Having spent the past several months focusing his foreign policy on Ukraine, US President Joe Biden is watching another war unfold, this time in Gaza.
The new crisis in the Middle East is a stark reminder of the polarised world order and difficult moral choices that have defined Biden’s office. When he became president in 2021, he framed global politics as a struggle between democracies and autocracies. The key thrust of that message was to find like-minded partners – deemed “democratic” by Washington – to counter America’s major geopolitical rivals, namely China and Russia.
Biden also used this rhetoric on democratic values as a response to his predecessor, Donald Trump. As president, Trump had largely dispensed with values-based rhetoric in foreign policy, leading an era of “America first” isolationism, and praising autocratic leaders from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Biden called on the US to return to a role of moral leadership – to “prove democracy works” – and strengthen democracy at home and abroad. This, he proposed, would distinguish the US from its rivals. To that end, Biden organised two Summits for Democracy and rallied countries around democratic norms and values.
Yet, as has long been evident – most starkly in the context of the war in Gaza – Biden has struggled to walk the talk, especially against illiberal allies. Instead, his rhetoric has ended up weakening democratic movements against those regimes and encouraged illiberalism.
Biden’s handling of the strategic US relationships with Israel and India – two important partners which have long been tending away from democratic values – is particularly instructive.
In the Middle East, as America’s traditional allies in the Gulf gradually drifted towards China, Russia and even Iran, Biden tried to use Israel as a strategic tool to win them back. He sought to normalise ties between Israel and the Gulf, playing up shared economic interests and even reportedly considering a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia as an incentive.
That effort, now unsettled by the Gaza conflict, was happening even amid disturbing authoritarian trends in Israel that predate the latest escalation.
Having won back power with the help of far-right nationalists late last year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu embarked on a controversial dilution of Israel’s democratic institutions. In response to his attempt to constrain the judiciary’s independence, protesters stormed the streets this year. The Israeli government retaliated by cracking down on them and briefly fired a minister for supporting the movement.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu oversaw sharp increase in tensions with Palestinians in the West Bank, as armed Israeli settlers vandalised property and destroyed crops. Even before the deadly Hamas attack last month, 2023 was already the deadliest year in the West Bank for nearly two decades.
But aside from some criticism of Netanyahu’s contentious judicial reform effort, Washington continued to extol Israel’s democratic virtues and invited Netanyahu to its Summit for Democracy this year as a panel speaker.
That warm embrace continued after the October Hamas terrorist attack. After that tragedy, Washington aligned closely with Israel’s response, even as leaders in Tel Aviv engaged in aggressive rhetoric against Palestinian civilians.
Israel has since exacted an immense civilian death toll in Gaza, including thousands of children, according to relief organisations. Yet, by issuing unconditional support and refusing to draw any red lines for the Israeli response, Biden has constrained America’s strategic space in the face of an unprecedented humanitarian crisis.
Further to the east, Biden has similarly chosen to overlook alarming trends in India, where controversial measures have been enacted against journalists, dissidents and religious minorities.
The Biden administration has validated the Indian government’s approach to human rights and spoken of an “overwhelming respect” for Indian democracy. Like Israel, India was invited to the Summit for Democracy and has benefited from defence cooperation with Washington.
Biden’s approach to illiberal strategic allies has made the US liable to allegations of hypocrisy and weakened the moral authority he promised to strengthen. That criticism has become especially sharp in the context of Biden’s response to the two major wars in Ukraine and Gaza, where Washington has adopted starkly different approaches to civilian deaths.
But perhaps more consequentially, by validating their democratic credentials, Biden has encouraged America’s illiberal allies to double down on their illiberalism, thereby weakening democratic activism against them – both within and outside those countries.
In response to such criticism, the Biden administration has said it brings up human rights concerns with illiberal allies through private channels.
While that may make for sensible diplomacy, Washington’s warm public rhetoric has the effect of diminishing that effort. It signals to illiberal allies that America values their strategic cooperation far too much to impose any costs for flouting norms abroad or repressing dissidents at home.
The US would do better to drop its black-and-white framing of the world as a battleground between democracies and autocracies. That rhetoric has the effect of forcing Washington to validate and appraise the democratic credentials of its partners and rivals, thereby tying itself to the policies of illiberal allies and limiting its ability to act against them.
Instead, Biden should adopt a more pragmatic line, which would give it the strategic space to respond to crises of authoritarianism as they evolve. That could include communicating clear red lines to illiberal allies and deploying tools to discourage a further slide into authoritarianism.
Mohamed Zeeshan is a foreign affairs columnist and the author of Flying Blind: India’s Quest for Global Leadership