Joe biden middle name1/12/2024 ![]() What constitutes a defensive weapon often depends on whom you ask. The administration said that the sale was for “defensive weaponry,” but opponents of the deal cried foul. There was a lot of anger among human rights groups and progressive members of Congress when the Senate voted in favor of a $650 million weapons package for the Saudis. Yemen is the other place where Biden’s ruthless pragmatism is clear. Maybe Biden’s strategy is a bad one, but he does have one. Any objective observer must acknowledge that Assad has never dealt with the aid issue in good faith and has often done just enough to keep his opponents at bay while retaining the capacity to continue malignant policies. Are their reasons to be skeptical? Yes, of course. Does it treat the root cause of the problem? No. Biden’s ruthless pragmatism in Syria tracks with American interests in counterterrorism, counterproliferation, Israeli security, and, yes, human rights by looking for ways to increase the flow of aid. One need not agree with what the administration is doing in Syria, but it is clear there is an underlying strategy. This has left members of Congress from both parties, who have sought to hold Assad accountable for his war crimes, wondering aloud why the Biden administration is standing by while Arab countries, including Egypt, Algeria, Bahrain, Oman, Lebanon, and Tunisia in addition to the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, rehabilitate Syria. The Jordanian leader’s plan for the restoration of Syrian sovereignty and unity seems to align with Biden’s overall view, though the White House has not signed on to the king’s plan.Īmerican diplomats were reportedly involved in efforts to use the Arab Gas Pipeline to send Egyptian gas to Jordan and then to Lebanon via Syria, providing relief for the Lebanese who have been forced to contend with intermittent electricity (among many hardships). ![]() Toward those ends, the Biden administration was not overly critical-or critical at all-when King Abdullah of Jordan called the Syrian president or when the Emirati foreign minister visited with him in Damascus in early November. Team Biden apparently believes that by coming to terms with this reality, the United States will stand a better chance of getting more aid to the people in Syria who need it, help the poor Lebanese, alter relations with Russia (though that now has more to do with Ukraine than anything else), and peel the Syrians from the Iranians. It is based on the implicit acknowledgement that President Bashar Assad has won and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Instead of the hawkish approach to Syria that Biden signaled, he has apparently concluded that de-escalation best serves a set of geostrategic goals that are both related to the Syrian conflict and broader than the civil war. Bush told Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to ignore “the empty canons of rhetoric” that he would hear as Bush hit the hustings. As he was gearing up to run for president in 1988, then-Vice President George H.W. Of course, it is rarely the case that campaign rhetoric aligns with policy once a president takes the oath of office. Biden assailed President Donald Trump for not understanding the geopolitical environment, making the case that Trump’s intention to withdraw American forces from Syria would advantage the Assad regime and Iran, as well as leave the Israelis dependent on the Russians for their security. It was not that Biden-Harris 2020 offered a detailed plan to deal with Syria’s civil war, but when the candidate spoke about the issue, he signaled a muscular approach. Based on the president’s statements during his run for the White House, one would have expected him to take a more active role in Syria. Ruthless pragmatism is perhaps clearest in the Biden administration’s Syria and Yemen policies. The result is a strategy that can be described as “ruthless pragmatism.” No wonder why both human rights activists and hawks are crying foul. It strikes me that Biden does have a strategy for the Middle East. That is to say that he and his advisors have considered regional problems, how they intersect with America’s interests, what resources are available to the United States, and what the costs are of pursuing a variety of policies. The critique tends to be a proxy for “the administration is not pursuing my favored policy.” ![]() ![]() President Joe Biden needs a Middle East strategy-at least that is what any number of analysts have argued in a variety of publications, including this one. The accusation that an administration “does not have a strategy for X” often reflects the writer’s ideological differences with a given White House rather than the actual absence of a strategy.
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