The Week When Biden Hugged Bibi

Has President Biden ever had a more high-stakes week of personal diplomacy in such uncertain circumstances? On Monday, a leader whose international travel is generally planned months in advance decided that he would leave—the very next day—to go to the Middle East to consult with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and with Arab leaders about the new war in the region. By Tuesday evening, as Biden was headed for Air Force One, his meeting in Jordan with the Arab leaders was cancelled in the wake of reports about a deadly explosion at a hospital in Gaza. On Wednesday, Biden’s emotional embrace of Netanyahu on the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport became a photo seen around the world. The American President’s grief at the brutal Hamas terror attack on Israel came through in a speech that day to the Israeli people. So did his warning about the perils of unrestrained military retribution amid a rapidly worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza. “Justice must be done,” he said. “But I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11 we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”

Biden’s bear hug for Bibi was a remarkable show of support. It was also an attempt to create more space for the airing of Biden’s private concerns to the Israeli Prime Minister. But it’s not at all clear yet what results were achieved. Hours after Biden landed back in Washington, I heard a grim prognosis about the conflict from a source familiar with the President’s trip and the days of intensive shuttle diplomacy to seven countries in the region by Secretary of State Antony Blinken that preceded it. How grim? Some senior Israeli officials told the Americans to expect a war that could last as long as ten years. To describe the threat posed by Hamas and the reason the status quo in Gaza has, post-attack, become unacceptable, the Israeli officials asked the Americans how they would feel about having the terrorist group ISIS headquartered in a safe haven in Mexico. No wonder, then, that Israel’s aims against Hamas were presented as maximalist, and that it took days just for Biden and Blinken to get an agreement for Egypt to open its border crossing with Gaza to let in an initial twenty trucks of humanitarian aid.

The trip was a remarkably gruelling one for any President to make, let alone an eighty-year-old often caricatured by his Republican foes as a doddering octogenarian. It was, in fact, only the second time a modern President has ventured into an active war zone without an American military presence; the first time was also Biden, who visited Ukraine in February to mark the first anniversary of the full-scale Russian invasion, travelling overnight by train to reach the capital before strolling defiantly into the streets of Kyiv with President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In an Oval Office address to the nation, on Thursday night, the President explicitly sought to connect the two trips to his vision for American leadership in a world in disarray. The sharp fifteen-minute speech—particularly crisp when you consider that Biden had just returned from Israel—made the argument to the U.S. public that Israel’s fight against Hamas and Ukraine’s fight against Vladimir Putin’s Russia were both “vital for America’s national security.” Biden promised to ask Congress—mired in its own crippling dysfunction at the moment—to send an “unprecedented” package of billions of dollars in new military assistance to help them win. “American leadership is what holds the world together,” Biden said. “To put all that at risk if we turn our backs on Ukraine, if we walk away from Israel—it’s just not worth it.”

For months, supporters of Ukraine in Washington had been urging Biden to speak out in just such an address. They argued that he needed to make the case for why the U.S. is investing so heavily in the Ukrainian cause—and for how it connects to the rest of American foreign policy. “One of the things that’s been lacking is the President hasn’t tried to make a fulsome case to the American people,” Dan Sullivan, a Republican senator from Alaska and a member of the Armed Services Committee, told me during an interview in September. “Not just our national-security interests, but what we’re getting in terms of the investment of the significant amount of aid that’s being provided. This is a major, major war, and we’re sending multiple billions, and there’s been no address from the Oval Office. . . . It’s just, like, Mr. President, you gotta make the case.”

Our conversation took place well before the simultaneous crises that have upended Biden’s foreign-policy plans on Capitol Hill—the war in Israel and the Republican meltdown in the House of Representatives, where a rump group of eight G.O.P. members caused the ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy more than two weeks ago (there remains no viable replacement for him in sight). But Sullivan was already arguing in favor of a broader framing of Ukraine aid, by combining it with enhanced American assistance to Taiwan as part of a more global U.S. response to the new authoritarian axis of Russia and China, and their partners such as Iran and North Korea. With Republican support for military assistance to Ukraine fast eroding, this appeared to be the only obvious path forward—and now it is one that Biden and both parties’ leaders in the Senate have embraced.

In the short term, this is what counts as welcome news for Ukraine, which, in an unlikely twist, finds itself twinned with perhaps the most solidly bipartisan cause there is in Washington: American military funding for Israel. And so, instead of Biden’s earlier request for a twenty-four-billion-dollar supplemental appropriation that would cover U.S. aid to Ukraine through the next few months, the Biden Administration, on Friday, is expected to send a security-assistance package of more than a hundred and five billion dollars to Capitol Hill—with the largest share, some sixty billion dollars, for Ukraine; fourteen billion dollars for Israel in its fight with Hamas; and another twenty-one billion dollars for Taiwan and U.S. border security. If it passes—and that remains a big if, given that, even before the Speaker was ousted, a majority of House Republicans had voted against one Ukraine aid provision—there would not have to be another divisive round of Washington debate over Ukraine funding until after the 2024 election. And, if Donald Trump, perhaps America’s most notable Putin cheerleader, somehow wins that election, well, then the matter of military assistance for Ukraine will be only one of many five-alarm crises to deal with.

For years, Biden has warned about the current geopolitical moment as a brewing conflict between the democracies of the world and rising autocracies, such as Russia and China, calling this an “inflection point” in apocalyptic language that suggests a new global conflict like the two World Wars of the twentieth century. In the past, it might have been possible to dismiss some of that as hyperbole from a politician who grew up in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. But events of the past year and a half—and especially during this trying past couple of weeks—have reinforced the urgency of Biden’s most consistent foreign-policy message. Rarely has his grandiose rhetoric seemed so matched to a real threat. On Thursday morning, when I spoke with Sullivan again, he welcomed Biden’s decision to give the speech now. “Better late than never,” the senator said, calling this “new era of authoritarian aggression” one of “the most dangerous times” since the Second World War.

But the tone of Biden’s speech on Thursday night was less foreign-policy manifesto than it was a family sitdown—of a very, very troubled family.

That is why, for me, the line that resonated the most was not the hoary clichés about America as a “beacon to the world” and an “indispensable nation” but the plea that followed it: for Washington to get its act together. “I know we have our divisions at home,” Biden said, alluding only indirectly to the G.O.P. mess in the House, which has left the country without a functioning lower chamber of Congress for the entirety of the crisis in Israel. “We have to get past them. We can’t let petty partisan politics . . . interfere with our responsibilities as a nation.” It was a lecture from a family patriarch to a fractious brood that didn’t necessarily want to hear it: Grow up. The world is counting on us. ♦