TEL AVIV—Biden administration officials have claimed credit this week for the ongoing collapse of the Iranian axis, seeking to recast their role in a series of Israeli victories that they worked to thwart.
Hours after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria on Sunday, President Joe Biden touted "the unflagging support of the United States" for Israel’s war against "Iran and its proxies," Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Biden noted that Israel had weakened the coalition of tyrants and terrorists in the region to a point where it became "impossible ... for them to prop up the Assad regime."
"Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East," the president boasted in remarks at the White House. "Through this combination of support for our partners, sanctions [on the Assad regime], and diplomacy and targeted military force when necessary, we now see new opportunities opening up for the people of Syria and for the entire region."
The Biden administration has overseen crucial U.S. military and diplomatic support for Israel during the past 14 months of the war. But from the outset, Biden and his aides have also pressed Israel to reach accommodation with its enemies—criticizing, threatening, and punishing the U.S. ally in the name of regional deescalation. By early this year, before Israel had militarily defeated Hamas or seriously retaliated against Hezbollah or Iran, Biden was already publicly calling for an end to the fighting.
"Biden tried to prevent us from winning this war in every way he could," Gadi Taub, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a cohost of the Israel Update podcast told the Washington Free Beacon. "Now that we’re winning in defiance of him, he’s pretending that he was with us all along."
On Oct. 9, 2023, two days after Hamas started the war with a surprise invasion of southern Israel, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged leaders of the devastated region to "stand firm because we are going to change the Middle East." The following week, Biden flew to Tel Aviv and—even as he embraced Netanyahu and affirmed U.S. support for Israel—sought to contain Israel’s military response.
"President Biden and his top aides have been urging Israeli leaders against carrying out any major strike against Hezbollah, the powerful militia in Lebanon, that could draw it into the Israel-Hamas war, American and Israeli officials say," the New York Times reported at the time. "U.S. officials believe Israel would struggle in a two-front war and that such a conflict could draw in both the United States and Iran, the militia’s main supporter."
According to the Times, the Biden administration aimed to preempt "an Israeli overreaction to Hezbollah rocket attacks," which forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents from the north of the country, and "harsh Israeli tactics in an expected ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza that would compel Hezbollah to enter the war" in solidarity with the Palestinian terrorist group.
"The response in the Gaza Strip has been over the top"
Netanyahu recalled in an address to the Knesset last month that the Biden administration had been against every major Israeli military advance in Gaza, starting with troops going into the strip at the end of last October.
"The United States had reservations, and proposed that we not enter with ground forces. It took issue with the entry into Gaza City and into Khan Younis, and first and foremost it was strongly opposed to the entry into Rafah," Netanyahu said, naming Gazan cities that saw decisive Israeli battles with Hamas.
In December 2023, less than seven weeks into the war, the Biden administration demanded that Israel wind down major military operations in Gaza. Speaking at the White House in February, Biden called for a permanent "pause" in the war, saying "the conduct of the response ... in the Gaza Strip has been over the top."
In May, as Israeli troops carried out initial raids in Rafah, Hamas’s main hub for smuggling weapons and other supplies into Gaza, Biden declared a partial weapons embargo on Israel meant to halt the operation. "There are a lot of innocent people who are starving, a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and it's gotta stop," he said in an interview with CNN.
Later that month, Biden presented a proposal for a "permanent end to hostilities "and regional peace deal. He said his administration had for "the past several months" been "relentlessly focused" on bringing a "durable end to the war."
In September, shortly after the conclusion of the Rafah campaign, the Israeli military assessed that Hamas had been militarily defeated in Gaza.
"I am comfortable with them stopping"
Meanwhile, the Biden administration stepped up efforts to head off Israel’s counteroffensive against Hezbollah.
Asked by a reporter in late September if he was aware of and comfortable with Israel’s plans for a ground incursion into Lebanon, Biden replied, "I am more aware than you might know, and I am comfortable with them stopping. We should have a ceasefire now."
In October, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the Biden administration opposed Israel’s intensified airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Beirut, which had recently killed Hezbollah’s top leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
"There are specific strikes that it would be appropriate for Israel to carry out," Miller told reporters, "But when it comes to the scope and nature of the bombing campaign that we saw in Beirut for the past few weeks, it's something that we made clear to the government of Israel we had concerns with and we were opposed to."
Last month, according to Hebrew media reports, slowdowns in U.S. weapons deliveries hampered Israel’s war effort in Lebanon and Gaza. Current and former Israeli officials confirmed the reports to the Free Beacon.
Israel nonetheless wiped out most of Hezbollah’s formidable weapons arsenal, terrorist infrastructure, and leadership before agreeing to a U.S.-brokered ceasefire in Lebanon late last month.
