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In March 1906, U.S. forces attacked a group of Moros and killed more than 900 men, women, and children at the top of Mt. Dajo on the island of Jolo in the southern Philippines. Even though the death toll was higher than at well-known massacres committed by American soldiers at Wounded Knee and My Lai, the massacre at Bud Dajo has been all but forgotten outside the Philippines.Recovering the history of this event is the subject of an important new book by historian Kim Wagner, "Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History." The book is a masterful reconstruction of the events leading up to the lopsided slaughter on the mountain, and Wagner sets the massacre in its proper historical context during the age of American overseas colonialism at the start of the 20th century. It also offers important lessons about how the dehumanization of other people leads to terrible atrocities and how imperial policies rely on the use of brutal violence.In the years leading up to the massacre, the U.S. had been extending its control over the southern Philippines after it had annexed the northern islands and defeated local pro-independence forces in the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). U.S. relations with the Sultanate of Sulu were initially regulated by the Bates Treaty of 1899, but within a few years the U.S. abrogated that treaty and sought to impose direct rule. The U.S. tossed the treaty aside on the recommendation of Gen. Leonard Wood, who was the local military governor based on Mindanao at the time.The massacre was part of a larger history of violent American expansionism, and it was the result of an imperial policy that sought to impose colonial rule on the Philippines. The U.S. effort to collect the cedula tax provoked significant resentment and opposition among the Moros. (The Moro name was the one given to the Muslim Tausugs of the Sulu archipelago by the earlier Spanish colonizers, and it was the one that the Americans continued to use.) As Wagner explains, Moro opposition to the tax was rooted in a defense of their religious identity, which they believed would be compromised and weakened if they submitted to a tax imposed by non-Muslim rulers.The Moros that sought refuge at Bud Dajo were protesting the encroachment of a new colonial power and resisting interference in their way of life. The U.S. authorities there perceived them and cast them as outlaws, and under the command of the same Gen. Wood, U.S. forces proceeded to wipe almost all of them out. As Daniel Immerwahr comments in "How to Hide an Empire," "Massacres like this weren't unknown in the United States. …Yet Bud Dajo dwarfed them all."The atrocity was initially the cause of some controversy at home, and anti-imperialist critics of American rule in the Philippines tried to use it to attack the Roosevelt administration's policies. The criticism was short-lived, and no one involved with the massacre at any level faced any penalties later. The massacre was quickly rationalized and normalized with the familiar appeals to "necessity" and an exceptionalist belief in America's expansionist mission.The similarities with crimes committed by the military against Native Americans led most Americans to justify the slaughter at Bud Dajo rather than condemn it. The similarities with crimes committed by contemporary European colonial powers didn't cause most Americans to reconsider the expansionist project, but instead it led them to retract their earlier criticisms of European atrocities. Merely exposing an atrocity abroad often has no political effect if most people at home are determined to ignore or excuse it.Wagner details how Wood and the Roosevelt administration tried to control the flow of information about the massacre, but the massacre was never a secret. There was never an attempt at a cover-up because the massacre became so widely accepted as "necessary." The officers and soldiers involved in the killing wrote letters home about what they had seen and done at Bud Dajo, and their correspondence is one of the sources that Wagner uses for reconstructing what happened on the mountain. The dehumanization of the Moros in the eyes of most Americans was so complete that the photographic evidence of the victims was turned into popular postcards for soldiers and tourists to buy.The photograph of the aftermath of the massacre taken by Aeronaut Gibbs stands out in Wagner's account. The photograph shows a trench filled with the bodies of dead Moros with a group of American soldiers posing alongside them. This is the picture that Wagner comes back to several times in the book to capture the brutality of the event and to illustrate how thoroughly the victims of the massacre had been dehumanized. The trench photo is an image of the atrocity "through the eyes of the perpetrators," as Wagner puts it, and he explains that the "image is not just evidence of a massacre—in the way that we might consider a crime-scene photo—but is itself an artifact of violence." American rule over the Philippines had been inspired by the example of European colonialism in Asia and Africa, and the American administrators of the overseas empire looked to copy the methods of European empires in suppressing local opposition by force. Today some proponents of American dominance still look back to this era of direct colonial rule as evidence of America's benevolent imperialism, but this ignores the record of brutal violence that was used to establish and maintain that rule. Bud Dajo was a shocking example of that violence, and it was the product of a system that routinely demanded and justified such violence against the people living under American rule. Though few Americans remember them, the U.S. wars in the Philippines were responsible for the deaths of up to one million people.Americans need to remember this period of U.S. history, but it is also important to recognize that many political leaders today use the same kinds of rationalizations to justify modern atrocities, whether they are committed by U.S. forces or client states acting with U.S. support.As Wagner puts it, "Whereas the actual history of US atrocities in the southern Philippines has been largely forgotten, the racialized logic that underpinned the violence of March 1906 has not." Just as the expansionists did 118 years ago, some supporters of American dominance continue to excuse war crimes by dehumanizing the victims and blaming them for their own demise.

Is America experiencing a crisis of confidence? That is the assessment of some world leaders from allied and partner nations in recent months. Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen criticized the U.S. at the start of the year, "Recent global events in the Taiwan Strait, in the Middle East, in Ukraine are all results of American hesitance to actually lead."As he addressed Congress earlier this month, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida chided his audience for what he called "an undercurrent of self-doubt among some Americans about what your role in the world should be." One implication of these complaints is that the world would supposedly become more stable and secure if the U.S. simply possessed and demonstrated greater resolve. Given the wreckage created by American hubris during the first part of this century, we know that this is not true. Another implication is that the U.S. should never reconsider or question its "leadership" role, as if the arrangements that were made after 1945 or 1991 are immutable for all time. According to this view, adopting a different strategy, shifting burdens to allies, or reducing commitments are all beyond the pale and a sign of irresolution.The critics are mistaken about all this, and Americans should have the confidence to ignore them.One of the biggest problems with our foreign policy is that U.S. policymakers remain enthusiastic about a "leadership" role that is ill-suited to current realities. American power is in relative decline, but our foreign policy is still defined by the pursuit of dominance in every region. Our political leaders are eager to reaffirm and expand U.S. commitments without any real debate over the risks or the resources that will be needed to make good on those commitments. Consider the last few years. NATO expands as if on autopilot. The president pledges to send U.S. forces to defend Taiwan when we have no treaty obligation to do so. Every commitment to every ally, partner, and client is said to be "ironclad" and therefore beyond serious scrutiny. Is this the behavior of a government that is hesitant and unsure about its international role, or is it the record of one that can't say no to new entanglements? Far from suffering from a crisis of confidence, the U.S. still seems far too sure of itself. The U.S. doesn't need to hear self-serving cheerleading from allies about how "indispensable" it is. It needs sober advice on how it can responsibly unwind the many unnecessary commitments it has accumulated over generations. Instead of cutting back, the U.S. keeps taking on new dependents as if its power and resources were unlimited. The reality of overstretch becomes harder to ignore with each new addition. To the extent that U.S. resolve is being questioned in other capitals, it is the result of spreading around so many promises of support that it becomes difficult to believe them all. Americans absolutely should be questioning our country's role in the world. Besides being an essential part of democratic self-government, a thorough reassessment of our foreign policy is long overdue. One of the reasons why U.S. foreign policy has been so dysfunctional and destructive in so many places is that core assumptions about the U.S. role in the world haven't been challenged and interrogated often enough.The U.S. would avoid a lot of pitfalls if it didn't arrogate to itself the role of dictating terms to other states and policing their behavior. What Prime Minister Kishida calls self-doubt is a hard-earned sense of humility that some Americans have learned from decades of costly and bloody policy failures. U.S. foreign policy has been marred by misguided ideological zeal for so long that we could stand to have a lot more doubting and questioning.A major flaw in our foreign policy debates is that our policymakers often fail to recognize policy failure and insist on plowing ahead with more of the same. The continued U.S. use of broad sanctions is one example of this. Despite considerable evidence over the decades that they achieve none of the government's stated policy goals and cause significant harm to the civilian population of the targeted countries, the U.S. relies on the economic weapon more heavily now than ever before.Waging economic war on recalcitrant states is one of the ways that Washington routinely exercises its "leadership," and in practically every case that exercise of "leadership" has backfired and exacerbated the problem that the sanctions were supposed to ameliorate. The terrible results of the "maximum pressure" campaigns against Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea speak for themselves. If anything should cause people in Washington to doubt U.S. "leadership," it is the repeated failure of sanctions, but nothing like that has happened.Refusing to question the current U.S. role in the world is a path to stagnation and eventually exhaustion. An overcommitted U.S. cannot honor all the promises it makes. If nothing changes, that will set the U.S. up for humiliating climbdowns or dangerous conflicts in the future. It would be far wiser for Washington to begin shifting responsibilities to capable allies now instead of trying to shore up an unsustainable status quo.The U.S. must be able to adapt its foreign policy to present-day realities, and that will necessarily involve reassessing the nature and extent of U.S. involvement in several regions. Clinging to tired dogmas about "leadership" that were created for a different world locks the U.S. into an overly ambitious and dangerous strategy whose costs far exceed the benefits. The U.S. needs to have the confidence to reject a strategy that does such a poor job of advancing and securing American interests.

