US support reaches critical juncture for Israel, Ukraine wars

It’s a depressing question to ask but is US support for Ukraine and Israel even helping those nations?

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) greets US President Joe Biden upon his arrival at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport on October 18.

Governments understandably need to construct appealing, simple stories to galvanise public support for foreign interventions. It is the job of journalists to inject some reality into these stories.

President Joe Biden’s opinion piece in The Washington Post published last weekend was a case in point as it sought to tie together US financial and military support for Israel and Ukraine as an existential fight for freedom, democracy and world peace.

It’s the kind of rhetoric that was successfully employed by US presidents from Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam to George W. Bush in Iraq. Biden is gambling on such rhetoric working again as he enters his re-election year. But so far it’s not paying off.

Shortly after the opinion piece was published, Biden’s approval rating fell to 40 per cent according to NBC, the lowest yet in his presidency, as Republicans and Democrats bore away at his support amid a news cycle dominated by US foreign policy, without even a single extra US soldier joining the fray in the Middle East or Ukraine.

Donald Trump and independent challenger Robert Kennedy, who is polling around 20 per cent, have lambasted the hundreds of billions in aid and military equipment the administration has sent to Ukraine, which appears to have prolonged a bloody stalemate.

US support for arming Ukraine has dropped to 41 per cent, according to an October Reuters poll, including a drop to 52 per cent among Democrats (from 61 per cent in May).

Among Republicans it has been well below 50 per cent for months. Meanwhile, US support for Israel remains high, but as the war drags on the political focus will shift away from avenging the horrors of October 7 towards multi­generational Arab griev­ances over Israel’s expansion and even existence.

Lyndon Johnson

These arguments resonate among Democrats and the young leftist ideologues on university campuses who make up the vanguard of the party’s grassroots support, and whose votes Biden risks losing in what is shaping up to be a tight presidential race.

A Quinnipiac University poll published last week found 41 per cent of Democrats were more sympathetic to the Palestinians, almost double the level of a month ago, as the world reeled in disgust at Hamas’s despicable attack. A third said they supported Israel more, down from 48 per cent.

In any case, the wars in Israel and Ukraine are very different. Israel is responding to a heinous act of terrorism perpetuated by a cancerous organisation. It should be left alone to decide how it secures its border and people – not counselled by France and the US, which have dubious track records of success in the Middle East.

Russia has argued its invasion of Ukraine was launched partly in response to head off the emergence of a NATO base in territory it once controlled near the critical Black Sea. In this context it’s hard to imagine the US acting any differently if China sought a base in the Western hemisphere via a friendly government.

Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky

Superficial parallels just as easily could be drawn between Russia and Israel. Both are overwhelmingly powerful in their region, both put their security interests ahead of so-called international law, and both are surrounded by nations or alliances they regard as hostile. Israel’s government hasn’t joined US sanctions against Russia and avoided sending military equipment to Ukraine, suggesting even Israel doesn’t subscribe to Biden’s Hamas-Moscow link.

Bizarrely, in his lengthy opinion piece the President didn’t once mention Iran, which offers economic and political support to Hamas. If any nation should be likened to Hamas, it’s Iran.

“The United States is the essential nation,” Biden wrote. “We rally allies and partners to stand up to aggressors and make progress toward a brighter, more peaceful future. The world looks to us to solve the problems of our time. That is the duty of leadership, and America will lead.”

As much as we might want this to be true, large parts of the Third and Second Worlds do not relish US involvement, seeing instead a trail of meddling that has produced unnecessary death and destruction.

In 2017 Monica Duffy Toft, an international relations scholar at Tufts University, pointed out that US foreign interventions had exploded from 46 between World War II and 1991 to 188 since the end of the Cold War.

Donald Trump

“(They) have only rarely achieved their intended political objectives,” she wrote. “That is, the United States has lost more than won; and when it has ‘won’, it has generally won at a cost far in excess of what would have been considered reasonable prior to the intervention.”

Perhaps it has been a mixed blessing for Americans, too, whose standard of living has suffered amid crumbling infrastructure as their tax revenues are diverted overseas. One depressing possibility is that US support for Ukraine and Israel isn’t even helping those nations. Meanwhile, US support for Israel fuels anti-Semitic tropes and Arab claims of a Western conspiracy against them, which endangers Israel and Jews everywhere.

Nuclear-armed Israel has one the most powerful, experienced and modern militaries and intelligence services in the world. It is possible Israel doesn’t need US help beyond the $US3.8bn ($5.8bn) already provided.