Red Line, What Red Line?

 

It isn’t surprising that the administration has backtracked on this, but the speed with which they run away from a fight with Netanyahu is still remarkable.

by Daniel Larison 

Posted onMarch 15, 2024

The Biden administration wants you to know that you shouldn’t take any of the president’s warnings to Israel seriously:

The White House denied on Tuesday that President Biden had set any “red lines” for Israel in its campaign against Hamas in Gaza but warned again that Israel should not attack the city of Rafah, the southernmost city in the enclave, without protections for more than a million people sheltering there.

“The president didn’t make any declarations or pronouncements or announcements,” said Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, referring to an interview Mr. Biden gave over the weekend in which he was asked whether he had a “red line” Israel should not cross in its prosecution of the war.

It isn’t surprising that the administration has backtracked on this, but the speed with which they run away from a fight with Netanyahu is still remarkable. Many observers have commented on the abject weakness of the administration in its management of the relationship with Israel during this war, and this is one of the clearest examples of that weakness that we have seen to date. It is hard to think of many other examples where an American president has tolerated the open contempt and defiance of a client government to the degree that Biden has over the last five months.

At the moment when the U.S. should be hardening its position and intensifying pressure on its destructive client, the official line from the White House is that there are no red lines at all. Even when the president says there are red lines and uses that exact language, his advisers rush to clarify that he didn’t mean it. Sullivan was also quick to dismiss reports that the president might be considering conditioning aid, adding that “reports that purport to describe the president’s thinking are uninformed speculation.” The administration is deathly afraid of imposing penalties on Israel no matter what happens. It appears that their cowardice is limitless.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2024/03/15/red-line-what-red-line/