Michael Arria
Mondoweiss / October 6, 2024
Michael Arria talks to Biden biographer Branko Marcetic about how the Gaza genocide will shape the president’s legacy.
Amid 2020’s Democratic primaries Verso published Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. The book, by Jacobin staff writer Branko Marcetic, detailed the future president’s forgotten political history and his key role in shifting the Democratic party further to the right.
With the Biden presidency coming to an end, Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke to Marcetic about the administration’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, its wider foreign policy, the views of Democratic voters, and what a Harris presidency might look like on these issues.
Mondoweiss: We spoke shortly before Biden became president and you were speculating what his Middle East policy might look like.
This was obviously before October 7. People often say that every U.S. president is the same when it comes to Palestine, but we have seen past presidents institute some very basic red lines and we haven’t seen Biden do that.
Has any of Biden’s actions over the past year surprised you or is this how you expected him to approach the issue after the Israeli assault began?
Marcetic: I find this entire thing quite baffling. Even putting aside the grotesque nature of what we’re watching, just the constant, daily mass murder. I have always seen Biden as someone who took up the issue of unequivocal support for Israel as purely a political matter. Not a true believer.
Just a few months ago I wrote a piece where I went to Delaware and went through a bunch of old Biden archives, the ones that are available to the public anyway, and my thinking on this was basically confirmed. He’s not a guy who has any real emotional connection to Israel, it was an issue that he purely took up because he thought it would help him win elections.
So to now watch him over the past year effectively shredding his re-election chances and destroying whatever legacy he might have wanted to claim as a president, just basically backing anything and everything Israel does, has been really head-scratching.
I still don’t have a very good explanation for why he’s done this, but I suspect a lot of it has to do with the workings of the White House that we as the public are not privy to. We got some look into how the White House was working in that month when Biden was in crisis and people were pushing to have him dumped off the ticket. We got drips of information here and there showing that he was not being given the full picture of what was happening for his advisors.
We also got a lot of information about his frailty, about the fact that he is plainly not up to the job that he’s doing, that he’s a guy who functions best between 10am and 4pm. So on and so forth. All of that stuff suggests to me that there are probably a lot of things that we do not know about what’s happening in the inner workings of The White House and what is actually shaping Biden’s thinking.
He’s a guy who, if you go back to his 1972 campaign, there was a story that he took up this diehard support for Israel, basically because he just thought that was the politically safe thing to do. Now he has engaged in probably the most politically unsafe thing of his entire presidency and he just seems unwavering on that.
Who knows, maybe in a year or two or five, we will find out why that is, but it’s really quite strange.
I’m wondering if you have any reflections on Biden’s foreign policy legacy overall. He did pull out of Afghanistan, something Obama and Trump falsely claimed they would do. He also scaled back the drone war, compared to Obama and Trump. I don’t think anyone would say he was pushing a progressive foreign policy, but there seemed to be some shifts. Then we get the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the consistent military support for Ukraine.
This actually relates to the answer I just gave you because the Afghanistan withdrawal can probably be considered a big surprise. Biden was not somewhat known for political courage or for even really operating by convictions, but the withdrawal was one of the most politically courageous things I’ve seen from a president.
The press absolutely salvaged him for it. Rather than turning tail and running, which frankly, I did expect from him given his career, he actually stuck to it and sort of ate the black eye he was given by the media and rival politicians.
Again, it’s hard for me to adjudicate exactly what is going on with the decision making in the Biden administration, because again, we don’t have much of a view into what exactly is going on there, or what’s driving this decision making. But it feels to me like once the political capital was spent on this particular thing, the Afghanistan withdrawal, Biden really took the path of least resistance approach on foreign policy.
To be honest, I think he, it seemed like he thought that a bunch of the hawkish things that he did after that, his maximalist anti-diplomacy position on Ukraine and then, of course, Gaza, were going to somehow boost his popularity.
To be fair, in the first few months of the Ukraine war, his approval ratings did get a bit of a bump. You can see from some of the things he said and the speeches he gave that there was a feeling that he looked like a “War President” who was taking on an international pariah.
Maybe he thought that was going to look good for him long-term, but the public’s early zeal for that war went away. Now the view among the American public on that war is very different. It’s not something that’s politically popular for him.
The same with Gaza. There was a piece in Politico from October 2023, shortly after October 7th, where a number of people from Biden’s circle are saying, “This is actually good for Biden because it can revive his re-election chances. People are going to see him, in action as an experienced statesman and they’re going to see the world would be in chaos if Trump was there. Biden is the who can steer the country and the world through terrible crisis.”
They really thought that this was going to improve his standing as president. In fact, again, similar to Ukraine, those hopes were dashed ultimately Gaza ended up becoming the biggest liability, arguably, of his entire presidency.
