Biden’s Mideast trip faces new challenges
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s efforts to tamp down tensions in the escalating war between Israel and Hamas faced massive setbacks even before he departed for the Middle East on Tuesday, as Jordan called off the president's planned summit with Arab leaders after a deadly explosion at a Gaza hospital killed hundreds.
Biden now will visit only Israel and will postpone his travel to Jordan, a White House official said as Biden departed.
The postponement of the Amman summit comes after Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas withdrew from the scheduled meetings in protest of the attacks, which the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza blamed on an Israeli airstrike. The Israeli military said it had no involvement and pinned the blame on a misfired Palestinian rocket.
“This war and this aggression are pushing the region to the brink,” Ayman Safadi, Jordan’s foreign minister, told al-Mamlaka
TV, a state-run network. He said Jordan would only host the summit when all participants agreed on its purpose, which would be to “stop the war, respect the humanity of the Palestinians, and deliver the aid they deserve.”
The cancellation reflects an increasingly volatile situation that will test the limits of American influence in the region as Biden visits Wednesday.
Biden’s decision to put himself in a conflict zone — the same year he made a surprise visit to Ukraine — demonstrates his willingness to take personal and political risks as he becomes heavily invested in another intractable foreign conflict with no clear end game and plenty of opportunity for things to spiral out of control.
The high-stakes presidential trip is emblematic of Biden’s belief that the United States should not turn back from its central role on the global stage and his faith that personal diplomacy can play a decisive role.
“This is how Joe Biden believes politics works and history is made,” said Jon Alterman, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who worked on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while Biden was a member.
There's been no water, fuel or food delivered to Gaza since the brutal Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,400 Israelis and triggered the unfolding war. Mediators have been struggling to break a deadlock over providing supplies to desperate civilians, aid groups and hospitals.
As the humanitarian crisis grows, so too does the concern of a spiraling conflict that stretches beyond the borders of Gaza. There have already been skirmishes on Israel’s northern border with Hezbollah, an Iranbacked group that’s based in
Southern Lebanon.
Biden's travels will be rife with security concerns, and visits by other U.S. officials have been disrupted by rocket launches into Israel. Additional Israeli airstrikes in Gaza could also prompt more condemnation at a time when Biden is intending to demonstrate solidarity with the United States' closest ally in the region.
The U.S. has subtly shifted its message over the past week, maintaining full-throated support for Israel while slowly turning up the diplomatic volume on the need for humanitarian assistance in Gaza, as Biden and aides have heard increasingly dire predictions about the potential for images of suffering Palestinians to ignite protests and broader unrest throughout the Middle East.
U.S. officials said it has become clear that already limited Arab tolerance of Israel’s military operations would evaporate entirely if conditions in Gaza worsened.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, bouncing back and forth between Arab and Israeli leadership ahead of Biden's visit, spent seven and a half hours meeting Monday in Tel Aviv in an effort to broker some kind of aid agreement and emerged with a green light to create a plan on how aid can enter Gaza and be distributed to civilians.
It was on the surface a modest accomplishment, but U.S. officials stressed that it represented a significant change in Israel’s position going in — that Gaza would remain cut off from fuel, electricity, water and other essential supplies.
In the U.S., Biden has won rare praise from Republicans over his leadership on Israel, but prospects for providing additional aid are uncertain. The administration has said it would ask for more than $2 billion in aid for both Israel and Ukraine, though House Republicans remain in disarray.
Still, Biden is committed to both Ukraine and Israel.
“We’re the United States of America, for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history of the world,” he said this week on CBS' “60 Minutes” when asked whether the wars in Israel and Ukraine were more than the U.S. can take on at once. “We have the capacity to do this and we have an obligation to . ... And if we don’t, who does?”