The U.S. and Israel have been raising the alarm of a possible Iranian retaliatory strike in response to last week's Israeli attack on an Iranian diplomatic facility in Damascus. The president once again pledged "ironclad" U.S. support for Israel in the event of an Iranian response, and the head of Central Command, Gen. Erik Kurilla, was reportedly headed to Israel Thursday to coordinate with Israeli leaders ahead of the expected strike. The administration is moving in the wrong direction. The U.S. ought to be distancing itself from Israel's illegal attack, but instead the Biden administration is moving to shield Israel from the consequences of its own actions.Israeli forces have routinely struck Iranian and other targets in Syria for more than a decade, but the attack on the consulate in Damascus was a major escalation both in terms of the location and the rank of the Iranian officers that were killed. The Israeli government appears to want to goad Iran into a military response to divert attention from the slaughter and famine in Gaza and to trap the U.S. into joining the fight. The president has made it that much easier for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by volunteering to walk into the trap. The U.S. is at considerable risk of becoming involved in a direct conflict with Iran thanks to the reckless actions of the Netanyahu government and the president's lockstep support. This does not serve legitimate U.S. security interests. The U.S. cannot afford another conflict in the Middle East, and siding with Israel exposes U.S. forces to significant unnecessary dangers. The U.S. is under no obligation to come to Israel's defense if Iran retaliates against an Israeli strike, and the president has no authority to commit the U.S. to fight a war for another country, especially when that country is not a treaty ally. President Biden said this week that the U.S. would do "all we can to protect Israel's security," but this knee-jerk response is the wrong one under the circumstances. Why is the U.S. putting itself on the hook to protect a state that is more than capable of fending for itself? It is an unnecessary commitment, and it is unwise. It risks fueling a regional war that the administration has said it wants to avoid, and it rewards Netanyahu for his rogue behavior. American troops have already come under attack because of our government's support for the war in Gaza. The administration's response to the war over the last six months has already been detrimental to U.S. interests and harmful to America's reputation. This latest commitment to protect Israel while the war in Gaza continues compounds these earlier errors and does even more damage to our country's global image.U.S. intelligence has reportedly warned that an Iranian response is "imminent." It remains unclear exactly what form Iranian retaliation might take, but it seems very unlikely that the Iranian government will choose not to answer a direct attack as brazen as this one was. The response could involve missile launches from Iranian territory, as we saw in the response to the U.S. assassination of Qassem Soleimani in 2020, or it could be some combination of missile and drone attacks from various Iranian proxies. Whatever shape the response takes, the U.S. should steer clear of the ensuing conflict. The U.S. should not lift a finger to assist an Israeli government that went out of its way to provoke this fight.The war in Gaza has been a wake-up call for the United States that its "ironclad" relationship with Israel is a serious liability for American interests. Jon Hoffman of the Cato Institute recently laid out the case against continuing the "special relationship" with Israel: "A special relationship with Israel does virtually nothing for the United States while actively undermining U.S. strategic interests and often doing violence to the values that Washington claims to stand for." Given how little the U.S. benefits from this relationship, the automatic and "ironclad" commitment to Israel's security that Biden endorses makes no sense.Perhaps there was a time when extensive U.S. support for Israel made some sort of strategic sense, but that time is long gone. Today this support makes the U.S. complicit in Israeli violations of international law, exposes the U.S. to intense regional hostility, and puts U.S. forces at greater risk in exchange for very little. When the Israeli government isn't actively undermining U.S. diplomacy with other states in the region, it is openly ignoring Washington's preferences and defying Washington's requests. The U.S. gets all the headaches and costs that come with foreign entanglement without gaining a reliable, constructive partner. U.S. officials have often called the relationship with Israel "unshakeable" and several presidents have taken pride in ensuring that there is no "daylight" between the U.S. and Israel in public, and that is why the relationship has become such a bad, dysfunctional one. In practice, preventing any "daylight" between our governments has meant catering to the Israeli government's preferences at the expense of our own position. The "unshakeable" relationship has remained that way largely because the U.S. keeps indulging its client regardless of the consequences. It isn't possible to have a balanced, respectful relationship with any country when the other government expects and receives such extraordinary deference. Instead, it creates a toxic relationship in which one government always takes advantage of the other. Reflexive U.S. backing for Israel has not only enabled the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza and implicated the U.S. in war crimes, but it has also encouraged dangerous Israeli behavior in the wider region for years. Unconditional U.S. support for the war in Gaza has led the Israeli government to believe that it can keep pushing its luck with more provocative actions against other regional states as well. Now the Israeli government is potentially facing some real blowback, and the U.S. should want no part of it.U.S. and Israeli interests have been diverging for decades, but U.S. policy has failed to keep up. The president remains wedded to a version of the relationship from the previous century with a country that no longer exists. We need to bring U.S. policy up to date and to bring it into line with the current realities of the Middle East, and to do that the U.S. has to give up this idea of an "ironclad" commitment to Israel.

The head of Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral John Aquilino, recently warned members of the House Armed Services Committee about increasing cooperation among Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea and said, "We're almost back to the axis of evil."There has been something of a revival of this discredited Bush-era idea in recent years, and it has become more common for members of Congress and now high-ranking military officers to describe the relationships between various authoritarian states using some version of George W. Bush's ridiculous phrase. While it is true that there has been some increased cooperation between these four governments, it is dangerous and misleading to suggest that they form anything resembling a close alliance or coalition. If the U.S. were to "act accordingly," as Adm. Aquilino recommended, it would risk driving these states much closer together and creating the very axis that U.S. officials fear.Aquilino's phrasing is revealing. When he said, "we're almost back to the axis of evil," that seems to suggest that he thinks there was a real one that serves as a model for the current group. The first "axis of evil" that George W. Bush denounced in his 2002 State of the Union address was made up of three states — Iran, Iraq, and North Korea — that were united only by Washington's hostility to them. Iran and Iraq had long been enemies and remained so at the time, and North Korea was added to the mix so that it wouldn't be entirely fixated on predominantly Muslim countries. These states weren't working together, and two of them were opposed to each other. There was no axis then, and there still isn't one now.The purpose in tying together unrelated adversaries has always been to exaggerate the size of the threat to the United States to scare policymakers and the public into supporting more military spending and more overseas conflicts. If inflating the threat from any one adversary isn't enough to instill sufficient fear, the invention of an axis that includes some or all adversaries around the globe can be very useful to hawks. Because it automatically calls to mind World War II and the fight against the Axis Powers, it also helps them to demonize the other states and smother domestic dissent. Supporters of hawkish policies in each region will then have an incentive to embrace the axis rhetoric and reinforce these views among their political allies.Several current and former elected officials have referred to a new "axis of evil" in recent months. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) used the phrase last October and demonstrated its threat inflating potential: "It's an emergency that we step up and deal with this axis of evil — China, Russia, Iran — because it's an immediate threat to the United States. In many ways, the world is more endangered today than it has been in my lifetime." Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley used it to burnish her hawkish credentials when she was running for president. Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) have also indulged in the fearmongering.The four states that hawks want to lump together as part of an axis today have some dealings with each other, but their security relationships are quite weak. None of them is formally allied to Russia, and Russia and China have no obligations to come to Iran's aid. All four governments are run by intensely nationalistic leaders, and they nurse grievances over past humiliations and conflicts that make closer ties difficult to establish.Russia has turned to Iran and North Korea for arms supplies to wage war in Ukraine, but that has really been the extent of their closer security ties. Of the four countries, only China and North Korea have a formal defense treaty, but despite that, China and North Korea have a fraught relationship. Notably, China has refrained from offering Russia lethal aid in its war in Ukraine. The "no limits" partnership that the two countries announced just before the February 2022 Russian invasion has been distinguished by how limited Chinese support for Russia has been. This is hardly a global alliance in the making.The danger of basing U.S. foreign policy on imaginary things should be obvious. If U.S. policymakers believe that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea form an axis when they don't, that will distort U.S. policies toward all four states in destructive ways. Instead of identifying the best ways to address U.S. disputes with each country, including the use of diplomatic engagement and sanctions relief where appropriate, there will be a strong temptation to see every problem with each state as part of a global rivalry where there will be no room for compromise and reducing tensions. The more that officials in Washington see these states as a hostile coalition, the less inclined they will be to negotiate with any of them for fear of signaling "weakness" to the rest.Another pitfall of believing that these states form an axis is that it will undermine Washington's ability to set priorities and devise a realistic strategy to secure U.S. interests. Once policymakers are convinced that all four states are linked together as part of an axis, they will refuse to distinguish between vital and peripheral interests, and they will insist that the U.S. must "counter" the imaginary axis in every corner of the globe. It will exacerbate Washington's bad habits of overcommitment and overinvestment in less important regions.Linking Russia, China, and Iran together as part of an axis has become a favorite rhetorical move for some Iran hawks in Washington. Mike Doran of the Hudson Institute, for example, tried using this to agitate for a more aggressive policy against Iran just recently:"Iran is the weak link in the Russia-Iran-China axis. The U.S. should press hard on that weakness rather than trying to maintain the status quo. Moscow and Beijing would certainly take notice. The fastest way to bring Putin to the negotiating table is to weaken his ally, Iran. Why are our foreign policy elites unable to recognize such an obvious strategic option?"There are a few flaws with this plan: the axis in question doesn't exist; Russia and China would have no problem if the U.S. wanted to waste its resources in yet another costly Middle Eastern conflict; Russia and Iran aren't really allies; and weakening Iran wouldn't matter to the Russian government. If the U.S. mistakenly assumes that it can inflict damage on one authoritarian state by undermining the others, it will squander resources and opportunities for engagement in exchange for nothing.To the extent that these four states are working more closely than they have in the past, aggressive U.S. policies have encouraged that collaboration. The U.S. pursuit of dominance in every region creates incentives for regional powers to assist each other, and Washington's frequent use of sanctions to punish all these states gives them another reason to help each other evade sanctions. The correct U.S. approach to increasing cooperation among these states is to exploit existing divisions and to reach a modus vivendi with as many of them as possible to drive wedges between them.

