolonization instead of the Cold War, there was no greater reminder than Gaza that the Rules-Based International Order renders them, more often than not, second-class global citizens. 

"In the Red Sea, we brought together more than 20 countries," Biden boasted. He left out the part about how the Houthis of Yemen have now withstood an entire year of bombardment from that U.S.-led naval coalition—and that it's the U.S.' warships that bear the brunt of the conflict, the most sustained naval combat since the Second World War. Biden pursued all of this instead of making Israel stop the genocide that drove the Houthis to put Red Sea shipping at risk. To brag about "defending freedom of navigation in one of the world's busiest waterways" when that defense came at the cost of tens of thousands of Gazan children is to chisel an epitaph onto the headstone of the Rules-Based International Order. 

Biden got applause when he pointed out that he, and not Putin, visits Kiev. I vastly prefer a free Ukraine to one conquered by Putin. Supporting an invaded Ukraine, after years of U.S. tacit and explicit promises to Kiev before and after 2014, was, I believe, the only option. Biden is correct that Putin cannot claim to have achieved his 2022 objectives for the war. The problem is that Biden and NATO do not have a credible path to victory for Ukraine, just a path for Ukraine not to lose everything, and now Trump will negotiate some kind of ceasefire that will likely accept Putin's control of parts of southern and eastern Ukraine. Biden might have reflected on how the NATO expansion he shortsightedly supported brought Ukraine to this disaster, but this was never going to be the kind of speech for such reflection. "We laid the foundation for the next administration to protect the freedom of the Ukrainian people," Biden said, somewhere between wishcasting and outright delusion. 

"Did you ever think we'd be where we are with Iran at this moment?" Biden said. It's extraordinary that Biden painted a triumphalist picture of a regional war he has backed while denying it is underway, one that—again—was the consequence of letting Israel devastate Gaza. FOREVER WARS wrote a few months ago about the Biden Mideast team sounding like the Bush Mideast team circa the Fall of Baghdad. This was the part of the speech to me that sounded like Biden's Mission Accomplished moment. You definitely do not have to like the Iranian regime to recognize that the past several decades show that both its power and regional ambitions are resilient. Any escalation Trump pursues, whether it's bombing Iran directly or letting Israel annex the West Bank, will unmistakably rest on foundations Biden helped lay this past year. 

I will leave it to experts like Van Jackson to assess Biden's comments about the "strategic competition" with China. With Los Angeles on fire, I would say only that the New Cold War with China, a project of Trump's that the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment has embraced, is something the world cannot afford. Biden brought back Cold War liberalism at a time when a great deal of the future of humanity depends on great-power cooperation. But that's incompatible with a strategy of primacy that Biden, Trump and the vast majority of the U.S. foreign policy "community" embrace. 

When Biden warned that the "competition" with China must "never tip over into conflict," he was talking past the responsibility he will bear should war end up happening, as with his support for NATO expansion a generation earlier. Pressuring hesitant nations into economic blocs, with the U.S.' arrayed against China, can only make such a war more likely. Biden grew animated talking about how the Chinese economy will not surpass the size of the American one. How must that sound in Beijing? Like a power you should cooperate with on shared climate interests? Or a power you must thwart even in the face of those shared climate interests? Biden can lecture the Trump people that climate change is the "greatest existential threat facing humanity," but the primacy strategy that he and Trump share cannot address it and can only exacerbate it. That ought to be the last word about primacy, but of course it won't be.  I say this as someone who just hosted an Angeleno friend and her son the past four days.  

America, Biden insisted, was "no longer at war." If he believes that, it is simply a measure of how thoroughly war has been normalized. It is the background noise of America in the 21st century. But Biden’s Justice Department sure doesn’t tell the courts that we’re no longer at war when it argues to retain War on Terror authorities. Meanwhile, Ken Klippenstein recently tallied 226 days out of the past 365 that U.S. forces took part in some variety of combat engagement. If we also consider Ukraine and Israel to be conflicts in which the U.S. is meaningfully engaged, even if in a support role, then that number goes up to 365. 

