A counterfactual: if the US and other friends of Israel had insisted on Oct 8 2023 that Israel desist in responding to the Hamas attack of Oct 7 by force, and instead defer to the UNSC and the International Criminal Court for dealing with Hamas & securing the release of the Israeli, Thai and other hostages, tens of thousands of civilian lives would have been saved, Hamas would have been effectively boxed up with its leaders awaiting trial in the Hague, Gaza & Lebanon would remain intact, and tensions with Iran would remain within parameters manageable through diplomacy. Israel would have taken and held the moral high ground and preserved and augmented its international reputation rather than being well on its way to becoming a pariah and an outlaw state.
Total minutes spent during the US election campaign discussing the elevation of international law and the US becoming a signatory to the Rome Statute underlying the International Criminal Court: 0 / Zero.
When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
This is genuinely hilarious.
>It wasn’t a failure of vision or of hard work. Biden concocted a grand plan for a multipart deal that would deliver a cease-fire in Gaza, normalization of Saudi-Israeli relations, a path to a Palestinian state and a stronger Saudi-American relationship that would freeze China out of the region. But Biden was unwilling to forcefully use his leverage to get there, so Netanyahu ran rings around the president.
Joe Biden and Jake Sullivan might be the only people on the face of the earth who believe that the “grand plan” described there would last for more than a week. It does nothing to address Hezbollah, or Iran’s destabilizing support for militias across the region. It’s a ludicrous pipe dream on its face.
Joe Biden’s foreign policy in the Middle East has been a colossal failure, not because of the dastardly caricature of Netanyahu imagined by Kristof, but because Biden–like Obama before him–did not respect the mullahs of Iran, or the religious fanatics in Hezbollah or Hamas, enough to take them at their word when they said they wished for our destruction.
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A counterfactual: if the US and other friends of Israel had insisted on Oct 8 2023 that Israel desist in responding to the Hamas attack of Oct 7 by force, and instead defer to the UNSC and the International Criminal Court for dealing with Hamas & securing the release of the Israeli, Thai and other hostages, tens of thousands of civilian lives would have been saved, Hamas would have been effectively boxed up with its leaders awaiting trial in the Hague, Gaza & Lebanon would remain intact, and tensions with Iran would remain within parameters manageable through diplomacy. Israel would have taken and held the moral high ground and preserved and augmented its international reputation rather than being well on its way to becoming a pariah and an outlaw state.
Total minutes spent during the US election campaign discussing the elevation of international law and the US becoming a signatory to the Rome Statute underlying the International Criminal Court: 0 / Zero.
When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
This is genuinely hilarious.
>It wasn’t a failure of vision or of hard work. Biden concocted a grand plan for a multipart deal that would deliver a cease-fire in Gaza, normalization of Saudi-Israeli relations, a path to a Palestinian state and a stronger Saudi-American relationship that would freeze China out of the region. But Biden was unwilling to forcefully use his leverage to get there, so Netanyahu ran rings around the president.
Joe Biden and Jake Sullivan might be the only people on the face of the earth who believe that the “grand plan” described there would last for more than a week. It does nothing to address Hezbollah, or Iran’s destabilizing support for militias across the region. It’s a ludicrous pipe dream on its face.
Joe Biden’s foreign policy in the Middle East has been a colossal failure, not because of the dastardly caricature of Netanyahu imagined by Kristof, but because Biden–like Obama before him–did not respect the mullahs of Iran, or the religious fanatics in Hezbollah or Hamas, enough to take them at their word when they said they wished for our destruction.