In a Sunday interview on MSNBC, President Biden warned the Israeli government that an assault on Rafah would cross a red line, but then immediately undermined that message with contradictory statements. The president stressed that the "defense of Israel is still crucial, so there's no red lines [where] I'm going to cut off all weapons" and he said, "I'm never going to leave Israel." Biden did not spell out what consequences, if any, the Israeli government would face if it crossed the red line and actually launched an assault on Rafah, and the president sapped his warning of any force it might have had by adding so many qualifications of what he would not do. The president's interview remarks reflect the failure of administration policy in which the U.S. uses strong rhetoric to signal its displeasure without making the necessary policy changes to give their warnings teeth. Having failed to take serious measures to challenge or rein in the Israeli military campaign for five months, Biden is in a weak position of his own making. It will be difficult for him to issue demands and warnings that the Israeli government takes seriously because the Israelis have ignored so many warnings before now without paying any penalty. Biden did say that "they cannot have 30,000 more Palestinian dead," but the president wouldn't say what he would do if the assault went ahead and the civilian death toll keeps shooting up. He gave Netanyahu's government no reason to fear that an assault on Rafah would damage the relationship with Washington or affect U.S. support for the war in any way. That makes Biden's warning look like a bad bluff that Netanyahu is only too willing to call. In fact, the prime minister is already calling the president's bluff by saying that the invasion of Rafah is going forward. The president's interview comments were consistent with last week's State of the Union address in which he made several declarations about what Israel "must" do without connecting them to any specific measures he would take if Netanyahu ignored him. The announcement on Thursday that the U.S. would be setting up a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza to bring in more aid was a tacit admission that Biden's "bear hug" approach to Israel had utterly failed to buy the U.S. influence with Netanyahu. If Biden's approach were working, he would not have to resort to absurd and impractical workarounds like the pier and the ill-advised airdrops to avoid confronting Israeli's blocking of aid. When Netanyahu sees the administration tying itself in knots to avoid clashing with him, that is much more likely to encourage the prime minister to press his luck and see how much he can get away with. The U.S. has a serious problem when it comes to restraining its clients because American leaders fear alienating these states and possibly "losing" them to other patrons. The Biden administration is hardly alone in this bad practice, but it is demonstrating how dangerous it can be for the U.S. to enable its clients in their most destructive behavior and then to refuse to impose any costs on them when they go too far. American politicians and policymakers convince themselves that the U.S. needs these clients so much that they surrender all the leverage that Washington has up front and instead obsess over how to "reassure" them that the U.S. will always support them. The president says that he will never "leave" Israel, but that has to be a viable option in any relationship with a client state. The administration needs to bring its policy in line with its rhetoric, and it needs to do it at once. If an assault on Rafah is truly unacceptable to the president, it isn't enough to say that this is a red line for the U.S. The administration needs to show that this isn't an empty threat by spelling out to the Israeli government the specific benefits they stand to lose if they proceed. That should include, but not be limited to, no longer receiving U.S. protection at the Security Council and an indefinite suspension of all military aid. To prove that they are serious, the administration will need to start following our own laws regarding weapons supplies to governments that are committing grave human rights abuses and violations of international law. As long as the "flood" of weapons to Israel continues, nothing that the president and other U.S. officials say about Israel's conduct of the war means anything. Netanyahu will not be easily dissuaded from ordering an assault on Rafah. Last week, he said, "Whoever tells us not to act in Rafah is telling us to lose the war and that will not happen." That makes it essential that the U.S. apply intense pressure now while there is still time to prevent an even greater catastrophe. An assault on Rafah would drive the starving people of Gaza into a major famine. There are already severe famine-like conditions throughout the territory because of Israel's deliberate use of starvation as a weapon. An assault on Rafah would also likely have destabilizing effects elsewhere in the region. The low-level war between Israel and Hezbollah is already threatening to explode into a major conflict, and a Rafah offensive could be the spark that ignites a larger conflagration. There are reports that Iran has given the green light to Hezbollah to escalate in response to such an offensive. The Israeli government has been hinting at its own plans for escalation for months. If there is escalation in the north, it will be a disaster for both Israel and Lebanon.The Biden administration has done a great deal to stoke the war in Gaza and it shares responsibility for the current disaster, but there is still an opportunity to slam on the brakes and prevent even greater loss of life.

Victoria Nuland, a career foreign service officer who served in prominent roles in the State Department under Presidents Obama and Biden and represented the U.S. at NATO under George W. Bush, will be retiring, according to a statement today from Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Nuland was a combative liberal hawk during her time in government, and she was consistently one of the most aggressive proponents of U.S. backing for Ukraine and NATO expansion. Her career sometimes exemplified the heedless and arrogant foreign policy worldview that she championed.She was the Principal Deputy National Security Advisor to then-Vice President Dick Cheney during the first two years of the Iraq war, and then served as U.S. NATO ambassador in Brussels during Bush's second term. Nuland was an early cheerleader for Ukrainian membership in the alliance. She reportedly advised the Ukrainian government at the time to launch an information campaign to "dispel the image of NATO as a 'four-letter word.'" As the U.S. representative at NATO at the 2008 Bucharest summit, she pressed allies to grant Membership Action Plans (MAPs) to Ukraine and Georgia. When the German and French governments balked at that idea, she was involved in the blunder in which the alliance promised that Ukraine and Georgia would one day be admitted to NATO. The promise at Bucharest contributed to the August war later that year between Russia and Georgia, and it laid the foundation for the later tensions between Russia and Ukraine. In her role as Assistant Secretary of State for Europe under Obama, Nuland was involved in meddling in Ukrainian affairs during the Maidan protests. She was captured in news photographs during those demonstrations in Kyiv handing sandwiches to the protesters who later helped oust the elected Yanukovych government.The leaked recording of her call to the U.S. ambassador of Ukraine at the time in which she infamously blurted, "f–ck the EU," reconfirmed her reputation as an interventionist. Keith Gessen wrote about it several years later: "What was remarkable about the episode was the utter confidence with which Nuland seemed to speak for the United States and its policy. From the start of his administration, President Barack Obama had tried to lower tensions with Russia and refocus American attention on a rising China; he had made clear he wanted no part in the problems of the post-Soviet periphery. Yet in the middle of the uprising in Kiev, there was Nuland, encouraging protesters and insulting European allies."As part of the Biden administration, Nuland has once again been the vocal Russia hawk everyone has expected. In recent months, she had been serving in an acting capacity as Deputy Secretary of State following Wendy Sherman's retirement, and she was being considered to fill the vacancy permanently, but the job ended up going to Kurt Campbell. A favorite of Russia hawks, Nuland often rubbed her European counterparts the wrong way with her lack of diplomatic tact. As one European official put it years ago, "She doesn't engage like most diplomats. She comes off as rather ideological." It is a measure of how little diplomatic skills are prized in U.S. foreign policy that Nuland flourished for such a long time in Washington.