Biden talked about Israel largely in the context of Iran, not Palestine. But when the speech hit its moment of once again laying out the hope for a Gaza ceasefire, Biden lamented that "so many innocent people have been killed [and] so many communities have been destroyed." It was the most telling of all his uses of the passive voice. Biden pursues a ceasefire like an arsonist pursues a fire engine. He has been a willing partner in a destruction that we have watched every day for 15 hellish months. All of it could have stopped had Biden halted arms sales, ceased defending Israeli behavior internationally, and imposed some form of consequence. All else is rationalization. No one in the Middle East will ever, ever forget that this is what the United States and its Rules-Based International Order produced. 

Biden has long liked to say that America must lead not just by the example of its power but by the power of its example. He was unquestionably the president best prepared to lead U.S. foreign policy since George H.W. Bush—by far the most experienced, long a known quantity in world capitals and boardrooms. No presidency in my lifetime ever had a more coherent and harmonious foreign-policy team (even H.W. Bush had to contend with the Powell-Cheney rivalry). Gaza was what all that coherence and harmony produced. The ashes of Palestinian children incinerated by American weapons will be the most enduring example of American power that Joe Biden showed the world he was determined to lead. The world to come, and U.S. foreign policy within it, cannot help but bear his imprint.

TULSI GABBARD, ON THE BRINK OF POWER, EMBRACES SECTION 702: A couple weeks ago, I listed Tulsi Gabbard's recent For Love of Country: Leave The Democrat Party Behind among my 2024 completed books—I read it for my December Zeteo column—and someone DM'd me to ask what I thought of it. I replied that I was disappointed. I wanted For Love of Country to be batshit, to be so far into outer space that maybe I would ask myself if Gabbard perceives reality in a deeper way than I do. Instead it read like it was written by a replacement-level Republican mouthing replacement-level Republican catechism. The Border is unsecured and scary Muslims are going to slip through. Incidents of police brutality are "tragic but rare." Trans people menace our precious children. She even talks about being afraid of New York City.

It occurred to me after I replied to the DM that Tulsi wrote the kind of book that, archetypally, neocons write: I Used To Be A Democrat Until I Discovered The Depths of Their Depravity.

Something conspicuous in Gabbard's book was its treatment of post-9/11 surveillance. Sorry to quote myself, but it's easier; and I returned the book to the library: 

Her book rightfully lambastes surveillance abuses, but it portrays them as either battles lost in the past or presently aimed at persecuting Trump, rather than institutional, ongoing, and often directed at those she considers indistinguishable from jihadists – the sort of thing answerable by electing Republicans, not by abolition.

It turned out to be foreshadowing. Now that Gabbard is on the verge of overseeing the entire vast, intrusive and fearsome U.S. surveillance apparatus, future Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has realized that actually, Section 702 doesn't maul the 4th Amendment after all. Punchbowl's Andrew Desiderio, a former Daily Beast colleague of mine, broke the news:

In her first public comments since being nominated, Gabbard told us in an exclusive statement that she now supports Section 702, saying the program is “crucial” and “must be safeguarded to protect our nation while ensuring the civil liberties of Americans.”

Gabbard tries to square this shameless, power-pursuing reversal through what she calls "significant FISA reforms [that] have been enacted since my time in Congress to address … insufficient protections for civil liberties, particularly regarding the FBI’s misuse of warrantless search powers on American citizens." This is the exact opposite of what just happened in the recent reauthorization of 702. Now the surveillance agencies can compel the aid of "any…service provider who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications." 702 is as acute a danger to  the civil liberties of Americans as at any time in its 17-year history—particularly when used as part of a combo move with other surveillance practices. 

Gabbard's reversal here is an aspect of her MAGA conversion. MAGA does not seek to abolish the Security State. It seeks to suborn it and use it against MAGA's internal enemies. I wrote a book about this. No matter how many of them are ex-CIA, ex-JSOC, ex-military, the Deep State is always someone else, and its tools are simply too enticing not to use. To anyone who persisted in thinking this weird fraud was a genuine voice against war and the Security State, I'm Johnny Rotten on stage at the Winterland. 

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! Bulletproof is also selling signed copies of my IRON MAN run with Julius Ohta, so if you want those, buy them from Flatbush's finest! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.