Opinion | Biden Sought Peace but Facilitated War

When Israel defied America’s appeals for restraint by invading Lebanon a few days ago, a reporter asked President Biden if he was comfortable with what had unfolded.“I’m comfortable with them stopping,” Biden replied plaintively.“We should have a cease-fire now.” He walked away from the podium, grouchy, frustrated and impotent, a self-diminishing president.It was the latest sign of how Biden keeps getting rolled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

As the political scientist Ian Bremmer said of Biden’s words on the invasion: “Impact: zero.”Instead of midwifing the landmark Middle East peace that he hoped for, Biden became the arms supplier for the leveling of Gaza — a war that killed more women and children in a single year than any other war in the last two decades, according to Oxfam.Biden has been calling for restraint for a year, but he marginalized himself by continuously providing the weapons that allowed his appeals to be ignored.He appealed to the better angels of Netanyahu’s nature, but it’s not clear that they exist.Biden restricted and conditioned U.S.

arms transfers to Ukraine but worried that doing the same to Israel might tempt Hezbollah to attack it.So Biden kept the arms flowing (with the exception of at least one shipment of 2,000-pound bombs) and never imposed serious restrictions on their use.

This impunity emboldened Netanyahu to ignore Biden, and the upshot is that Biden has nurtured not a regional peace but, it seems, a regional war — with America at risk of being sucked in.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe....