The past two months of strong polls and good vibes for the Democrats likely won’t last if Israel starts a regional war and drags in the US. The only solution is for Joe Biden to stop sending Israel weapons.
President Joe Biden during an event on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, on September 9, 2024. (Chris Kleponis / CNP / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Everything seems to be coming up Democrats. The party is still riding its wave of excitement over its “brat” new nominee, Donald Trump and his campaign are floundering, and their candidate has just widened her lead over him after a debate most everyone agreed Trump lost badly. What could possibly stop this kind of momentum?
Another dumb, disastrous quagmire in the Middle East could.
In their euphoric haze, Democrats and the Kamala Harris campaign have been doing their best the past two months to more or less ignore the ongoing, bloody tumult in the Middle East, which was already on the brink of tipping over into a region-wide war back when Joe Biden was still on the ticket. While we seemed to have been in an intermission to the conflict’s escalation — thanks to a combination of Biden’s exit, the possibility of a Gaza cease-fire deal that his administration has dangled in front of voters and the Iranian government, and Israel pausing some of its more reckless behavior — it’s now looking like the show is back on.
The most dramatic sign was yesterday’s rash of Hezbollah pager explosions, which wounded twenty-eight thousand people across Lebanon and killed twelve, including two young children, and which an aide to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to take credit for in a tweet. Observers are asking if this is the start of a bigger operation, as well as how Hezbollah will respond to this major attack, setting us up for yet another escalatory fork in the road. Lebanon’s health ministry is worried an all-out war is coming.
This isn’t the only omen. Over the past week, numerous Israeli officials — not just Netanyahu and the far-right kooks propping up his government, but even his leading political rival and the defense minister he’s been feuding with and planning to fire — have been threatening to launch a “broad and strong operation” and “military action” in Lebanon, suggesting something bigger and altogether different to the relatively limited attacks Israel’s been carrying out in the country. Just yesterday, as thousands of Hezbollah members’ pagers exploded around Lebanon, the Israeli security cabinet voted to officially expand its war aims to returning the tens of thousands of Israelis who were displaced by Hezbollah rockets into Israel. This is the public justification Netanyahu’s government has given for saying a war in Lebanon is unavoidable.
We’ve had so many near-escalations and false alarms in this war that many of us are likely numb to more cries of “regional war.” We’ve been told we were on the brink of it several times and nothing happened, so why should we believe that this time is different? But the White House is taking this seriously enough that it dispatched an envoy to Israel on Monday to warn Netanyahu not to go ahead.
Make no mistake: a full-on war between Israel and Hezbollah would not just be a human disaster for the people who live in the region but a political disaster for the Democrats that would make all the past two months of elation, good vibes, and talk of “weird” grind to a halt — and so, they have every reason to do what they’ve been trying to avoid for the past year and materially restrain Netanyahu to prevent it.
Americans are tired of war and do not want the country dragged into another one, something that could very likely happen if Israel starts a war with Hezbollah. They overwhelmingly prefer that their president focus on domestic problems instead of international ones and don’t see supporting Israel as a priority. Nearly half think the United States should scale back its overseas involvement and focus on its own problems, and a majority sees the escalation of Israel’s war into a wider Middle East one as a critical threat to their country.
All of that is to say that for Harris and the Democrats, there is real political peril in Israel going ahead with its plans here — particularly while they’re running against Trump, who is not wrong when he says he was the first US president in decades not to start a new war. (Like it or not, the fact that Trump tried his hardest to start a war and only avoided one by dumb luck is lost on most voters). A recent Cato Institute poll of swing state voters found that Trump already holds an advantage over Harris in terms of trust in handling foreign policy, that most think the country is “too involved” in world affairs and foreign conflicts, and that majorities in key states think we’re approaching World War III.
If Democrats are hoping Harris might get a rally-round-the-flag bump in the event of US troops getting killed by Hezbollah or Iranian proxies, and so possibly shift public opinion in favor of war, they should be careful. Biden and his team also thought early on after October 7 that giving Israel a blank check would revive his electoral fortunes, only for the policy to become his biggest liability and his approval to continue sinking. They might also recall that US counties in battleground states that suffered the most casualties from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were key to Trump’s 2016 win over a proudly hawkish Hillary Clinton campaign.
In other words, it is far from clear that voters will see US troops being murdered by Hezbollah or another adversary in the region and react by enthusiastically backing US intervention or giving Harris their support. In fact, they might very well blame Biden, and by extension Harris and the Democrats, for getting the region and country into this mess and for getting Americans killed in the process, and punish them for it.
So the best course of action, as it has been for eleven months now, is to prevent this from happening in the first place. Unfortunately, Biden’s preferred method for doing so — issuing a warning to Netanyahu’s government while continuing to feed him weapons — isn’t going to cut it.
Biden’s words have been meaningless for a while now, going at least as far back to when he publicly drew a “red line” over an Israeli invasion of Rafah, then did nothing when Netanyahu ignored him and barreled over it anyway. Over nearly a year of bending over backward for Netanyahu while making impotent warnings and unhappy phone calls and swearing at him when he can’t hear it, the president has made abundantly clear to Israeli officials that nothing he says will ever be enforced and that they can freely walk all over him.
Or, as one of Biden’s own Pentagon officials put it, “We have let Israel face zero consequences for crossing all of our red lines in Gaza so they are emboldened and know they will face no consequences for going into Lebanon, despite us saying, ‘Don’t go there.’”
Sure enough, Israeli officials have reacted to Biden’s latest caution as you’d expect: by politely telling him that they don’t care what he thinks and that they’ll do whatever they want.
The only thing that’s going to restrain Netanyahu — who even Biden himself has publicly acknowledged is dead set on keeping a state of war going so he can stay in power — is to stop giving him the weapons and other military support that he can’t keep waging war without. The Democrats have spent nearly a year trying to do everything they can to avoid making this decision, fearing the political backlash from the donor class (rather than ordinary voters, who actually back restricting aid). It is now coming to the point where it will be completely unavoidable, at least if they don’t want to be on the hook for another Middle East disaster and lose the election because of it.
While recently urging a group of young men to convince their friends to vote, Harris’s running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, told them: “Some of them are just going to say, ‘Look, I’m not that into politics.’ The answer to that is: Too damn bad, politics is into you.”
If the wanton slaughter in Gaza isn’t enough to make them cut Israel off, then Harris and the Democrats might want to at least think about their own political futures and take some similar advice: You might prefer to ignore the chance of regional war, but a regional war won’t ignore you.