On Monday, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs hosted a debate between the Quincy Institute's director of Grand Strategy George Beebe and CCGA's president, Ivo Daalder, looking back at the first year of the Russia-Ukraine war, previewing concerns for the upcoming months, analyzing prospects for a negotiated settlement between the two countries, and more.
Both debaters believed it unlikely that either side could claim a victory on the battlefield anytime soon, with Daalder saying the question was "Who over time will have sufficient capability to change military status quo?," and predicting "neither side is likely to have that for many, many years. And that you will be in this situation where this conflict and the line of conflict may move back and forth."
Beebe agreed with this general assessment, but worried that Russia could wreck Ukraine, even if it couldn't secure a clear battlefield win. For Beebe, this risk means that Ukraine and the West should pursue a negotiated settlement, which will require changing the frame through which they both understand this war. That solution will have to address not only territorial questions, but also the security concerns of all involved countries, including Russian fears of living with a Ukraine that is a military outpost of the United States.
"Finding some way of addressing Ukraine’s legitimate security concerns, America and Europe’s legitimate security concerns, and also finding a way to address Russian concerns is necessary," Beebe said.
"Unless we are willing to address that, I don’t think there are prospects for a negotiated settlement to this war. But if we are, if we're willing to talk about that, then I think the territorial issue might be able to be kicked down the road (...) and in the meantime, bring this conflict under control."
Blaise Malley is a former reporter for Responsible Statecraft. He is also a former associate editor at The National Interest and reporter-researcher at The New Republic. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, The American Prospect, The American Conservative, and elsewhere.
Jessica Tuchman Mathews, George Beebe, and Ivo Daalder at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9y4aXw1kU0)
The Biden administration says it is giving Israel 30 days to address concerns related to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
In a letter to two senior Israeli officials dated Oct. 13, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said, “We are now writing to underscore the U.S. government’s deep concern over the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza, and seek urgent and sustained actions by your government this month to reverse this trajectory.”
But critics are panning the letter, calling it a political gambit that’s too little and too late.
“I don’t know whether I'm terribly naive, I still have the capacity to be shocked, but the degree of cynicism required to set a 30 day limit … which coincidentally, gets you past the election date,” said Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project. Levy spoke about the letter Tuesday during a panel discussion on Israel’s war in Gaza hosted by the Quincy Institute.
The letter warns that a “failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measures may have implications (arms embargo) for U.S. policy under NSM-20 and relevant U.S. law.” The problem with this is that “the Biden administration hasn’t done this (ultimatums) throughout” the last year when it could have, according to Levy.
Others wondered, given atrocities are playing out in real time, whether the Biden administration would act on its ultimatum.
“The U.S. giving Israel 30 days to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza or face cuts in weapon shipments is the most dishonest and morally bankrupt announcement I've seen for a long time,” said former UK diplomat Ian Proud on X. “Surely U.S. voters aren't so stupid they won't spot a big can of worms kicked down the street until after the elections?”
Blinken and Austin say that a minimum of 350 aid trucks per day need to enter Gaza through the four major crossings, as well as a fifth crossing that must be opened. Additionally, they want to ensure that Israel is not preventing essential items from entering Gaza by listing them as “dual use.”
They also insist “that there will be no Israeli government policy of forced evacuation of civilians from northern to southern Gaza.”
Dr. Annelle Sheline, Middle East fellow at the Quincy Institute, said that the letter appears to be a “clear acknowledgement” that the Biden administration knows that Israel is flouting laws governing U.S. military assistance.
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Top image credit: Prashantrajsingh / Shutterstock.com
“Isolationism” is back in vogue in American political discourse. Not as a policy (by some measures, the United States has been at war for 93% of its history, with no sign of stopping), but as a term of abuse.
From Kamala Harris to Condoleezza Rice, accusations of isolationism are once again weaponized to discredit calls for a more restrained foreign policy. Yet it is not the so-called isolationists who threaten the United States with isolation on the world stage. Paradoxically, it is the self-appointed anti-isolationists, rather than those calling for a reconsideration of America’s role in the world, who have left America more isolated than ever.
This is not the isolation of a country that turns inwards and to its own problems. It is the isolation that comes when the global majority perceives you as — let’s not mince words — a militaristic country that eschews diplomacy and is beset by its own problems with democracy and human rights.
One need not agree with this assessment. But Americans need to understand just how widespread such opinions have become outside the U.S., and increasingly also within it. We need to understand just how isolated America has become after decades of “anti-isolationist” leadership. American leaders have bombed more than 30 countries since 1946, and have conducted near constant regime change operations in the same period (the Washington Post has the number at 72 times between 1945 to 1991). We have conducted overseas military interventions 251 times between 1991 and 2022, according to the Congressional Research Service. When we include the British Empire, there are few countries that have not suffered, at one time or another, at the hands of Anglo-Saxons. One can therefore forgive much of the “Global South,” most of which is comprised of former Western colonies, for seeing America’s chief export as terror, exploitation, and destruction.
These views predated October 7th and the subsequent assault on Gaza, which has killed at least 42,000 and wounded nearly 100,000, the vast majority civilians. After a year of constant bombing, rampant disease, and famine, the true toll is almost certainly many multiples of the official numbers.
