Some advocates of an end to the Israeli military’s ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza have seen signs of hope in the Biden administration’s recent shift in rhetoric on the conflict, as well as its decision to abstain on a U.N. resolution calling for a ceasefire. The hope was that the administration was moving — albeit far too slowly — towards conditioning continued military aid to Israel on a ceasefire and an end to the shameful practice of blocking humanitarian aid at a time when large numbers of Gazans are on the brink of starvation.
The optimistic interpretation of the direction of Biden policy has been destroyed by the administration’s recent actions, from apparently giving the green light to an $18 billion transfer of F-15 combat aircraft to the Israeli Air Force.
Although the planes might not be delivered for years, agreeing to provide them in the midst of Israel’s war on Gaza sends a signal of support that runs contrary to the administration’s claims to be pressing the Netanyahu government to avoid civilian casualties and clear the way for humanitarian aid shipments. Of more immediate concern is a report by the Washington Post that the administration is poised to send thousands of bombs to Israel, including “2,000-pound bombs have been linked to previous mass-casualty events throughout Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.”
The sad truth is that there have been zero consequences from Washington for Israel’s crimes in Gaza. Regardless of the rhetoric, the weapons keep flowing and the killing continues. The Biden administration’s argument that it is simply giving Israel the means to defend itself willfully ignores the fact that killing over 32,000 people and attempting to deny them food and other essential goods goes far beyond defense, to the point that the International Court of Justice has suggested that Israel’s actions could “plausibly” be considered a campaign of genocide.
Even worse, the tragedy in Gaza has been compounded by Israel’s attack on Iran’s consulate in Syria, which has increased the chances of a wider Middle East war which could easily draw in U.S. personnel.
To put it bluntly, the policies of the current Israeli government are diametrically opposed to U.S. interests, and to the prospects for peace and stability in the Middle East. Cutting off arms supplies until the Netanyahu government stops the killing in Gaza and pledges to stop attacks on neighboring countries is not just a humanitarian gesture — it is essential to securing a peaceful, stable, forward looking Middle East, which should be in the interest of the entire international community.
President Biden’s stubborn attachment to a policy of “Israel Right or Wrong” is doing serious damage to U.S., regional, and global interests.
William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His work focuses on the arms industry and U.S. military budget.
In half a century of public life, U.S. President Joe Biden has demonstrated unwavering support for Israel. In this photo Biden is welcomed by Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu, as he visits Israel amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Tel Aviv, Israel, October 18, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo
On February 12, President Trump revealed he had talked to Putin about a peace deal in Ukraine, and Defense Secretary Hegseth gave a speech about what a peace settlement would not entail (NATO membership, US protection, return of occupied territories).
This left Ukrainians reeling with feelings of betrayal and being steamrolled, while European leaders looked shellshocked at finding themselves sidelined. I thought the right moment had arrived to finally write a long-planned article, on inclusive, people-centered peace-making, with my co-author Wolfgang Sporrer.
The next morning, I woke up to the inconceivable news that Wolfgang had died in his (and my) hometown, Vienna. The cause of his death, three days earlier on February 10, has not been publicized. He had been posting pictures from his latest assignment in the Middle East just days ago, along with his usual pithy comments on matters of war and peace.
In Europe, where the canceling of experts arguing for a negotiated peace between Russia and Ukraine has been far more ruthless than in the US, only a few brave souls have been sticking out their neck. Wolfgang was easily the most knowledgeable among them, having sat in on the consultations under the Minsk accords after 2015 and implemented the OSCE’s monitoring along the pre-2022 frontline in Ukraine, and later teaching conflict management, negotiation and mediation at the Hertie School, Germany’s premiere foreign policy school. He was also optimistic and constructive to a fault, convinced that peace was always possible if one approached it with a seasoned negotiator’s toolkit and attitude. His last article was titled “No War is Inevitable”.
Wolfgang first contacted me in summer 2022 on Twitter, as it was. Later, I realized there were curious parallels in our lives. We are not just both from Vienna, but our homes are just blocks from each other in the city’s 7th district. We had both studied law at Vienna University and Belgium’s University of Louvain-la-Neuve and then international relations in the US. Wolfgang served as the head of the human dimension unit in the OSCE special monitoring mission in Ukraine, and later at the EU delegation in Moscow.
In both places, I might have run into him when I dropped by to raise awareness about the human rights and peace issues I had found in my work with activists in remote regions. But I never did. I would have remembered a fellow Austrian, larger than life, with a twinkle in his eyes and an unending supply of shrewd anecdotes and thoughtful observations about the business of making peace, told in his old-school, gregarious Viennese accent.
What brought us together were the lessons we had learned from communities affected by armed conflict, he as a senior OSCE diplomat, I while working with grassroots women activists. Wolfgang took peace seriously, as an essential objective that should inform our grand strategies, as the fundamental condition for a good life and as a hands-on, skilled practice.
Wolfgang loved his craft. He stood out for always looking at peace from the point of view of average people: how they are affected by armed conflict, how their lives are in danger, and how we can restore their safety and security. He began and ended every conversation about war with ordinary people.
When asked about his ideas for ending the war in Ukraine, he declined to offer a peace plan and instead focused on process. He looked at it as a mediator: how do you get the parties to agree to sit at the same table? That would already be a first successful step. He kept reminding people that Ukraine and Russia were talking every day, at the Istanbul hub of the Black Sea Grain Deal. Wolfgang was a glass-half-full kind of guy, spotting openings and opportunity where others see only violent deadlock.
Last year, he proposed we write an article together, about inclusive, people-centered peace-making. We both thought this approach was curiously missing from discussions about ending the war in Ukraine, despite being recognized by many governments, the UN and academics as the gold standard for making peace: not only is inclusive peace-making better at ending armed conflict, with settlements that last longer and lower relapse rates.
It also produces a better peace, one in which countries rebuild faster, communities thrive more and enjoy greater safety and reconciliation. Examples of the sturdy settlements this approach produces include Northern Ireland in 1998 and Colombia in 2016.
How does inclusive peace-making (or inclusive diplomacy) achieve all this? By placing the human security, well-being and rights of people living in conflict-affected territories at the center of war-ending diplomacy. Peace has to deliver for the people who suffered from war. We achieve this by bringing these people right into the peace process, to the negotiation table. There, their concerns can be heard, put on the agenda and addressed, and they can envision creative solutions to intractable problems.
As a result, communities emerging from war will not be plagued by typical post-conflict dysfunction, deprivation and injustice that translate into friction and a renewed conflict. Ordinary people at the table and bread-and-butter issues on the agenda make the atmosphere calmer and more constructive overall.
Because men will be at any negotiating table by default, inclusive diplomacy means including women: comparative data from 40 conflicts shows that when women were part of peace processes, there was a far higher likelihood that an agreement will be reached, that agreement was more likely to be implemented and it was 35 percent more likely to last at least 15 years. These numbers are so remarkable that anyone serious about making peace cannot afford to ignore them.
While Western governments seem to have forgotten all about inclusive diplomacy and people-centered peace-making, countries from the Global South did not. A range of governments brokered prisoner exchanges. Last summer, Qatar prepared to mediate a partial ceasefire to halt attacks on energy infrastructure in both Ukraine and Russia, to protect civilians during the upcoming winter, though the attempt collapsed when Ukraine launched its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. When China and Brazil invited others from the Global South to endorse their peace plan in September last year, it was updated to reference “inclusive diplomacy”.
Last month, Oleksyi Arestovych, one-time advisor of Zelensky and now one of his harshest critics, talked on one of his wildly popular YouTube streams about how any ceasefire or peace agreement would need to address everyday problems caused by war, occupation and displacement: regulate free movement of people, goods and services between territories occupied by Russia and those controlled by Ukraine, the mutual recognition of vital records and diplomas earned by young people on either side, protect the rights and interests of those forced to leave property behind and those buying such abandoned homes.
Government, he said, sounding like the aspiring presidential candidate he is, has to exist for the people, not the other way around.
I never got to write that article about inclusive, people-centered peace-making with Wolfgang. In this current moment, with Europe’s ruling elites aghast at the specter of peace and Ukrainians feeling betrayed and abandoned, he would have looked for openings to do things right, to build a good peace. He was fearless, brilliant and original, kind and supportive, and one of the most persuasive proponents of peace and diplomacy in Europe. Rest in peace, Wolfgang.
keep readingShow less
Top image credit: Eric Poulin via shutterstock.com
The Pentagon is in the midst of a three-decades long plan to build a new generation of nuclear weapons, and it is not going well — so badly that the Air Force announced this week that it will pause large parts of the development of its new intercontinental ballistic missile, known officially as the Sentinel.
The pause will impact design and launch facilities in California and Utah and is projected to throw the project 18 to 24 months off schedule.
The project has been troubled from the start, when Northrop Grumman received a sole source contract to develop the system after Boeing withdrew from the competition, charging that the bidding process was rigged against it. And last year the missile underwent a Pentagon review when it was revealed that it was projected to cost 81% more than original estimates, boosting the price of procurement alone to $141 billion, with hundreds of billions of dollars more to operate and maintain the Sentinel over its useful lifetime.
Despite the runaway costs, the Pentagon decided to double down on developing the Sentinel, claiming that it was essential to deter other nations from launching a nuclear attack on the United States. In fact, at a time when “efficiency” is the watch word in Washington and other federal agencies are being dismantled as we speak, canceling the new ICBM is an obvious place to find savings, as suggested in a recent research brief by myself and my colleagues Gabe Murphy of Taxpayers for Common Sense and Julia Gledhill at the Stimson Center.
As enormous as the cost of the Sentinel is slated to be, that is not the only reason to put the system on the budgetary chopping block. Independent experts like former Secretary of Defense William Perry have argued, persuasively, that the new ICBM will make us less safe by increasing the chance of an accidental nuclear confrontation sparked by a false alarm of an enemy attack. The risk is grounded in the fact that the president would have just a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch U.S. ICBMs in a crisis.
Despite the costs and risks posed by the Sentinel program, it remains virtually sacrosanct in the view of the Pentagon and many members of Congress, on the theory that the nuclear triad — the ability to launch nuclear weapons from the air, land, and sea — is essential to U.S. security. But the triad was born out of bureaucratic politics, dating back to the 1950s fight between the Navy and the Air Force to get their piece of the nuclear budget pie. And it persists in major part due to pork barrel politics — the jobs and profits generated by spending inordinate sums developing and deploying new nuclear bombers, ground-based missiles, and ballistic missile submarines.
The ICBM lobby includes Northrop Grumman and its major subcontractors and members of the Senate ICBM Coalition, composed of members from states that host ICBM bases or major development and maintenance work on the Sentinel. The lobby has been remarkably successful in fending off any efforts to reduce the size of the ICBM force or even to study alternatives to a new missile.
Former Representative John Tierney of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation has neatly summed up the problem:
“Not only are intercontinental ballistic missiles redundant, but they are prone to a high risk of accidental use. … They do not make us any safer. Their only value is to the defense contractors who line their fat pockets with large cost overruns at the expense of our taxpayers. It has got to stop.”
As President Trump and Elon Musk pledge to scour the Pentagon budget for potential savings, ending the Sentinel program and eliminating ICBMs from the arsenal should be at the top of the list, and a measure of whether the effort to streamline the Pentagon and end dysfunctional programs is serious.
Europeans are surprised and frustrated by President Trump’s decision to call Russian President Putin without consulting Ukrainian President Zelenskyy or other European leadership.
The president made good on his promise to begin negotiations with Russia by having a phone call with President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, which he described as “lengthy and highly productive” and indicated that further negotiations would begin “immediately.”
“We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s nations,” Trump posted on social media. “We have also agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately, and we will begin by calling President Zelenskyy of Ukraine to inform him of the conversation, something which I will be doing right now.”
The president subsequently had a call with the Ukrainian president, during which they discussed opportunities to achieve peace, the U.S.’s readiness to work together at the team level, and Ukraine's technological capabilities -- including drones and other “advanced industries,” according to Zelenskyy.
Many European leaders saw Trump’s call with Putin as a betrayal. The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said that the Americans were giving Russia “everything that they want even before the negotiations” and that any agreement made without the Europeans “will simply not work.”
“This is not how others do foreign policy, but this is now the reality,” said German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock. She insisted negotiations should not “go over the heads of the Ukrainians.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth defended President Trump’s call with Putin, saying that “there is no betrayal there,” but a “recognition that the whole world and the United States is invested and interested in peace, a negotiated peace.” He also softened his comments on Ukrainian NATO membership, saying that “everything is on the table in his (Trump’s) conversations with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.”
Trump said he and Putin may meet for an initial discussion at an undetermined date in Saudi Arabia because “we know the crown prince, and I think it’d be a very good place to be.” Vice President JD Vance will meet with Zeleskyy today on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.
On Thursday, after the call, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said that the “position of the current (U.S.) administration is much more appealing.” For his part, Zelenskyy noted that he was not pleased that Trump chose to speak with Putin before himself and made it clear that Ukraine “cannot accept it, as an independent country, any agreements (made) without us.” However, he told reporters that he and Trump were “charting our next steps to stop Russian aggression and ensure a lasting, reliable peace. As President Trump said, ‘Let’s get it done.’”
“The Trump-Putin call and Defense Secretary Hegseth's subsequent statement signals a long overdue willingness by Washington not only to engage the Russians in wide-ranging, impactful discussions but to countenance the concessions necessary to make a deal stick,” the Quincy Institute's Mark Episkopos told RS. “The hard work of squaring U.S., European, Ukrainian, and Russian positions is still ahead, and all sides should be prepared for what will be a winding, tortuous road to a negotiated settlement.”
He added, “still, the administration has just taken a colossal leap forward not just to resolve the Ukraine war but to stake out a new, more propitious architecture of European security and to reap all of the long-term geopolitical rewards therefrom.”
According to The Washington Post, Russian authorities released an American prisoner, Marc Fogel, after being imprisoned for three and a half years on drug charges. Trump said that a Russian prisoner would be released to Moscow as part of a deal with the Kremlin and added that the exchange “could be a big, important part in getting the war over."
Ukraine may be open to giving the United States access to its mineral industry in exchange for continued financial assistance. In an interview with the Associated Press, Zelenskyy's chief of staff, Andrii Yermak, remarked, “we really have this big potential in the territory which we control." He continued, “we are interested to work, to develop, with our partners, first of all, with the United States.” Trump showed support for such a plan earlier this month.
China has said it is ready to play a significant role in the Ukraine-Russia negotiation process. The Wall Street Journalreported that “the offer, however, is being met with skepticism in the U.S. and Europe, given deep concerns over the increasingly close ties between Beijing and Moscow.” The Journal speculates that this offer could be a vehicle for Xi to increase contact with President Trump as he seeks to negotiate away from the aggressive economic measures promised by the Trump administration.
There were no Department of State press briefings this week.
Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.