The U.S. foreign policy is also being put to the test due to the armed conflict between the two sides that began with the attack on Israel by the Palestinian armed political faction Hamas.
First, the Biden administration’s Middle East policy itself is in a difficult situation.
After completely ending the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that began in the 21st century with the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan two years ago, the United States focused on ‘diplomatic stabilization’ instead of direct intervention in the Arab world.
The core of that strategy was to arrange for improved relations between Israel, an ally in the Middle East, and its neighbors.
In 2020, before the inauguration of the Biden administration, under the chairmanship of then-President Donald Trump, Israel and Arab countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Morocco signed the ‘Abraham Accords’ to establish formal diplomatic relations, and President Joe Biden signed an agreement with Israel. and Saudi Arabia have accelerated the normalization of diplomatic relations.
The general analysis of experts was that the diplomatic goal was to simultaneously check Iran, the largest anti-American power in the Middle East, and China, which is gradually seeking to expand its influence in the Middle East after the United States left.
Therefore, the consensus is that the attack on Israel, the axis of U.S. policy toward the Middle East, is bound to be a significant blow to the driving force of the policy of stabilizing the Middle East through diplomacy.
If the situation escalates and anti-Israel and anti-American forces in the Middle East unite, it is expected that the Biden administration’s policy toward the Middle East will inevitably be shaken.
Politico, an American political media outlet, introduced that the United States has also involved the Palestinian side in the process of normalizing diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and wrote that it is highly likely that the participants will be personnel from the Palestinian Authority, a rival of Hamas.
Even if efforts to normalize diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia do not run aground immediately, it is unlikely that diplomatic negotiations involving the Palestinian Authority will progress while the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas intensifies.
We cannot rule out the possibility that this incident will act as a variable in support for Daewoo Ukraine, which is already showing growing fatigue among Americans.
President Biden requested $24 billion (about 32 trillion won) from Congress in July to support Ukraine, but many Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives are opposed to it.
In this situation, he failed to reflect the amount of support to Ukraine in the 45-day temporary budget passed on the 30th of last month.
Moreover, as former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who led the passage of the interim budget bill through Congress, failed due to a few hard-line right-wingers in the Republican Party pushing for a resolution to dismiss him, it has become difficult to guarantee when the House of Representatives, which holds the key to supporting Daewoo Krai, including the election of the next House Speaker, will return to normal.
Therefore, as this incident occurs, there is a high possibility that support for Daewoo Ukraine will fall behind support for Israel, which is bipartisanly supported by U.S. politicians, in terms of priority.
Moreover, unlike Ukraine, which is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe, Israel is an ally of the United States.
Observers believe that if this armed conflict, which Israel has defined as a ‘war’, shows signs of an ‘escalation’ and the United States needs to rapidly increase its support for Israel, the possibility of the Daewoo Ukraine support plan drifting may increase.
In the end, President Biden’s plan to promote stable external relations as an achievement of the regime by increasing the number of ‘fronts’ (Ukraine and the Middle East) that do not directly deploy troops but are indirectly involved (Ukraine and the Middle East) with about a year before the US presidential election in November next year is not possible. We are facing a difficult situation.
In this situation, there is also talk of the possibility that the Biden administration will deploy behind-the-scenes diplomatic power to prevent this conflict from spreading into a ‘Middle East war’.
With President Biden immediately expressing his support and willingness to support Israel, there is no doubt that the United States will come forward to support Israel.
However, there are observations that the expansion of the front line outside the Gaza Strip will not lead to a situation where Iran intervenes militarily or where Middle Eastern countries that are non-hostile to the United States, such as Saudi Arabia, end up sympathizing with or supporting Palestine.
Some media outlets are already raising suspicions that Iran was involved in Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel. However, the U.S. government is extremely cautious about this assessment.
Previously, Secretary of State Tony Blinken stated cautiously in an interview with NBC the previous day that he had no evidence of Iran’s involvement in the planning and execution of Hamas’s attack on Israel, which is seen as reflecting the complex intentions of the United States.