US President Joe Biden’s administration missed an important policy window in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel.
As news spread of the mass murder of civilians, including foreign nationals, the Biden administration had a strategic opportunity to push governments around the world to recognize the event as a terrorist attack before the military response by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration took over the headlines.
Biden’s inability to seize that opportunity was yet another strategic blunder that will have long-term implications for US foreign policy in the Global South.
The Biden administration should have been better prepared to seize the diplomatic field in the 48 hours after the attack. The US government was well aware of the risk of such an attack by Hamas. It also was aware of the risk that there would be a “gates of hell” response by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) following such an attack.
The Biden administration may have been caught by surprise when probability turned into reality. There was clearly an intelligence failure somewhere along the way. However, surprise does not justify incompetence. The administration should have been much better prepared to respond diplomatically to such a low-probability, high-impact event.
One of the important characteristics of this situation is that the attack by Hamas played out largely over the course of a couple of days. However, the military operations that the IDF will prosecute in Gaza will take exponentially longer.
Hamas knows this. Hezbollah knows this. Iran knows this.
It was almost inevitable that one set of terrible photos and videos of civilians killed and injured would be replaced by another. That is how the news cycle works. Policy windows are fleeting phenomena. They need to be seized at the moment they appear. Otherwise, they are lost.
Now, the window has closed. Hamas has succeeded in avoiding being recast as the next al-Qaeda or ISIS.
To compound matters, a new policy window has emerged. The siege of Gaza is creating a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions.
The Palestinian envoy to the United Nations has declared that what is happening in northern Gaza amounts to ethnic cleansing. A key question is whether like-minded governments will prove more apt at seizing this policy window than the Biden administration was.
If so, then one should expect a significant deterioration in a number of US bilateral relationships around the world, including Algeria and South Africa.
Michael Walsh was the subcommittee chairman for Asia-Pacific security affairs on the Biden Defense Working Group during the 2020 US presidential election.