The U.S. will have almost half of its aircraft carriers deployed in the Pacific in the coming weeks. The South China Morning Post reported on February 14 that five of America's 11 aircraft carriers would all likely soon be deployed there at the same time. Two of the carriers, the USS Carl Vinson and USS Theodore Roosevelt have been participating in a military exercise with Japan in the Philippine Sea, the USS Ronald Reagan is in port at Yokosuka, the USS Abraham Lincoln departed San Diego earlier this month, and the USS George Washington is expected to relieve the Reagan in a few weeks. This is an unusual concentration of America's naval power in one region at once, and it is being widely interpreted as a show of force meant for China and North Korea. The Biden administration has made a point of making more shows of force in East Asia over the last year to reassure Asian allies that the U.S. has not forgotten about them. That isn't surprising given the importance that the administration attaches to the "Indo-Pacific" and an active U.S. role in it, but in doing this it may also be contributing to increasing tensions with both Beijing and Pyongyang. We have already seen some of this in the back-and-forth between the U.S. and North Korea since last summer as North Korea has answered U.S. naval deployments to South Korea with additional missile tests and more bellicose rhetoric. While these carrier deployments are presumably intended to signal American resolve and commitment to its regional allies, they could easily encourage China and North Korea to engage in their own reciprocal demonstrations of strength. They are also a reminder that the U.S. approach to East Asia is still very much a "military-first" approach that gives short shrift and devotes relatively few resources to economic statecraft and diplomacy. International relations scholar Van Jackson warned about the dangers of this approach more than two years ago, and since then the U.S. has only ramped up its military spending and deployments.Because Washington's attention has been focused so intently for the last four months on the war in Gaza and the other conflicts in the Middle East connected to it, it seems that the administration wants to show that it isn't neglecting East Asia. The carrier deployments in the Pacific appear to be an attempt to "make up" for the continued massive over-investment of energy and resources in the Middle East. The show of force may satisfy some allied governments, but it could also confirm the impression in both friendly and hostile capitals that the U.S. is overstretched and trying to take on too many tasks at the same time. The habit of reassuring allies so frequently has its own costs, including encouraging greater allied dependence, and when it is done too often it can have destabilizing effects on the wider region. One of the principle weaknesses of U.S. foreign policy in East Asia is an overreliance on military deterrence. This tends to ratchet up tensions more than necessary and undermines credible assurances to adversaries. The U.S. excels at reassuring allies with its displays of military power, but because it often fails to strike a balance by giving adversaries assurances about its intentions, our government can feed the fears of Chinese and North Korean leaders and encourage them to assume the worst about what the U.S. is doing. The carrier deployments suggest that the administration doesn't understand the need for balancing deterrence and assurance. Failing to balance the two risks making conflict based on a miscalculation more likely. As the Quincy Institute's Michael Swaine recently wrote about U.S. deterrence and Taiwan, "This balance is essential because, if the level of punishment or denial capability acquired is in fact seen as threatening the adversary's most vital interests, the adversary, rather than being deterred from taking aggressive action, will become more inclined to undertake or threaten preemptive or punishing moves of its own in order to protect those interests, thus increasing, rather than decreasing, the chance of conflict." By relying so much on shows of force designed to intimidate China, the Biden administration increases the risk of a crisis.The potential danger with North Korea is arguably even greater, since the North Korean government has a long history of responding to U.S. and allied pressure with its own provocations and threats. To the extent that Pyongyang perceives the deployment of so many carriers to the Pacific as directed even partly at North Korea, Kim Jong-un may conclude that he needs to show off his country's own capabilities with additional missile tests and possibly even a new nuclear test. Last year, North Korea reacted very angrily to the arrival of the USS Ronald Reagan in Busan, so it seems reasonable to expect an even harsher response if there are multiple carriers in the vicinity. Given the increasingly hostile rhetoric already coming from Pyongyang in the last few months, it would not take much for a new standoff between the U.S. and North Korea to begin.The U.S. can ill afford a new crisis in East Asia on top of the other conflicts that it is involved in, but its overly militarized approach to the region is not the way to avoid it. If Washington wants to make conflicts in East Asia less likely, it will need to do a much better job of understanding its adversaries' thinking and of offering them assurances that they can believe. Right now, the U.S. is doing far too little of both, and that is making the U.S. and its allies less secure than they could be.

The Israeli government is preparing to launch a ground assault on Rafah in southern Gaza as their devastating military campaign enters its fifth month. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was adamant that the assault would happen: "We're going to do it." This, after Israel started an aerial bombardment against Rafah, killing nearly 70 civilians as of Monday morning.As deadly as the war has been for Palestinian civilians so far, the next phase could be even more terrible. More than a million Palestinians have crowded into Rafah over the course of the war and there is nowhere left for them to go. Even some of Israel's most reliable supporters in the U.S. and Europe fear that a military operation in Rafah would be catastrophic for the people of Gaza. The German government, normally a backer of Israel's war, said earlier this month that an attack on Rafah would "simply not be justifiable." The proposed assault is also roiling Israel's relations with Egypt. The Egyptian foreign minister, Sameh Shoukry, said that an assault would have "disastrous consequences." According to the Associated Press, two Egyptians officials said that Egypt might even suspend its 1979 treaty with Israel if the ground assault goes ahead. This might be an idle threat, but the fact that it is being made at all is a measure of how bad relations between Israel and Egypt have become. Because Rafah is on the Egyptian border, the assault would create a refugee crisis that Egypt has been desperate to avoid. The Egyptian government doesn't want to be seen as permitting the forced displacement of Palestinians, nor does it want to have to bear the costs of Israel's campaign. The Biden administration issued a pro forma warning that the operation "should not proceed without a credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of and support for the more than one million people sheltering there," but this warning, like others before it, has no teeth because there is no reason to believe there will be any consequences if Netanyahu ignores it. At each stage of the war, the administration has urged the Israeli government to adhere to international law and protect civilians only for Israeli forces to wage one of the most destructive campaigns of the twenty-first century that has resulted in tens of thousands of civilian casualties in just four months. Netanyahu has correctly assumed that he can afford to disregard Washington's requests because he and his government pay no price when they do so. There are reports that Biden is becoming more frustrated with Netanyahu, but these leaks about Biden's frustration seem to be entirely for domestic consumption. They do not suggest that there will be any change in policy. In fact, in some of the same reports administration officials say that the president and his advisers "continue to believe his approach of unequivocally supporting Israel is the right one." The president's comments last week in which he seemed to criticize Israel's campaign are similarly meaningless if they do not lead to actions aimed at reining Netanyahu in.The president's "no daylight" approach to Israel and the war in Gaza was a serious mistake from the start, and it has clearly failed on its own terms. Far from gaining the Israeli government's trust, this approach signaled to Netanyahu that he could safely ignore all U.S. complaints and concerns. The assumption that uncritical support for the war would buy the U.S. greater influence with the Israeli government has been tested and proven wrong. Washington's refusal to use its leverage has left the U.S. in the absurd position of enabling Israeli violations of international law while feebly asking for the violations to stop. Unconditional U.S. backing for the war has enabled a rolling campaign of ethnic cleansing as the Palestinian population has been displaced from one part of the Gaza Strip after another. While the Biden administration keeps saying that the population should be allowed to return to their homes, the Israeli military has so thoroughly destroyed the infrastructure and housing across much of the territory that there is nothing for the people to return to later. Almost the entire population has been displaced by the war, but each supposed refuge that they find in the south has quickly become a new war zone. There are no other refugees left. There is no safe place for the people in Rafah to go to now. If the Israeli military repeats what it did in Gaza City and Khan Yunis, Rafah will be left as a smoldering ruin and the civilian death toll will skyrocket.Gaza's humanitarian crisis is already severe and continued fighting ensures that it will get worse. An assault on Rafah would be a death sentence for tens of thousands of people and possibly for many more than that. The people of Gaza were already teetering on the edge of the abyss, and this assault would push many of them over the edge. There have been many opportunities over the last four months for the U.S. to end its blanket support for this war and to demand a ceasefire, but so far the president has failed to take advantage of them. Halting the ground assault on Rafah might be the last chance that the Biden administration has to prevent an even greater humanitarian disaster. The U.S. needs to make a dramatic change in its policy regarding Israel and the war in Gaza. The Biden administration needs to stop providing unconditional support for the war, it needs to restore funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that it wrongly stopped, and it needs to back up its previously empty warnings with serious penalties in the form of aid cutoffs and targeted sanctions on top officials if the Israeli government won't halt the assault. Beyond preventing the ground assault on Rafah, the U.S. should also be pressing Israel for a full and permanent ceasefire and a lifting of the blockade that has created famine conditions in Gaza. These are all things that the U.S. should have done months ago, but there is still time to correct course and prevent the worst-case scenario.