U.S.-Israeli narratives regarding the necessity of continuing what many consider a genocide fall flat across the formerly colonized world, and increasingly also in America, where President Biden’s Middle East policy has alienated a generation of voters. With actions that even ex-CIA directors call terrorism now barreling down upon Lebanon and potentially Iran, and with storms of American-made, multi-ton bombs raining down upon civilian infrastructure in southern Beirut, global perceptions of the U.S. are on a glide path from horror to rage making it, well, extremely isolated.
Washington and much of the media continue to insist that America maintains unshakable alliances with the richest and most powerful countries in the world. In reality, these alliances now consist of a handful of states, almost all former colonial powers, which make up a fraction of the global population and whose demographics, militaries, and economies have been declining for years. Add to this the wave of anti-“globalist” sentiment across Europe and North America, and NATO’s much vaunted unity could collapse under ballots rather than bombs. Should the much ballyhooed “Article 5” be invoked against Russia or China, you can bet that many NATO members — Turkey and Hungary for certain, but many others if the far-left and far-right continue to gain electoral ground in Europe — would not heed the call. Such an abandonment would open the door for further defections from an alliance whose most recent accomplishment, in the minds of a growing number of Europeans, has been the economic devastation wrought by electively closing the continent to the cheap Russian energy.
Americans might worry when their country’s standing in the eyes of the world is in free fall. We might worry when our most consistent allies at the United Nations are tiny states whose economies would collapse without U.S. largesse, when our closest counterparts cannot stand with us on critical policy decisions, and when a number of our most important client states (Jordan and Egypt, for example) are hemorrhagingpopular support as a consequence of (in the eyes of many ordinary Egyptians and Jordanians) their autocratic leaders’ vassal-like obedience to Washington’s war aims.
Even the initial global support for our policy in Ukraine has weakened, with much of the Global South (and an increasing number of Americans and Europeans) viewing the war, however unfounded, as provoked by Washington and waged for the sake of gaining control of Ukraine’s trillions in natural resources. Even if we vehemently disagree with such assessments, we cannot close our eyes to them.
America remains powerful. But it is not powerful enough to go it alone. As we lurch closer to WWIII, the real question for U.S. foreign policy is not between “isolationism” or “internationalism," it is between continuing on a path that has left us increasingly isolated on the world stage, or taking up the difficult task of recalibrating what American leadership means at a global scale. If such a recalibration is foreclosed, if anti-war — or simply pro-prudence — voices continue to be ridiculed, vilified, and silenced, then isolationism will indeed be our undoing. Just not in the way that the anti-isolationists expect.
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Top photo credit: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. officials visit the Terminal Altitude Area Defense System site in IsraelU.S. Air Force (photo by Staff Sgt. Cory D. Payne)
The escalation of conflict in the Middle East will now apparently involve U.S. troops. President Biden has directed the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system to Israel, along with around 100 American soldiers needed to operate it. This is the first time that U.S. troops will have been sent to Israel since Hamas’ Oct. 7 assault.
This risk of further American involvement comes as the American public is increasingly against sending troops to fight Israel’s war. A survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs released in August found that only about four in ten Americans supported sending troops to defend Israel if it were attacked by its neighbors, down from around 55% until 2021. This decision to deploy to Israel so close to the November election is made as general sympathies for Israel have slipped to a low of 33% amongst Americans polled in Sept. 2024.
After Israel assassinated several Hamas, Iranian, and Hezbollah officials, Iran retaliated with a missile barrage that was restricted largely to military targets and caused minor damage and no Israeli deaths. Following Iran’s assault, Israeli officials have been explicit in their intent to continue the cycle of violence. “Our strike will be powerful, precise, and above all – surprising,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said. “They will not understand what happened and how it happened.”
Israel has reportedly been planning its retaliation to Iran’s Oct. 1 attack, some experts believe that the THAAD defense system is an indication that this response may be imminent, and severe. Middle East expert Aaron David Miller says that Israel’s next assault will likely be “so comprehensive that the Iranians will have to respond.”
Military expert at Defense Priorities, Daniel Davis, says placing American troops in harm's way carries significant risk. “Naturally, if Americans are killed in the execution of their duties, there will be howls from the pro-war hawks in the West ‘demanding’ the president ‘protect our troops’ by firing back on Iran,” he said, adding,“if he wants to protect our service members, then don't put them into someone else's war. This is exactly the sort of thing that gets nations sucked into war they have no interest in fighting.”
The United States deployed missile defense systems to Israel during the 1991 Gulf War when Israel was facing threats from Iraqi mobile Scud launchers. But Americans were already fighting Iraqi troops in the region, thus not contributing to regional escalation or making Americans more vulnerable than they already were. The Quincy Institute’s Adam Weinstein also notes that the U.S. deployed THAAD systems to Iraqi Kurdistan where U.S. personnel face risks, but, he added, Washington sending them to Israel now “makes U.S. troops part of Israel’s conflict with Iran.”.
“The Biden administration keeps saying that they want to prevent a wider war, and yet every time they send Israel more money and weapons and now American soldiers, they are causing the violence to spread,” said Quincy Institute Middle East Research Fellow Dr. Annelle Sheline. “They must be aware of this, and therefore they are lying when they say they don't want a regional war.”
Weinstein says that with U.S. troops in the region targeted by Iranian-aligned militias and Houthi fighters off of the Yemeni coast, further entangling America in Israel’s regional conflict with Iran needs to be further scrutinized. “While we don’t know what’s been agreed upon behind closed doors, events over the past year give plenty of reason to doubt that Israel will consider U.S. interests in exchange for its support," he said.
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