Despite the fact that he has increasingly focused on foreign policy since, basically the death of “Build Back Better”, as major component of his legacy, I actually think his foreign policy has been the most disastrous part of his entire tenure.
So it’s interesting to see me to see him leaning in on it in the way he has.
When we spoke in 2020, I asked if you thought Biden would take a similar approach to Obama on Iran. What have you made of his Iran policy and has anything about how he’s approached another potential nuclear deal surprised you?
The approach to Iran reminds me a lot of Biden’s approach to other aspects of Obama’s foreign policy legacy. These are aspects that I thought were kind of settled, but Biden has taken a much more conservative stance on Iran.
I think Biden did and does want to go back to the Iran deal, but instead of just re-entering the deal, he decided that he would use Trump’s withdrawal from it as a way to get Iran to renegotiate its terms. So you ended up in these protracted negotiations.
I guess they thought this was clever, but ultimately it’s been problem for him because Iranian-U.S. relations are where they are. It seems like Biden has basically given up really on diplomacy with Iran in favour of basically just trying to do the Trump thing and isolating them regionally and trying to cozy up further with Saudi Arabia. He’s continued to try to push these normalization deals between countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel.
It’s the same thing with Cuba. With Obama trying to change U.S. policy towards Cuba and make things more friendly, I thought that issue was settled. But again, Biden has been far more conservative on this, clearly fearing some kind of domestic blowback.
It’s the same story every single time; not pulling the band-aid off on these things early in his presidency just ends up making the issue far more of a problem later on. It makes it increasingly politically difficult to actually deal with these things.
Right now we’re in a pretty bad situation, with Iran possibly entering this war with Hezbollah and Israel and the U.S. getting pulled into that. So basically a U.S.-Iranian war, potentially and even if they stave that off you have the circumstances in place for a U.S.-Iran war under Trump if he wins.
I guess things could change if Harris wins, but then the question is, what is Harris going to do? Is she going try and push a deal with Iran, or is she going to just continue doing what Biden was doing and try to isolate Iran? Given some of Harris’s foreign policy positions, I’ll be surprised if she takes a very different approach.
Unfortunately, we’re just in a very, very bad place as a result of this administration not doing the smart thing and re-entering the Iran deal immediately.
The Biden administration has not stopped supplying Israel with weapons throughout this assault, yet polls indicate that Democratic voters want to condition aid to Israel and even support an arms embargo on the country. Why do you believe there’s such a big disconnect between voters and lawmakers on this issue? Is it as simple as saying Democrats are afraid of pro-Israel lobbying groups, or are there other factors at work?
It’s a reminder of the age-old truism in U.S. politics, which is that foreign policy in the U.S. is completely disconnected from any kind of democratic process, or any sort of democratic accountability.
Probably the closest we’ve gotten to democratic accountability recently, was the War Powers resolutions that were passed during the Trump presidency against the war in Yemen. That was the result of popular agitation, as people had been working for years to stop U.S. support for that heinous war. The resolution failed, but at least there was some attempt to restrain the Executive Branch. There was a reflection among Congress of the popular will on that subject.
In this case, absolutely not. I don’t know where the numbers stand now, but if you look at the Senators and members of the House who back a ceasefire, let alone an arms embargo against Israel. And you compare it to the voters, both Democrat and Republican, it’s completely out of whack.
I think there’s one Republican? I think Thomas Massie maybe supports cutting off some arms to Israel, but that would be one Republican. I don’t think there’s a single Republican Senator who supports any of those things.
Poll after poll shows that most Republicans support giving Israel whatever it wants and Trump says they have to be able to “finish the job” in Gaza,” but in some polls 40% of Republicans say they want a ceasefire and want to cut off military aid. There’s certainly not 40% of Republicans in the House or Senate who want that.
So, there’s a huge disconnect. I think it comes down to money. It’s the same thing with Biden. I do not think that Biden or Harris have some kind of intense, lifelong emotional connection to Israel. I suspect that they’ve made the calculus that however bad this issue is, Number one, they’re so deep into it now, it’s hard to go back. Then Number Two, whatever popular anger exists is not as big a deal as arousing the ire of megadonors who almost exclusively care about Israel and U.S. support for Israel as the only issue.
One example I’d point to is when Biden withheld 2,000-pound and 500-pound bombs from as Israel as a kind of warning shot against an invasion of Rafah. Immediately, his advisers were emailed by Haim Saban, a big Democratic megadonor who has said, “I’m a one issue guy and my only issue is Israel.”
Shortly thereafter, Biden maintained the embargo on the 2,000-pound bombs, but he allowed the 500-pound bombs to resume. Basically, since then, there’s been absolutely no restriction on any weapons from the U.S.
