Can Democrats Ever Learn From Experience?
When the "safe" middle path leads directly into a brick wall of right-wing sabotage, liberals will march down it anyhow.
There’s something uncanny about President Biden’s Middle East diplomacy, and it’s a microcosm of the uncanny state of liberal politics in modern America generally—marked by a determination to forge ahead as though our counterparties don’t have bad-faith motives, or won’t act on them.
In the matter of Israel, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia, Biden is surely correct to believe a diplomatic agreement to end the war in Gaza, free hostages, restore political rights to Palestinians, and normalize relations between Tel Aviv and Riyadh would help stabilize both the region and his domestic political outlook. It’s a worthy goal and, to some extent, the only reasonable one available for him to pursue. (It isn’t really clear to me as a layman what other humane diplomatic objective he could be chasing at this juncture.)
But the objective is quite clearly undermined by the fact that at least two of the other participants in the negotiation—Israel and Saudi Arabia—are led by men who want Biden to lose the 2024 election, so that Donald Trump can return to power and resume trading favors for bribes.
Biden’s presidency has been marked by extraordinary patience, sometimes more than advisable. Back in January I wrote that patience is Biden’s greatest strength and weakness, and we’ve seen both facets of it in the months since. It required incredible patience to grind down House Speaker Mike Johnson, and his implacable opposition to funding Ukraine’s resistance to Russian invasion. But Johnson’s months-long embargo, ordered up by Donald Trump, may have already done fatal damage to the cause of Ukrainian independence.
So I wouldn’t want to say (and don’t know enough to say) that Biden’s approach in the Middle East is hopeless. But there’s this elephant in the room and it’s a big, troubling one: