The president published another strange op-ed tying the wars in Ukraine and Gaza together. His immediate goal was to urge Congress to pass a bill funding more military aid for Ukraine and Israel, but to do that he insists on linking the two wars together as if they are comparable and equally worthy of support. This is the same line he has been pushing for months ever since he decided to try to use Congressional support for Israel to get more funding for Ukraine last year. It was a strained and unpersuasive argument six months ago, and now it is just insulting.
The U.S. shouldn’t be providing any military assistance to Israel for its current war(s). Not only has the Israeli government used U.S.-made weapons to commit war crimes, but it has also been impeding and blocking the delivery of humanitarian aid as part of a policy of using starvation as a weapon against the people of Gaza. Further weapons transfers to Israel should be out of the question. There shouldn’t be one more cent spent on military aid to a government responsible for such crimes. U.S. forces shouldn’t be used to protect a bad client from the consequences of its actions.
It has been a terrible mistake to tie military assistance to Ukraine to support for the war in Gaza. Every time Biden tries to sell both as a package deal, he brings further discredit on his Ukraine policy by association with an indefensible policy in the Middle East. As it happens, Biden’s “pro-Israel” belligerence has done nothing to win over skeptics of his Ukraine policy, and it is odd that he ever expected that it would.
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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.