Biden’s Biggest Foreign-Policy Problem in Gaza, Ukraine, and Elsewhere Is Incompetence

Foreign Policy  "The U.S. military’s collapsed pier in Gaza is symbolic of a much bigger issue." 

. . ."If I tossed in the failed interventions in Afghanistan and Libya, you’d accuse me of piling on, and I haven’t said a word about the clown asylum that the U.S. House of Representatives has become." SW

"U.S. soldiers look on as a digger attempts to extricate a U.S. Army vessel that ran aground at a beach in Israel's coastal city of Ashdod on May 25, 2024." Otherwise it's all good. TD

"As the New York Mets compiled a record of 40 wins and 120 losses during their comically inept inaugural season, manager Casey Stengel famously lamented: “Can’t anyone here play this game?” I thought of Stengel’s remark when I learned that the temporary pier the United States had built to bring relief aid into Gaza had collapsed. It was an apt metaphor for the Biden administration’s handling of the whole Gaza conflict, as critics on social media were quick to point out. Constructing the pier was essentially an expensive PR stunt undertaken because U.S. officials were unwilling to force Israel to open the border crossings and allow sufficient relief aid for civilians facing a man-made humanitarian catastrophe. This largely symbolic effort managed to deliver about 60 truckloads of aid before rough seas damaged the structure and aid deliveries were suspended. Repairs are now underway and will reportedly take at least a week, and the cost of the whole operation is already hundreds of millions of dollars and rising.

"One might see this sorry episode as just a small part of a larger tragedy, but I think it raises larger questions about American ambitions and pretentions. Foreign-policy experts in the United States obsess about preserving “credibility,” largely to justify spending vast resources on conflicts and commitments that are of minor strategic importance. In the 1960s and 70s, U.S. leaders understood that South Vietnam was a minor power of little intrinsic strategic value, yet they insisted that withdrawing short of victory would cast doubt on America’s staying power, undermine its credibility, and encourage allies around the world to realign toward the communist bloc. None of these gloomy forecasts came to pass, of course, but the same simplistic arguments get recycled whenever the United States finds itself in an unwinnable war for minor stakes.

"Those who fetishize credibility typically assume all that is needed is sufficient resolve. They believe the United States can achieve whatever goals it sets if it just tries hard enough; in their minds, victory is just a matter of staying the course. But seeing credibility and influence solely as a matter of will overlooks another key ingredient, one that is arguably more important. That key ingredient is competence." . . .

 Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.