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I’m Thomas Friedman. I’m the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times. And today, we’re going to talk about the “Biden Doctrine.”
I made up the “Biden Doctrine” only in the sense that he hasn’t said it this way. But I took everything he’s doing. And it adds up to a doctrine that is precisely designed to produce the goal of a credible, legitimate, effective, demilitarized Palestinian state that can live in peace and security with Israel.
The “Biden Doctrine” involves taking on directly Iran’s proxies in the region who are doing everything they can to destroy Israel and drive America out, intimidate America’s allies, and basically drag the region down. Up to now, we and the Iranians have been playing kind of a cat and mouse game. And we have basically said to Iran implicitly, not explicitly, your proxies — Hezbollah, Hamas, Shiite militias in Iraq — can hit Israel or can hit us. And as long as you don’t cause any casualties, we will play the game. And we’ll keep this at a low level.
And that dynamic has, I think, reached a dead end because a US base in northeastern Jordan was hit by a drone launched by pro-Iranian militias in Iraq and killed three US soldiers. And despite now dozens of such attacks since October 7, even before, none of them have ever resulted in the death of a US soldier. And that changes everything.
In terms of what kind of military response the Biden administration undertakes, and I suspect it’s going to happen fairly soon, the administration is trying to devise something that will be meaningful and that will hurt and that will provide long-term deterrence. And I don’t think we’re talking about just a one-day, one-rocket volley.
There’s a lot of people who I find even writing me saying, boy, I really hope they punch Iran in the nose, and directly. And I think one should be very careful about that not only because you don’t want to start a war directly with Iran, but it’s very hard for the United States say, we are going to hit something or someone in Iran to defend ourselves and Israel at the same time that Israel is fighting a war in Gaza with no plan for the morning after, no Palestinian partner, and a right-wing government that wants to annex the West Bank.
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The “Biden Doctrine” basically says, we are ready to help Israel defend itself against Hamas, against Iran, and its proxies. But we cannot do that effectively. We will not have the regional legitimacy, the regional allies, and the global allies to do that unless you, Israel, are engaged in some kind of diplomatic process with a horizon to nurture two states for two people, one for Palestinians and one for Israelis.
The administration is consulting experts inside and outside the government of whether to actually recognize, in theory, a Palestinian state. It’s something no administration has ever done before. We’ve actually never recognized a Palestinian state.
It would, I think, catalyze a whole set of discussions, debates, howls of outrage, et cetera. But it would move us to a necessarily new place. In Israel, it would meet enormous opposition. It could trigger a fall of this Israeli government. But at the same time, it would force Israelis to step back and really think about something they haven’t been thinking about, how it wants Gaza to be governed. It will buy President Biden, I think, some important support from progressives and the left, who have been upset with what they see as a kind of blank check support for Israel in the Gaza war. And it’s saying to the Iranians, we’re just not going to play your game anymore and let you and your proxies undermine all the constructive engagement in the region.
The Palestinian diplomacy creates the political space and legitimacy for the retaliations against Iran. And the retaliations against Iran create potentially more political space for the diplomacy to go ahead.
Now, the third plank of this “Biden Doctrine” that really goes with it is on a separate track, the US negotiating a security agreement with Saudi Arabia that would involve weapons transfers, security guarantees, possibly a civil nuclear program, but also Saudi normalization of relations with Israel. And that normalization would only happen, though, if Israel entered into negotiations with the Palestinians on this state.
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If we can’t pull these different initiatives together, we’re looking at a Middle East on fire. That will threaten Israel. That will force our Arab allies to, I think, pull away from us and will make Iran and its backer, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the big dog in the region.