The Biden administration continues to deny any connections between the war in Gaza and the ongoing conflicts involving U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. The White House's position that these are all unrelated conflicts that are just cropping up at the same time can't be squared with the evidence showing that the war in Gaza has fueled regional instability and violence, including the recent drone attack by an Iraqi militia that killed three American service members and injured more than 40 at a base in Jordan earlier this week.As much as the administration might want to keep the conflict confined to Gaza, the truth is that it has spread to several other countries. It is a disservice to the American people and to American military personnel to pretend that U.S. support for the war in Gaza hasn't already had serious negative consequences for regional stability and for American forces in the region when it clearly has.When he was asked about this "same, larger conflict" at a press conference on Wednesday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby dismissed any link between Gaza and the U.S. fight with the Houthis or the back-and-forth strikes between local militias and U.S. forces."I absolutely don't agree with your description of the same, larger conflict. There's a conflict going on between Israel and Hamas…and we're going to make sure that we continue to get Israel the support that they need to defend themselves against this still viable threat," Kirby said. "There were attacks on our troops and facilities in Iraq and Syria well before the seventh of October, certainly in the last administration as well. As for the Houthis, they can claim all they want that this is linked to Gaza, but two-thirds of the ships that they're hitting have no connection to Israel whatsoever. So it's just not true, it's a falsehood."Kirby's answer is misleading and false. The umbrella group in Iraq that claimed responsibility for the attack in Jordan, the Islamic Resistance of Iraq, explicitly stated that its attack was connected to the war in Gaza. The Houthi leadership has been emphatic that their attacks will continue for as long as the war does. The decision of other actors to jump on a cause's bandwagon may be cynical or not, but there is no denying that they have jumped on the bandwagon.Refusing to face the reality of the connections between these conflicts guarantees that the U.S. will pursue ineffective and counterproductive policies by ignoring that the key to defusing regional tensions is to bring the war in Gaza to an end as quickly as possible.Kirby did not mention that militia attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria had ceased for several months prior to October 7 because of the understanding that the U.S. and Iran had reached in connection with the prisoner exchange deal. It was only after October 7 that those attacks resumed and then increased to record levels. Local militias have additional reasons of their own for targeting U.S. forces that predate the war, but there is no way to understand the intensity of the attacks in recent months or their cessation during the pause in fighting in Gaza last year without recognizing that they are linked to Israel's war.The same goes for the Houthi attacks. The Houthis did not launch a campaign against commercial shipping during their war with the Saudi coalition, so this is not something that they have usually done since seizing power in 2014. The first Houthi attacks after October 7 were aimed at Israel itself. The Houthis shifted tactics to targeting commercial vessels, but it was clear that they were doing so in response to the war. No doubt the Houthis are acting opportunistically and are launching these attacks partly to bolster their own political fortunes in Yemen, but that doesn't change the reality that these attacks are happening now because of the war in Gaza. If that's true, it also seems reasonable to conclude that the attacks against shipping could be ended with a ceasefire there as well.The Biden administration has strong political incentives to deny links between these different conflicts. If they acknowledge a link, that makes it harder for them to justify their unconditional backing for Israel's war because of the greater costs involved. It also undermines their argument for military action in Yemen against the Houthis. The White House needs Americans to think that the costs of continued support for the war are lower than they are, and they also need Americans to buy that the strikes on Yemen aren't related to their stubborn opposition to a ceasefire in Gaza. Now that there are American fatalities from an Iraqi militia attack, the administration wants to compartmentalize each conflict so that the American people won't conclude that U.S. soldiers are being killed because of a foreign war that the president chose to support without conditions.The administration insists that it wants to prevent a regional war, but that won't be successful if it fails to recognize the relationships between Israel's campaign and what is happening elsewhere in the Middle East. Denying the link with Gaza in Yemen has already led to the blunder of escalation against the Houthis. That has done nothing to make commercial shipping more secure, but it has drawn the U.S. into another unnecessary, open-ended fight. The president is on the verge of making a similar mistake in response to the drone attack in Jordan.The U.S. can choose to entangle itself ever deeper in Middle Eastern conflicts as it is doing now, or it can recognize the futility and folly of going down the same dead-end road it has traveled before. If Washington wants to avoid involvement in new conflicts, it must reject the path of escalation and it must stop fueling the war in Gaza that is one of the chief drivers of regional instability.In the longer term, the U.S. needs to reduce its military footprint in the region to make it harder for other actors to hit American forces, and it needs to reassess and significantly cut back on its client relationships. The public deserves an honest accounting of what our government is doing in the Middle East and why, and right now the White House isn't providing anything close to that. If the president won't change course, the very least that he can do is level with the American people about the full costs of continuing down the dangerous path that he has chosen.

Taiwanese voters elected Vice President Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as their next president on Saturday, which will be the third consecutive presidential win for the party and an indication voters want to stay the course — in policy and in current US-China-Taiwan relations.Whether it will result in heightened tensions between the island and mainland China, and Beijing and Washington, remains to be seen, and will likely be determined by the public actions and reactions by each party in the immediate days and weeks.Despite a late tightening of the presidential race between Lai and his main opponent, Hou You-ih of the Kuomintang (KMT), the candidate of the incumbent party prevailed with 40% of the vote in a three-way race that included Ko Wen-je of the Taiwanese People's Party.The failure of the two main opposition parties to unite on a joint ticket last fall paved the way for Lai's victory. While opposition campaign rhetoric painted a win for Lai as a vote for confrontation and conflict with China, enough Taiwanese voters opted to stick with the policies of outgoing president Tsai Ing-wen to give the DPP the unprecedented third term in office. Lai campaigned on a message of continuity with Tsai. In a popular campaign ad, Tsai and Lai were seen driving in a car together and then the outgoing president got out and let Lai get behind the wheel, saying to him, "You can drive better than me." Despite Tsai's somewhat low overall approval ratings, the appeal to staying on the same course was effective enough to secure Lai the win. Lai's victory is unlikely to trigger a major crisis right away, but it will ensure that cross-Strait dialogue will not resume. The lack of dialogue between Taiwan and China has coincided with and contributed to a period of increasing Chinese pressure and deteriorating relations between the United States and China. As a result, the tensions that have built up between Taiwan and China and between the U.S. and China over the last eight years will remain high for the foreseeable future. The Biden administration was already adding to those tensions last week with the announcement that it would be sending a delegation of former high-level officials to Taiwan after Saturday's election. This move was unwelcome to Beijing, and the Chinese government condemned the decision, saying that the administration should "stop sending wrong signals to 'Taiwan independence separatist forces and refrain from interfering in elections in the Taiwan region in any form."For their part, the Chinese government had been putting additional pressure on Taiwan in the weeks leading up to the election with threats of punitive trade measures. The DPP triumph is not in itself a prelude to war, but it could encourage hardliners in Washington to pursue more aggressive and provocative policies toward China while making the Chinese use of coercive tactics more likely. As the Quincy Institute's Michael Swaine said in response to the election result, Lai's victory "will likely worsen the negative dynamics" in the U.S.-China relationship that he and his colleague James Park discussed in their recent QI brief. Depending on how Lai manages relations with the U.S. in the coming years, there is a danger that his efforts to strengthen ties with Washington will cause a backlash from China that brings all parties closer to a new crisis. Lai has expressed a desire to see a Taiwanese president visit the White House sometime in the future. If Lai were to pursue such a visit, and if the Biden administration indulged him in this, that would almost certainly be met with significant Chinese punitive measures, whether in the form of economic warfare, military drills, or some combination of the two. More modest efforts to build up the relationship with the U.S. may not have such dramatic consequences, but they will contribute to the ongoing strains in U.S.-Chinese relations. The old status quo between the U.S. and China has been steadily eroding for at least the last eight years, and this has accelerated over the last three years under Biden. The bipartisan consensus in Washington in favor of containment and rivalry and ill-conceived gestures of "support" for Taiwan have fed a cycle of threat inflation and overreaction in both countries. Officials in both governments tend to assume the worst about the intentions of the other side, and there are few safeguards in place in the event of a crisis. Cross-Strait relations and relations between the U.S. and China have both suffered significantly since then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taipei in 2022. Following that and the spy balloon incident, it took almost all of last year for the Biden administration to stabilize the relationship between Washington and Beijing. That has left Taiwan measurably worse off under the "new normal" conditions that have been created. It has also undermined the peace in East Asia that has endured for more than 40 years. It is against this backdrop of growing mutual mistrust and hostility that we need to view the implications of the Taiwanese election results. The U.S. can expect and should prepare for at least four more years of heightened tensions and worsening relations with China.That is why it is imperative that the U.S. approach become much more cautious and responsible than it has been in a long time. The U.S. not only needs to avoid taking provocative actions like extending an explicit security guarantee to Taiwan or restoring normal diplomatic ties, but it must also seek to offer credible assurances to Beijing that it has no interest in encouraging what the Chinese government considers separatism.Reassurance is as important as, and possibly more important than, making deterrent threats. As Bonnie Glaser, Jessica Chen Weiss, and Thomas Christensen recently explained in their article in Foreign Affairs, "For effective deterrence, both threats and assurances must be credible." The U.S. has no trouble in convincing other states that it is prepared to use force. The difficulty is in getting other states to believe that the U.S. can be trusted to leave well enough alone. The U.S. should take care in the coming months not to make any moves that suggest that it is upgrading the relationship with Taiwan. The post-election delegation that Biden is sending should be the last one of its kind for a long time. The Chinese government already perceives a gap between the Biden administration's rhetoric and its actions, so it is crucial that this gap not get any wider than it already is. The administration also needs to communicate privately to the incoming president that he should not take any actions that are likely to antagonize Beijing. Given the political incentives in an election year to engage in gratuitous China-bashing, that may be a tall order, but it is what needs to happen if the U.S. and Taiwan are going to navigate the year ahead without serious incident.

