The singular lack of hospitality experienced by Joe Biden in West Asia is all a part what the US, and Israel, must expect in the altered global order.
A look at trends from the beginning.
The global media which brought Operation Desert Storm live into our living room was sired by Peter Arnett of the CNN from the terrace of Al Rasheed hotel in January 1991. This media would amplify globalisation, riding on the back of the Sole Superpower.
The system cruised, with minor turbulence, until the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 signalled structural weakness in the capitalist design which was the base of US power and exceptionalism.
The post-Lehman Brothers world order could not be credibly described by a media which had in any case bartered away its credibility during the post-9/11 wars. My friend the late Philip Knightley’s book The First Casualty is a catalogue of the war correspondent as a myth maker. When wars break out, the first casualty is the truth.
Instead of being cheerleaders for globalisation being steered by one hegemonic power, the media became the drumbeaters and myth makers for America’s endless wars, particularly the ones after 9/11 which, by sheer repetition, were to impair and, over time, demolish the media’s credibility. Lyse Doucet, Nick Robertson, Christiane Amanpour, Wolf Blitzer were paraded on the screen with monotonous frequency, justifying America’s wars, leaving viewers none the wiser why the US needs 760 bases worldwide?
The disgraceful departure of the US from Afghanistan in August 2021, after 20 years of occupation, put its imprimatur quite indelibly an American decline. Rearguard action was attempted in Ukraine: the cast of characters from the media took up positions for their piece-to-camera at vantage points with the golden dome of the Kiev Cathedral as the backdrop.
Half-truths, always more pernicious than lies, became the staple in covering the story. The half-truth which defines the media’s coverage of the Hamas-Israel war is carbon copy of the media’s projection of Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin, whose assassination was sought by Senator Lindsay Grahame as a solution and whom President Joe Biden called “butcher, butcher, butcher”, in close range of the camera, spraying all over it — the blame for the war was placed on a “brutal dictator cloistered in the Kremlin”.
Not a word about the repeated warnings by Putin and by eminent US strategic thinkers, that the expansion of Nato to the border of Russia in Ukraine was a red line that should never ever be attempted. It is for Russians an existential issue. But drum beating by the Western media became louder by the minute. “Russian invasion is coming, Russia are coming”.
US political thinkers like Prof. John Mearsheimer of Chicago repeatedly warned that Russia was being provoked. “It is war created by the West”, he said. Ironically, the US, which set out to change the regime in Moscow and thereby recover prestige is, yet again, bogged down in a war it cannot win.
The media will not tell you this bitter truth. Just as Putin alone is responsible for the “brutal, inhuman war”, on the Hamas-Israel war, it has been true to form. All the sins have been piled onto one side which started this round on a scale which left Israel and their cohorts rubbing their eyes in disbelief.
Not a word about Nabka, and the flight of Palestinians as refugees, no attention to the caged ghetto totally at the mercy of Israel. Witness how water, food, electricity have all been cut off by a simple snapping of fingers. The jackboot of Israel was always been on the Palestinian neck.
Yes, Putin was provoked into a war the US thought it would win. Likewise, Palestinians live under constant provocation.
Why did Hamas choose this moment to launch an attack on Israel for which, there is now evidence, the militant group had been planning for years? This explains why the leader of Hamas military wing in Gaza, Mohammad Daif, disappeared after what was known in May 2021 as the sword of Jerusalem campaign. It shocked the Israeli army even then in its level of preparedness. In the eleven-day offensive by Israel on Gaza, 260 Palestinians were killed and 2,000 injured. The Palestinian resistance group fired rockets towards Jerusalem for the first time. Palestinians in Israel joined the resistance to protect Al Aqsa which was under constant IDF threat.
For intelligence agencies as smart as Israel’s, there was sufficient going on for these agencies to grasp. The allegation is that the security apparatus was much more focused on protecting the settlers on the West Bank and the anti-government protests with ever-swelling ranks.
Pundits have explained the timing of Hamas’s October 7 attack in various ways: it was timed to scuttle the Saudi-Israel rapprochement which Biden was so keen on. Was Saudi Arabia which had just made peace with Iran under Chinese auspices, being asked to embrace two implacable enemies – Iran and Israel?
It would be foolish to imagine that Riyadh clasped Iran’s hands only to unclasp like the trapeze artist at America’s bidding. This line of thinking completely misses the key point. Why did Riyadh break ranks and shake hands with the Ayatullahs. King Abdel Aziz al Saud developed a friendship “with no limits” with President Roosevelt during a historic meeting on board the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal in February 1945, much before the Jewish state was born. Riyadh’s pivot to Tehran, a historic step by any yardstick, implied much more: Riyadh was snapping the apron strings to Washington, stepping out of the Western club into BRICS, the expanding group of the global South.
This one step must have caused great anxiety in Jerusalem. Of the two powerful regional states, US allies and partners, one had gravitated towards BRICS. This option is not available to Israel which President Carter described as an Apartheid state.
Riyadh would not have created this distance from Washington during the days of, say, George W Bush’s presidency when the US still wore its Sole Superpower hat. Today’s America is a much diminished power. The risen power is in the global south.
Israel’s existence depended on American power. US exceptionalism globally and Israeli exceptionalism regionally, were both a function of American power.
The US is not about to abandon Israel. Far from it, but it will not be able to cope with its routine tantrums. The need of the hour is that Israel works day and night to harmonise with the region and give the Palestinians what is rightfully theirs. The US has the difficult task of searching for peace on two fronts — Ukraine and Israel. With every week of delay, America weakens that much more and Israel becomes that much more vulnerable.