Seth Mandel
Commentary, May 9, 2024
“To abandon that fight is to surrender to the barbarians at the gate, ensuring the post-Biden transition is not only imminent and irreversible (in the near term, at least) but chaotic, authoritarian, and baldly anti-Semitic.”
Welcome to the post-presidency of Joe Biden.
He’s still in the big chair, of course. And he may win a second term in November. But he has handed over the Democratic Party to others. The policies favoured by those we feared were the “future” of the party are the policies we can expect from here on out. The future is now.
By now everyone is aware that the president has announced his withholding of certain bombs and munitions from Israel as the IDF prepares its attempt to take Hamas’s last major redoubt in Rafah. “I made it clear that if they go into Rafah—they haven’t gone in Rafah yet—if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities—that deal with that problem,” Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett. Mainly the president is talking about 2,000-pound bombs that Israel uses to clear its way through to Hamas’s fortified underground tunnel network.
The president explained, in an unusually honest statement: “We’re not walking away from Israel’s security. We’re walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas,” Biden said.
That is, Biden is trying to make it impossible for Israel to win the war against Hamas.
The immediate moral, strategic, and practical consequences were covered well here by John Podhoretz yesterday. The longer-term ramifications center on the fact that Biden was supposed to be a bulwark against not just the progressive fringe but his party’s overall trend away from Israel and our Gulf allies. As part of that trend, the Democrats threatened to abandon the one realistic road map to Middle East peace and efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. The trend also weakens democracy at the expense of autocracy, since it favours the Iran-Russia-China axis and leaves Israel and Ukraine less well-prepared to fend off their genocidal enemies—who are also, by the way, America’s enemies.
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