The people of Gaza are facing one of the worst man-made famines in recent history.The combined effects of bombing, displacement, and blockade have driven an already vulnerable population into severe, widespread hunger. This is not some accidental byproduct of conflict. Critics like Human Rights Watch charge that it is the result of a deliberate Israeli government policy to punish the entire population of Palestinians in Gaza for the crimes of Hamas. Now we are seeing the calamitous consequences of that policy for more than two million people, 90% of whom have been displaced from their homes over the last three months.Last month, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) initiative released a report on Gaza warning that a quarter of the population is now in the worst, catastrophic phase and that the entire population is highly food insecure and at risk of famine. According to the report, this is the highest level of acute food insecurity that the IPC has ever measured in a particular territory. Case in point: everywhere else in the world, there are roughly 130,000 people in IPC 5, the catastrophic phase, and in Gaza there are more than half a million. Arif Hussain of the World Food Program told the New York Times earlier this month, "I've been to pretty much any conflict, whether Yemen, whether it was South Sudan, northeast Nigeria, Ethiopia, you name it. And I have never seen anything like this, both in terms of its scale, its magnitude, but also at the pace that this has unfolded." The WFP says that almost every Palestinian in Gaza is going more than a day without eating anything, and when there is an opportunity to eat, there is only a tiny amount to be split among extended families. According to reliable news reports, food is so scarce that people resort to eating whatever spoiled and rancid food they are able to find. Mothers with infants are so malnourished that they cannot nurse their babies, and what little food there is has become prohibitively expensive. The blockade of commercial imports means there is no way to meet the basic needs of the population. In northern Gaza, where infrastructure has been wiped out and aid deliveries are impossible, conditions are even worse than in the rest of the Strip. The UN emergency relief coordinator, Martin Griffiths, has said, "Gaza has simply become uninhabitable. Its people are witnessing daily threats to their very existence – while the world watches on."The Israeli government's policies are creating this disaster. Based on its analysis of Israeli government actions and official statements since October 7, Human Rights Watch has concluded that the Israeli government is using starvation as a weapon of war, which is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. The New York Times quoted Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch's Israel and Palestine director, "For over two months, Israel has been depriving Gaza's population of food and water, a policy spurred on or endorsed by high-ranking Israeli officials and reflecting an intent to starve civilians as a method of warfare." The Israeli government denies the charges that it is hindering aid, and points to the deliveries that have been let in, but this defense strains credulity. The small amount of food and fuel that is allowed in must first go through a laborious, time-consuming inspection process, and the aid that makes it through is insufficient to meet the needs of millions of uprooted people in a territory otherwise cut off from the outside world. Scholar Alex de Waal wrote in a new article that "the catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a deliberate act. Gaza is a starvation crime scene." He explains that "[t]he rigor, scale and speed of the destruction of OIS [objects indispensable to survival] and enforcement of the siege surpasses any other case of man-made famine in the last 75 years." De Waal has written an important history of modern famine, Mass Starvation, in which he wrote about the recent atrocity famines that have been created in this century in Yemen, South Sudan, Sudan, Uganda, Nigeria, Syria, and Somalia. The U.S. government response to what is a new "atrocity famine" in Gaza has been poor and inadequate. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Israel Tuesday, and acknowledged the need for aid to get in and said that there "far too many" deaths in Gaza. But he did not assign blame to Israel and like all administration rhetoric, would not put any weight behind it. Continued unconditional support for Israel's military campaign and Washington's stubborn opposition to any resolution calling for a ceasefire at the U.N. have meant that there is little or no pressure on the Israeli government to change course. As Israel's principal patron and arms supplier, the U.S. bears significant responsibility for both the campaign and the policy of collective punishment to which it belongs. The only way to avert large-scale loss of life from hunger and disease in Gaza is an immediate ceasefire and a lifting of the siege. The longer it takes to secure a ceasefire, the more innocent people in Gaza will die preventable deaths. Staving off famine in Gaza should be Washington's top priority. If the U.S. does not act in time, it will be a black mark on our national reputation and one of the greatest foreign policy failures in our history.In Biden's first year as president, the State Department made the unpopular move of reversing the previous administration's designation of Ansar Allah, a.k.a., the Houthis, as a terrorist organization. The decision to remove the Houthis from the list of terrorist organizations was done because of the threat of famine to Yemeni civilians that the designation had created. The administration made the right call then to preserve the lives of innocent civilians, and it must do so again now.

