The Financial Times reports:
“Hamas has admitted surprise that its attack on Israel this month promoted such a muscular response, with Washington deploying two carrier strike groups, air defense systems and thousands of troops to the region.
Ali Barakeh, a senior member of Hamas’s political leadership in exile, said the groupv ‘didn’t expect this much if a response from America.
‘An Israeli response? Yes, we expected that,’ Barakeh said from his office in Beirut. But what we are seeing now is the entrance of the US into the battle, and that we didn’t count on.’”1
I can understand why Hamas might have been surprised. What Hamas saw was a United States that under George W. Bush did not respond to Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008. Barack Obama ignored his own red-line against Syrian use of poison gas in 2013 and refused to provide Ukraine with even anti-tank weapons in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea.
Donald Trump did nothing when Iran shot down an American surveillance drone in international airspace in June, 2019 or when Iran bombed Saudi oil fields three months later.1
Under Joe Biden, there was our disastrous cut-and-run from Afghanistan, which President Biden himself defended as a good move. While President Biden has supported Ukraine strongly in words, the United States has provided advanced weapons only hesitantly, and we still have not given Ukraine what it needs to actually defeat Moscow.
George Schultz, former U.S. Secretary of State3, always said: “Trust is the coin of the realm.” If so, deterrence, and the ability to deter, is the other side of that coin. The past 15 years have reduced trust in the United States and reduced its ability to deter bad actors in the world. This reduction in trust and lessened ability to deter may encourage other countries and groups to take risks they might otherwise not have taken, leading to conflicts, and even wars, that would not otherwise have occurred.
The problem the United States faces today is that the ability to deter, like respect, is easy to lose and hard to win back. To regain its ability to deter, the United States will need to be strong and consistent for more than just one crisis and one president. Whether the American people have the will and the leaders to do that is unclear – and a concern for peace in the world.
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1 Raya Jalari, “Hamas leaders admit they ‘didn’t expect’ attack on Israel would result in US going ‘into battle’”, Financial Times, October 28, 2023.
2 See also this episode of “GoodFellows,” starting at about 5:25.
3 and many other things.
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