I think that tells you who the Democratic party is listening to and who the Biden administration is listening to. Obviously the Uncommitted voters have had an impact too, but clearly this is an administration and a party that is still far more concerned about the wrath of megadonors than it is about the wrath of rank and file Muslim, Arab-American, and antiwar Jewish voters.
You’ve alluded to this a little already, but I am wondering if you see any differences between Biden and Harris on this issue or whether you expect a continuation of the same policy if she’s elected. She seems to have a slightly different foreign policy team around her, people like Phil Gordon who have criticized the logic of the Iraq War for instance.
With Harris, whether it’s Gaza or any other foreign policy issue, it seems like there is a deliberate attempt by her campaign to confuse voters and to confuse people like us, commentators and journalists, from actually understanding what her position is.
It’s the same with domestic policy too. Phil Gordon is an encouraging sign, but at the same time we saw one of her former foreign policy advisors say she wouldn’t re-enter a nuclear deal with Iran. People were very confused by that.
That could just be words, but again, it’s an example of the way they’re constantly muddying the waters. That’s the thing. We really have no idea where Harris stands on anything because it does not seem that she has strong positions on anything.
I suspect that if Harris comes to power, we would get a similar situation as with Biden, where probably you have a mix of traditionally hawkish liberal interventionist stuff combined with some elements of more restrained foreign policy.
Biden also had that. Remember Biden, to give him credit, didn’t just do the Afghanistan withdrawal, he also massively ramped down drone bombings. His administration also reportedly intervened to prevent a coup in Brazil when Lula was elected. Softly, but nevertheless they did intervene to make sure that power was transferred in an orderly way in Brazil.
There have been certain things that have been encouraging. So I suspect we’ll probably see that from Harris. However, one of the people that is in the running for Defense Secretary is Michèle Flournoy who is a massive hawk and a massive liberal interventionist. She was a Harris policy advisor during her presidential campaign in 2020. She comes out of WestExec and the Center for a New American Security, so she’s not unlike Secretary of State Tony Blinken.
She believes a lot of things that most Democratic voters probably don’t believe and certainly a lot of people on the left don’t believe. She’s for unleashing American energy in the form of fracking and drilling as a foreign policy strategy. She favours a very hawkish line on Russia. Her being in that position, having Harris’s ear, if that comes to pass, um would not point to a massively different direction on this.
We’ve also seen from Harris in the course of this campaign that she’s also not really willing to break from Biden. Maybe she hasn’t explicitly said she’s a Zionist like he does, but she’s basically taken the same exact position on this war as Biden and just garnished it with some more empathetic words towards Palestinians than Biden was able to muster.
Ultimately, that’s not really an important thing. The important thing is for the bombs to stop, not for the bombs to continue while the president makes a sad face.
What do you think Biden’s legacy will be? How do you think he will be remembered historically?
We need to bear in mind that this will be hugely speculative, since we’re still watching events unfold and don’t know the answers to many questions, such as how far will regional war spread? How long will it last? Will the U.S. get pulled in? Etcetera.
But I suspect that, similar to Vietnam, the moral clarity around the genocide in Gaza and Biden’s facilitation of it will only become more stark in the years and decades ahead. At that point, I can imagine a debate among future historians and commentators over whether we should think of Biden as akin to LBJ – a deeply flawed and weak man who did something evil out of political insecurity – or as simply a frail, increasingly unfit old man taken advantage of by unscrupulous advisors and Israeli leadership. I suspect the latter will become more of an attractive narrative for his defenders once he leaves office and we have a better understanding of the scale of what Israel has done to Gaza, and we’re already seeing signs that Biden might prefer this narrative, too. In any case, neither reflects well on his leadership.
But that’s if Biden’s Israel policy ends up “only” resulting in the razing of Gaza. If this does mushroom into a full-on regional bloodbath with long-lasting ripple effects, which it shows every sign of doing, there will still probably be debates about how much Biden was in control. But I think he’ll nevertheless go down as a disastrous, incompetent president who plunged the world into chaos and did deep, lasting damage to the country and to its claim to global leadership, at a moment where there was already growing doubts about that status and a serious competitor on the rise – all without even the domestic accomplishments of LBJ to justify it.
It will be an even worse verdict if the war ends up putting a radicalized Trump in power, eliminating what is right now Biden’s strongest claim to a positive domestic legacy. I would close by saying that I think Biden’s foreign policy in general, which right now gets wide praise in liberal circles, will be viewed far less fondly in the future, as a time of reckless, strategically incoherent U.S. proxy warfare that shunned diplomacy in favour of military solutions – and perhaps even laid the foundations for even more disastrous future conflict, although I sincerely hope not.
Michael Arria is Mondoweiss’ U.S. correspondents