The Biden administration's foreign policy record in 2023 won't give the president much to boast about in next year's election. The U.S. is even more overstretched at the end of 2023 than it was at the beginning, and the president has had very few policy successes. For most of the year, there weren't any major debacles, but that changed over the last two months as the president gave the Israeli government a blank check to wage a brutal war in Gaza. The president committed Washington to support another foreign war in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel while the conflict in Ukraine settled into a stalemate. Even though the U.S. was under no obligation to support this war, the president made a point of turning it into one of his signature policies and linked it closely with support for Ukraine in his public rhetoric. Biden did not, and has not made a compelling case that unconditional support for Israel's campaign is in the best interests of the United States, and the costs of that support have been rising ever since. Furthermore, backing the war exposed U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria to renewed attacks from local militias, and it has also led to increasing risks for U.S. ships in the Red Sea as the Houthis have been launching attacks on commercial shipping to protest the war. The risks that the conflict could escalate and spread into other parts of the region have been growing, and so has the risk that the U.S. could become directly involved in a multi-front war. The president's instinct to back Israel to the hilt has made a wider war more likely and it has put U.S. forces in greater danger.U.S. support for Israel in Gaza has not only overshadowed the rest of Biden's foreign policy agenda, but it has also tied the U.S. to an indiscriminate bombing campaign and a punishing siege that is driving hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians into famine conditions. The Biden administration has not only torched whatever remained of Washington's credibility on human rights and international law, but it has closely associated the U.S. with the war crimes committed against Palestinian civilians.The damage to America's reputation has already been considerable, and the damage to American interests in the Middle East and beyond over the longer term will likely be significant.The setback for Biden's own agenda has been undeniable. The administration's biggest diplomatic initiative of 2023 — the ill-advised pursuit of Saudi-Israeli normalization — stalled when the war in Gaza showed the administration's understanding of the region to be fundamentally flawed. Having bought into the false assumption that U.S.-facilitated normalization agreements between Israel and Arab clients would stabilize the region, the administration failed to recognize how bad things were getting in occupied Palestine. Like their predecessors, the Biden administration did nothing to keep Netanyahu's coalition government in check as it pursued its creeping annexation of the West Bank. Believing that the Palestinians could be safely sidelined and that their grievances could be ignored, the administration was trying to find out what inducements it would take to get Mohammed bin Salman to endorse normalization. If they had been successful, it would have meant another security commitment and more costs for the United States, so it was just as well that this policy was derailed.It isn't clear how much of a factor the push for Saudi normalization was in contributing to Hamas' decision to attack, but it clearly wasn't helpful for the U.S. to waste so much effort on trying to entice the Saudis into a deal while tensions between Israel and the Palestinians was about to explode. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan's infamous line uttered shortly before the start of the war about how the region was quieter than it had been in decades reflected how much the administration had come to believe its own press releases. Support for the war has cost the U.S. a lot of goodwill in countries of the Global South, and the administration's stubborn opposition to a ceasefire has left the U.S. as deeply isolated at the United Nations as it has ever been on a major issue. The administration had earlier emphasized the importance of competing for influence with other major powers in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, but with its hardline position on Gaza it seems to have frittered away most of whatever gains it has made. Especially for an administration that constantly talks about the importance of America's leadership role, it has outdone itself in alienating and driving the rest of the world away from the U.S. on this issue.U.S. support for the war in Ukraine has been undermined by backing for the war in Gaza in two ways. First, it has diverted U.S. attention and resources away from Ukraine as the U.S. has turned its focus once again to the Middle East. It has also made a mockery of the administration's rhetoric in support of Ukraine. The U.S. spent the better part of two years extolling the importance of international law to rally support for Ukraine, and then demonstrated that the U.S. doesn't hold its own clients and partners to the same standard that it expects from other states. The Biden record this year wasn't all bad. On the plus side, the U.S. made some modest progress in stabilizing relations with China near the end of the year after months of deteriorating ties in the wake of the spy balloon incident in February. There was a small diplomatic breakthrough with Iran in the summer that led to the release of five Americans that had been wrongfully detained by the Iranian government. Unfortunately, the administration then reneged on releasing Iranian funds that had been frozen under "maximum pressure" sanctions because they didn't want to be seen as "rewarding" Iran following Hamas' attack.The administration also recently secured another prisoner release agreement with the Venezuelan government. While these were positive results, they were also hardly earth-shattering.The Biden administration had more success in working with established allies. They further developed the technology-sharing AUKUS arrangement with Australia and Britain, and they took advantage of a temporary improvement in relations between South Korea and Japan to strengthen ties with both. In both cases, the administration was pushing on an open door, and it is questionable whether either arrangement will endure, but they can at least point to these things as examples of advancing Biden's agenda. Even more than in previous years, the Biden administration's foreign policy in 2023 has been defined by too much reliance on military tools and too little effort put into diplomatic engagement. That may be one of the reasons why the public now broadly disapproves of Biden's handling of foreign policy. Both for his own sake and for the sake of U.S. interests, the president needs to make some major course changes in 2024 in Gaza and in his overall approach to the world.

The United States should not be part of a post-war stabilization force in Gaza. There are some proposals circulating in Washington for a U.S.-led post-war force, but this would be deeply unpopular at home and politically radioactive in the Middle East. One proposal from Jonathan Lord of the Center for a New American Strategy emphasizes that a U.S.-led mission is the only "credible" option. According to Lord, "a US military-led stabilization operation is necessary to enable Hamas' defeat." In addition to underestimating the difficulty of securing sufficient support in Congress for such a mission, this plan fails to take into account the intense local hostility that an American military deployment on Palestinian soil would encounter and the dangers that U.S. forces would face as a result. A U.S.-led stabilization force would be occupiers and would be perceived as such, and their presence would likely invite resistance. Instead of providing security and stability, such a force could easily become embroiled in renewed conflict. Putting U.S. forces in Gaza risks exposing them to future attacks. Their presence could act like a magnet for extremists and puts both their lives and the lives of Palestinian civilians in danger. It was a huge mistake for the Reagan administration to send Marines into the middle of the war in Lebanon following Israel's invasion more than 40 years ago. It would be a similarly grave error to put American troops in Gaza. A major military role for the U.S. in postwar Gaza would be a non-starter with the American public. Americans opposed to Israel's war and U.S. support for it would not want to commit U.S. troops to deal with the aftermath. Given that polling shows Americans more broadly are wary of sending more U.S. troops to the region, it's likely that many of those Americans that have supported U.S. backing for the war still would not want to put American soldiers potentially in harm's way as part of yet another deployment to the Middle East. Any stabilization mission would need to have broad bipartisan support for years to come, and there is simply no political appetite in either party to take on another significant overseas commitment like this. The president has no mandate to make such a commitment, and it is hard to imagine Congress approving the mission in an election year.Lord claims that a "US military presence on the ground can give Biden significant leverage to drive a peace process forward." But we have seen that Biden, like his predecessors, absolutely refuses to use leverage to pressure the Israeli government to do anything. Putting U.S. troops in Gaza might theoretically give Washington some leverage with Israel, but this doesn't matter when there is no political will to use that leverage. Making U.S. troops hostages to an unserious peace process will just lock the U.S. into another open-ended deployment that has nothing to do with U.S. security. Besides, the U.S. needs to be looking for ways to reduce its overall military footprint in the region rather than finding excuses to add new missions.Far from being a "credible" option, a U.S.-led force will have little or no support from the many regional governments whose entreaties for a ceasefire Washington has ignored. The U.S. has made the choice repeatedly to side with the Israeli government no matter what, and it therefore has no credibility as an impartial outside actor. As the principal enabler of the war, the U.S. has lost any goodwill and trust in the wider region that it might have had. As much as the Biden administration might like to have things both ways, it is not possible to support the war that is laying Gaza waste and then show up as a postwar protector of the population.Perhaps the most fanciful part of Lord's proposal is that a U.S.-led stabilization force in Gaza might help to jumpstart Saudi-Israeli normalization. That Biden administration initiative was a serious error even before the war started, and it is doubtful that the Saudi government would be interested in embracing Israel anytime soon after the war. Even if Riyadh were willing, the normalization deal under consideration suffers from the same major flaws that made it undesirable for the United States in the first place. If Biden was going to have a hard time selling a security guarantee for the Saudis before the war, he would face even stiffer resistance from Congress if he were simultaneously seeking its support for a Gaza mission.The goal of any stabilization force must be the protection of the people of Gaza. To succeed in that, it would need to be accepted and viewed as legitimate by the residents. There is simply too much baggage and bad blood between the U.S. and the people of Gaza for the U.S. to be involved with a postwar military presence. Our government's role in this conflict makes it impossible for U.S. forces to act as a trusted security force in this case. To have any chance of success, a future stabilization mission must not be tied to any governments that have been directly involved in supporting Israel's military campaign. As Israel's chief arms supplier and diplomatic supporter, the U.S. is uniquely disqualified from having a role in post-war stabilization. Ideally, governments known to be sympathetic to the Palestinians such as Brazil or South Africa could be leading contributors to a security mission. If those governments are unable or unwilling to take part, the United Nations could organize a peacekeeping mission with troops drawn from predominantly Muslim countries or from other states that have been involved in U.N. peacekeeping operations in the past, including China. Turkey and Qatar might also be valuable contributors to stabilization and reconstruction efforts. There are other alternatives available in an increasingly multipolar world, and there are several that would be more suitable than a U.S.-led mission.Planning for what comes next after the war in Gaza is important, but it would be much better for the U.S. to use its influence now to head off the worst outcomes before more innocent Palestinians are killed by bombs, starvation, and disease. The best thing that the U.S. could do to help make postwar Gaza more stable is to press for an end to the war now and to lead a massive relief effort to stave off the looming humanitarian catastrophe that threatens millions of lives.

