Why the White House turned on Israel

The chattering class in Israel struggles with understanding American behavior. How did the United States turn 180-degrees from supporting Israel in the first days of the war to where it functions now as a shield for Hamas, from understanding its paradigm had collapsed along with the parallel reigning paradigms in Israel – “they now get it” or as the Israelis say, “the token dropped” – to seeing the United States appearing to double down on policies that seem to emanate from those failed paradigms.  The right asks “what happened to the Americans?” The left races to ask, “what has Netanyahu done to destroy US relations from such a position of support?”

I believe I have some insight into this can help Israelis better understand. I served in US Department of State in a senior policy position for several years, and then in the White House as a senior advisor to the Vice President from 2001-2007.  Later, I was senior advisor to National Security Advisor John Bolton under President Trump.  And I also served in the Pentagon as a senior intelligence officer for a decade.  Let me relate to you what I learned in terms of the mentality of the bureaucracies with which you are dealing.

First, let me set aside ideology and the particular way in which this administration reacted to the collapse of paradigms – it just doubled down in its imagery. It saw October 7 confirming the imperative of establishing a Palestinian State under the PLO and the necessity of reaching a strategic condominium with Iran to stabilize the region – but we leave that for another article.  The administration never abandoned its paradigms, but that fails to explain the pro-Israeli behavior of October.

On this, one must examine the culture of the US government, and in particular, the bureaucratic power and ethos of the US Department of State. It is the key to understanding what really happened since October 7.

First, it is not a foreign ministry, but a super-bureaucracy above all others with functions that are even domestic, its power on foreign policy is even more eclipsing than corresponding foreign ministries elsewhere and stands above all other bureaucracies.

The NSC in this administration is best dealt with as an ideological question since it is ultimately a political body, not bureaucratic. This is a significant power that must be factored, but again, that is best left for another article. In particular, though, the direction of the NSC is not at odds in this administration with the tilt of the State Department, which is increasingly staffed by young progressives, more senior figures aligned with the progressive drift of the administration, and professional foreign service officers who have invested their entire careers advancing the very paradigms that are collapsing and struggle to conceptually jettison their life’s opus.

When guidelines of policy are set, the NSC lacks a vast bureaucracy of its own. So, it tasks the writing and drafting of the policy to relevant bureaus – which in terms of foreign policy is almost always the State Department. As in any large organization, the person tasked with drafting the policy defines the policy – everything following that is reactive revisions, not resetting.

Intelligence agencies – with their power coming from the control and distribution of information, including over what the president himself sees — also has a significant power. But ever since George Tenet, the intelligence agencies have been ever more active in the implementation, let alone formation of policy – which is problematic.  If the head of intelligence is shaping policy, then how objective is the information and analysis produced by the bureaucracy under him going to be if it begins to contradict the policy around which the director has staked his reputation – such as the Tenet Plan (1998-2001).   Moreover, currently, intelligence agencies are run by Bill Burns, who is a foreign service officer who rose through the ranks to this position, and very much embodies the outlook and operational methods of the State Department.  And the Department of Defense in this administration – in contrast to other administrations — is very weakly represented in policy formation. In other words, at this moment, the CIA does not function in ways that are culturally different than the way that the State Department does; it is right now part of the overall culture of the State Department.

So what is this culture? It is no great revelation to note that there are structural reason why the Department of State is more Arabist than pro-Israeli. It is not wrong.  But the real motivational factor of State Department officials over the last several decades has consistently been to nurture control. Proud, powerful nations such as the Japanese and Indians complain of this often, as do many other countries.

The quest for control is less ideology than control. In some ways, it came from two factors: first the fact that the foreign service looks up to the British Foreign Office, with its premium of navigating to maintain colonial control, as its model for over a century already.  And second, the Cold War and the global policy of containment demanded alliance discipline to stand down the great enemy of the Soviets. Hence the grand bargain at the center of all State Department policies toward allies: “surrender some or much of your defense sovereignty and untethered freedom of maneuver in exchange for which we will extend a warm blanket of protection over you.” The promise of superpower backing was difficult for any nation to simply dismiss, so this became the eclipsing modus operandi of all State Department relationships with allies.

But what about October 7?  How does this explain how the US went from overwhelmingly friendly to hostile?

Again, losing control is the most unnerving prospect – internal to the US government or over foreign governments — for a State Department official.  To maintain his predominant policy role internally or to reassert external control over circumstances and other nations, the State Department officer will often bend toward championing a policy or nation he himself does not like so that the control – often the penmanship of drafting the resulting policy  — falls to him.  I saw it myself. Whenever it was clear that the Principals Committee meeting at the NSC (the relevant cabinet level officials minus the president himself) had laid down a strong policy preference, State Department officials would rapidly adopt those policies which they abhorred so that they could be given the drafting of the policy – which they then slowly could manipulate back to their position.  That is how President Bush’s Rose Garden speech in 2003 – with its clear guidelines that the US cannot deal with any Palestinian leadership that is tainted by terror or corruption as our interlocutor – became the Roadmap for Peace by 2004-5 – which was a plan to build a Palestinian state around the corrupt PLO and Abu Mazen.  The pen to draft this policy had been given by Bruce Reidel, the Senior Director at the NSC for Middle East,  to … Bill Burns – who was then Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs and his team.  I saw it also on Iran policy in 2003-4, although some of that remains beyond my brief to write about since it remains classified.

So, what happened between October 7 and now regarding Israel?

Basically, the consensus in Israel – that the US government was emotionally, materially and most importantly conceptually on Israel’s side at the beginning – is wrong.  The token never dropped.  The Biden administration never abandoned any of its delusions of October 6. Instead, it saw the greatest threat being that Israel would demolish those paradigms upon which the house of cards of US policy was built. Namely the greatest concern in Washington was that Israel would take actions that demolish the two-state under the PLO paradigm (Oslo 20.0) and that potential Israeli escalation against Hizballah (and then the Houthis) would threaten the paradigm of having to reach a regional strategic condominium with Iran (JCPOA 2.0).

At the same time, there was a realization that Israel was so badly damaged and in such a desperate frame of mind that it was likely to lash out, preempt and act decisively and uncontrollably in many directions.  The immediate imperative of policy then became: how to get control over Israel’s actions again?  True to tradition, the best way was to co-opt Israel – rush to be more pro-Israeli than Israel – to win confidence and establish influence over actions, and then over time slowly bend it back into the paradigm. Carriers were deployed, Houthi missiles shot down, and weapons deliveries flooded.

A reasonable argument can be made that President Biden himself operated out of friendship – in fact, he probably did.  But those of us living in Washington have observed for years with every Presidential utterance in this administration, one must wait for the State Department and NSC spokesman to clarify it into the real policy – often in direct contradiction to what the President said.  White House Spokesman, Jen Psaki, once famously said that one should wait for the administration spokesman to tell you what the official policy is rather than rely on the words of the president. In other words, in this administration, President Biden is  not the prime shaper of operational policy.

Israel – neither left nor right – ever appreciated how this was never genuine newly-found friendship as much as it was designed to place a warm blanket over Israel so that it calms down, pauses and then returns to controllable strategic dependency.