Michael Arria
Mondoweiss / January 14, 2025
In a recent series of speeches and interviews, Biden officials have attempted to put a positive spin on their foreign policy legacy. The reality is that Biden’s legacy is, and will remain, one of genocide.
On Monday Joe Biden gave his final foreign policy speech.
The president attempted to take a victory lap, touting his moves to establish alliances throughout the world. He highlighted the fact he pulled U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, said he laid the foundation for the Ukrainian people to be free, weakened Iran’s status as a global threat, and put the United States in a better position to compete with China.
“We’re leaving them an America with more friends and stronger alliances, whose adversaries are weaker and under pressure – an America who once again is leading, uniting countries, setting the agenda, bringing others together behind our plans and visions,” he declared.
On Gaza, Biden finally had something positive to point to, as many have reported that a ceasefire deal is imminent. “We’re on the brink of a proposal that I laid out months ago finally coming to fruition,” he explained.
“I’ve learned [over] many years of public service to never, never, never, ever give up,” he continued. “So many innocent people have been killed, so many communities have been destroyed. Palestinian people deserve peace.”
On the same day as the Biden speech, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan took reporter questions at a White House press conference, where he also touted the administration’s ceasefire efforts. Sullivan has also given a number of media interviews in recent days, in which he has consistently attempted to put a positive spin on Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.
“It is brutal,” Sullivan told Ezra Klein. “It keeps me up at night — and I think about that from both the perspective of the Palestinians and the Israelis. And I believe that if we can get a foothold in the cease-fire and hostage deal, and try to carry that forward into something more enduring, we can move into a different era on that conflict, as well.”
The outgoing officials are all publicly embracing the same set of talking points: 1.) The administration has tirelessly been working for a ceasefire and has finally made progress after many months. 2.) The main impediment to peace has been Hamas. 3.) Despite a humanitarian issue here or there, Israel’s cause in Gaza has always been just.
Back in reality, these assertions fall apart fairly quickly.
The agreement currently negotiated is essentially the same deal that Hamas accepted on May 6 and July 2 of last year. Netanyahu continually added additional stipulations to the agreement and received no resistance from the Biden administration.
This fact is seemingly discussed more openly in Israeli society than it is within U.S. mainstream media. Alon Pinkas cuts straight to the point in a Haaretz column:
Throughout the first half of 2024, Netanyahu was deliberately seeking an open confrontation with the White House. “The U.S. is trying to impose a Palestinian state on Israel,” he sanctimoniously and bogusly lamented without any basis. By May 2024, he had reneged on and disowned a plan he himself had presented to Biden. During those months, the hostage and cease-fire deal that may come to fruition in the coming days was already on the table.
For eight full months, such a deal was presented time and time again by Qatar and the United States. But Netanyahu only had politics and his own survival in mind, and then the U.S. election and Trump’s inauguration.
This level of callousness, cruelty, disregard for the hostages and indifference toward their traumatized families – who he even blamed for undermining him – and the sheer recklessness in prosecuting a war with no defined, tangible and attainable objectives is staggering even by Mr. Netanyahu’s standards. Even his harshest critics and most vehement detractors didn’t think a year ago that it would get to this.
Israel’s extreme right lawmakers openly admit that they have purposely tanked the ceasefire for months. “In the last year, using our political power, we managed to prevent this deal from going ahead, time after time,” said National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, after news of the deal broke. Gvir called on Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to join him in killing the current deal.
None of this is acknowledged in Biden’s world. In a very lengthy interview with The Times of Israel, United States Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew put so much blame on Hamas that even the paper’s editor David Horovitz pushed back a little:
Lew: So our strategy in July was, get these issues where they’re distracting from Hamas, get them settled. Get the world to put pressure on Hamas to stop its insistence on things that are impossible and let Phase One start, save dozens of lives, and get into the period of negotiating Phase Two. All of the attention on the Philadelphi Corridor has left an impression that is not accurate. If none of that focus had been put on the Philadelphi Corridor, I don’t think we would have seen Hamas bend enough for there to be a deal. We’re hoping this week we get there. We’re still in the process of trying to get there.
Horovitz: I want to be sure I understand. Even if Netanyahu had not brought up the new condition of the IDF remaining deployed on the Philadelphi Corridor, you’re not convinced that we would have got a Phase One. But it certainly didn’t help, and it certainly took some of the pressure off Hamas.
Lew: I think it distracted the attention from Hamas’s intransigence in a way that was strategically not helpful.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Secretary of State Antony Blinken pushes a similar story, rejecting the idea that Netanyahu tanked the process. When asked about reports that the Israeli Prime Minister blocked a ceasefire Blinken said, “No, that’s not accurate. What we’ve seen time and again is Hamas not concluding a deal that it should have concluded. There have been times when actions that Israel has taken have, yes, made it more difficult. But there’s been a rationale for those actions, even if they’ve sometimes made getting to a conclusion more difficult.”
Blinken might admit that Israel has made things more difficult, but he makes sure to point out that Israel’s wider war is justified.
“One of the things that I found a little astounding throughout is that for all of the understandable criticism of the way Israel has conducted itself in Gaza, you hear virtually nothing from anyone since Oct. 7 about Hamas,” says Blinken during the interview. “Why there hasn’t been a unanimous chorus around the world for Hamas to put down its weapons, to give up the hostages, to surrender — I don’t know what the answer is to that. Israel, on various occasions has offered safe passage to Hamas’s leadership and fighters out of Gaza.”
“Why did this war start?,” asks Jake Sullivan in the aforementioned interview. “This war started because Hamas committed the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, and Israel responded to try to root out the threat that Hamas could do that again — as its leader said it wanted to do again and again and again.”
Jack Lew even acknowledges that the Democrats might have lost the election over Gaza, but frames it as a noble defeat and imagines some alternative universe where Biden faced robust opposition from the mainstream media and fellow Democrats.
“President Biden has demonstrated with enormous power what it means to have the character to take political risk,” he explains. “Standing with Israel for these past 15 months, with huge opposition in the media, in parts of his own party, you could argue that it contributed to making his challenge for re-election insurmountable.”
Amid the administration’s parting remarks, we saw the release of a new report from The Lancet medical journal estimating that the Gaza death toll from the first nine months of Israel’s assault was roughly 40% higher than numbers recorded by the Palestinian health ministry. They estimate that about 64,260 Palestinians were killed between October 2023 and June 2024.
Through reporting and testimony from former Biden officials we know that the administration has always known about the horrors in Gaza and we know that they have consistently supplied Israel with weaponry in the face of this carnage.
In his speech, Biden told viewers that America was no longer at war, but just a week ago he notified Congress about his plans to send Israel another $8 billion in weapons.
This will be his foreign policy legacy.
Michael Arria is Mondoweiss’ U.S. correspondent