There are few words in contemporary foreign policy debates that are more abused than "internationalist."Internationalism should refer to a foreign policy approach that prioritizes resolving conflicts peacefully, respecting international law, strengthening international institutions, and eschewing coercive policies as much as possible. As it is commonly used in Washington today, however, internationalism often means almost exactly the opposite. It is a euphemism that advocates of U.S. "leadership" use to describe their preferred policies of pursuing dominance, dictating terms to other states, and routinely using force or the threat of force to get their way. The label internationalist has become code for supporting militarism and interference in the affairs of other countries, which is just about as far from what it used to mean as it is possible to get. The internationalist label is usually paired with and opposed to the "isolationist" slur used to dismiss critics of U.S. foreign policy. To be considered an internationalist in Washington, one needs to be comfortable endorsing the extensive use of American power, including and especially the use of hard power. Expressing doubts or asking questions about the wisdom or necessity of this extensive use of power is one of the quickest ways to earn the "isolationist" tag. According to this warped set of definitions, the so-called internationalists are the ones that seek to impose Washington's will on other nations while the "isolationists" are the ones that respect their rights and sovereignty. Even generally hawkish presidents will be accused of "isolationist" leanings if they "fail" to order military action somewhere, as we saw with Barack Obama and the red line episode in 2013. Meanwhile presidents will be praised for their "internationalism" when they order illegal attacks. It is common for analysts to conflate support for U.S. primacy with internationalism. Earlier this year, Foreign Policy magazine published a long article by Ash Jain classifying different foreign policy camps and putting them under the headings of "internationalist" or "non-internationalist." In one of the more bizarre examples of how this worked, the "unilateral internationalists" represented by the likes of John Bolton and Dick Cheney, were included among the internationalists because they were champions of power projection, but restrainers were deemed "non-internationalist" because they favored fewer commitments and a less ambitious overall strategy. Nothing could better demonstrate how absurd the contemporary use of "internationalist" has become when someone like Bolton, who has a record of despising international law and institutions, can be considered an internationalist while defenders of international law are not. The conflation of support for primacy with internationalism goes all the way back to the remaking of U.S. foreign policy in WWII. As Stephen Wertheim explained in Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, "officials and intellectuals redefined armed supremacy as the epitome of internationalism and the core of international organization." That redefinition was made because internationalism had meant something profoundly different in the past. Unfortunately, the redefinition stuck, and the more older understanding of internationalism faded into obscurity. That has had serious long-term consequences for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. The distortion of internationalism into a project of global power projection fed the worst impulses of U.S. policymakers. As Wertheim explained, "to install one's dominance in the name of internationalism is something else. It effectively turns one nation's military supremacy into the prerequisite for a decent world. This kind of internationalism denies that armed force can obstruct cooperation and provoke others. It also attenuates the value of international rules and bodies." Such a deformed, militarized internationalism will not be a stabilizing force, but will often become a threat to the international peace and security that its adherents claim to defend.As long as the world's leading power refuses to respect the limits of international law, it will always be a destabilizing force in the world and a contributor to future conflicts. A principled internationalist approach to the world requires that the U.S. not only follow the laws that it expects others to follow, but that it should also hold itself and its clients to the highest standards. Any attempts to carve out exceptions or to create loopholes for the U.S. and the states aligned with it will serve to undermine international law and encourage more violations. That is what is happening with the war in Gaza right now as the U.S. makes a mockery of international law by enabling a devastating military campaign that has already killed well over 10,000 civilians.Many self-described internationalists are quick to invoke international law and the U.N. Charter when it comes to the actions of U.S. adversaries, but then become suddenly mute when a U.S.-backed government begins trampling on the same things. The champions of the "rules-based order" evidently do not believe that international law applies to the U.S. and the governments that it arms and supports, and they have no intention of doing anything to hold those violators accountable. If the U.S. is going to take international law seriously, it can't keep doing this. Washington must not play favorites by giving some states a free pass to commit terrible crimes. The U.S. would benefit a great deal from the recovery of a genuinely internationalist approach to the world. It would still be deeply engaged around the world through commerce and diplomacy, but it would have a far less militarized and less coercive foreign policy. Because it would be taking sides in very few conflicts, it would be in a stronger position to act as an effective and trusted mediator in whatever conflicts did arise. If the U.S. made a habit of adhering to international law and did not selectively trample on it when expedient, it would likely find a much more receptive audience in foreign capitals when it appealed for their support in a dispute. The U.S. would not be cutting itself off from the world, but it would also not be overcommitted and constantly embroiled in wars, whether they were its own or those of its clients.Recovering an internationalism that prizes peace and cooperation rather than the pursuit of dominance and rivalry is crucial for the U.S. in the coming decades to face the global threats of pandemics and climate change. America and the other nations of the world can ill afford to squander this century in fruitless contests for supremacy. To that end, Americans need to rediscover the internationalist tradition that flourished in this country a century ago.

The cutoff of food, water, and fuel imposed on Gaza has created dire conditions for the Palestinians there in just the last six weeks. Soon, they could be starved to death.The trickle of aid that has been allowed in under international pressure is not nearly enough to sustain the civilian population. According to the World Food Program, only 10% of the necessary food is entering the Gaza Strip, and the people there now face an "immediate possibility of starvation." The WFP also warns that the "food infrastructure in Gaza is no longer functional," and what little food is available is being sold at inflated prices and much of it cannot be used because people have no means to cook it. There is a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding before our eyes in Gaza. People are not just starving, they are being starved, and it is happening with the support of our government.Human Rights Watch and legal scholars say Israel is committing war crimes by waging a "war of starvation" against civilians in Gaza. Insofar as Washington continues to assist Israel's military campaign and blockade, it is helping to enable it. The meager amounts of humanitarian aid that the Biden administration boasts about facilitating are a drop in the bucket of what the population needs, and at current rates they cannot stave off large-scale loss of innocent life. The need for a ceasefire and an emergency relief effort is undeniable and Washington's resistance to it is a potential death sentence for thousands of people. Starvation has been used as a weapon with disturbing frequency in several conflicts over the last decade from Syria and Yemen to Tigray and South Sudan. Governments typically use economic warfare and physical blockades to achieve their ends. The current blockade of Gaza involves both by effectively shutting down Gaza's economy and cutting it off from outside supplies. The forced starvation of a civilian population is a form of collective punishment. Israel has an obligation under the Fourth Geneva Convention "of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population." The Israeli government is obviously not fulfilling that obligation, and instead it has been doing the opposite. It is not surprising that President Biden had nothing serious to say about any of this in his recent op-ed in The Washington Post. The president acknowledged that many innocent Palestinians have been killed in the war, but he said nothing about those responsible for killing them. Biden insists that there must be "no siege or blockade" while both are ongoing. He mentioned no consequences if the Israeli government ignores his list of things that "must" not happen. The Biden administration may have "called for respecting international humanitarian law," but it is not acting to uphold it and it is not holding violators accountable.The president has once again rejected the option of a ceasefire: "As long as Hamas clings to its ideology of destruction, a cease-fire is not peace." This fails to take seriously the devastating consequences that allowing the war to rage on will have for all parties. No one imagines that a ceasefire will resolve the conflict or immediately create conditions for a permanent settlement, but it is imperative for protecting the lives and health of millions of people facing death from starvation, disease, and conflict. As the political scientist Sarah Parkinson explained in Foreign Affairs, "A cease-fire is the only politically reasonable, security-enhancing, and morally defensible policy to advocate, especially if Washington has any hope of remaining a respected player in the Middle East." Opposing a ceasefire in this war is a profound strategic and moral error that will cost the United States dearly in the months and years to come. Biden stresses that the U.S. is aiding Israel in its self-defense, but self-defense does not give a state the unlimited right to do anything it wants. Adil Ahmad Haque wrote an incisive article on self-defense and proportionality in Just Security earlier this month, in which he said this: "Under the law of self-defense, even a legitimate aim must be set aside if it is outweighed by the harmful effects of the force necessary to achieve it. Even if Israel's right to self-defense is engaged, its current exercise of that right is disproportionate."If this war were happening almost anywhere else and if it didn't involve a U.S. client state, it is very likely that our government would insist on the necessity of a ceasefire and U.S. officials would be repeating that there is no military solution. It is only when the U.S. or a U.S.-backed government is fighting that Washington sees no merit in adhering to international law. Unfortunately, this looks like the U.S. is least interested in stopping the wars over which it has considerable influence, and it is most vocal in demanding ceasefires in wars where it has little or no clout. If millions of people were facing an immediate threat of starvation in some other conflict, the U.S. would be appealing to the belligerents to lay down their arms and to do everything possible to facilitate the delivery of life-saving aid. That is exactly what our government should be doing now in this war. Brief pauses in the fighting will not be enough to ensure the safe, consistent delivery of aid.Acting in self-defense doesn't free a government of its obligations under international law, and self-defense isn't a catch-all excuse for violating the law. Some political and military goals can't be reached at an acceptable cost. The harmful effects of waging this war are already too great to justify continuing it, and they will only get worse the longer that this war is allowed to continue.