"Take the win"
Iran directly entered the war for the first time in April, launching more than 300 missiles and drones at the Israel. Biden emphasized that Israel had intercepted nearly all the incoming projectiles with the help of a U.S.-led regional coalition, and urged Netanyahu not to respond.
"Take the win," Biden reportedly advised.
Iran attacked again in October, firing more than 180 missiles at the Jewish state. Biden this time acknowledged Israel’s "right to respond." But he said "they should respond proportionally" and avoid hitting Iranian nuclear facilities. A week later, a U.S. intelligence leak exposed potential Israeli plans for retaliation.
After a mostly symbolic response to the first Iranian attack, Israel hit back in October with a wave of airstrikes that crippled Iran’s missile production and air defenses, as well as a secret nuclear weapons research facility.
Iran vowed a "crushing" third retaliatory strike and moved to ramp up enrichment of uranium to near weapons grade.
In recent months, Netanyahu has said that the war must end in Iran.
"This war is a campaign against one entity first and foremost, and that entity is Iran, which raises the banner of our destruction," Netanyahu told the Knesset last month. "Iran has one option left, of arming itself with a nuclear weapon, and it is striving to achieve this. We will be tested by our ability to thwart the nuclear program. We held Iran back by a decade, but it advanced. The test is of us, of the government of Israel, and of our friend the United States."
"Logical and consistent with Israel’s right to self-defense"
On Nov. 5, Donald Trump won the presidential election, and the Iranian axis started to crack. Late last month, Hezbollah, with the assent of Iran and Hamas, approved the Lebanon ceasefire, which allowed Israel to enforce the group’s disarmament and withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Next door in Syria, rebel forces sensed weakness. They stormed across the country in less than two weeks and took Damascus as Assad and his forces fled the capital without a fight. Iran and Hezbollah, which propped up Assad’s regime for more than a decade, could not or would not come to its defense.
A number of U.S. officials have joined Biden this week in taking a victory lap for the regional realignment they worked so hard to block.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan enthused at a conference on Sunday that "Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia are all in a position of relative weakness in the Middle East," and "our core security partner in the region, Israel, is in a position of relative strength in the region."
"We believe that the United States has taken steps over the course of the past year, through military deployments, through diplomacy, and through engagement with all of our partners that have helped to bring about this set of conditions," he said.
The Biden administration may be adjusting policy to match its revised version of history. In Tel Aviv on Thursday as part of a renewed U.S. push for a ceasefire agreement in Gaza that would involve Hamas’s release of Israeli hostages taken in the Oct. 7 attack, Sullivan backed Israel’s deployment of troops to the Syrian Golan Heights and massive bombing campaign of the Assad regime's military assets.
"What Israel saw was an immediate threat, the collapse of a structure that had been in place for a long time and the potential for that vacuum to be filled by a direct, proximate threat right across its border. So it moved in to fill that threat," he said. "That, from the United States’ perspective, is logical and consistent with Israel’s right to self-defense."
Sullivan also rejected the idea, previously encouraged by Biden and other U.S. officials, that Netanyahu was stalling the ceasefire negotiations for political reasons, and credited Israel’s military achievements for what he said was new flexibility by Hamas in the talks.
"Hezbollah can never again rebuild its terror infrastructure to threaten Israel," he said. "Hamas’s leaders are gone, including the terror masterminds of Oct. 7. "Now the Assad regime in Syria is gone."
Still, few in Israel expected the Biden administration to come all the way around to support a decisive confrontation with Iran. In Taub’s view, the Democratic foreign policy establishment remains wedded to former President Barack Obama’s failed Middle East strategy, which seeks to achieve regional balance by accommodating Iran and restraining Israel.
"This goes back to Obama’s red line," Taub said, referring to the then-president’s 2012 decision to subcontract to Russia promised U.S. action against Assad’s use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war. "Obama handed over Syria to [Russian president Vladimir] Putin as part of a progressive strategy to create a new regional order in which America’s allies would learn to ‘share the neighborhood’ with Iran. The Biden administration did its best to preserve Obama’s accomplishments, but Israel has stubbornly insisted on winning this war."
Taub pointed out that as recently as last month the Biden administration renewed a waiver of U.S. sanctions on Iran, continuing years of non-enforcement that has enriched the regime to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.
"If they had more time, I suspect they would go right back to trying to balance and retreat," Taub said of the Biden administration, which will end in a month.
In a press gaggle on Tuesday, a reporter asked National Security Council spokesman John Kirby to respond to "Israelis’ perspective" that "contrary to what you said, which was that President Biden’s support has been unflagging and unrelenting, it has, in fact, flagged and relented at various points."
"Indeed, much of what the Israelis have done that has served to weaken Iran has been done against the advice and warnings of Mr. Biden and his national security team. So my question is this: Isn’t it disingenuous, at a minimum, for the Biden team to be crowing over this checkered record of support for our closest strategic ally in that region?"
Kirby replied that the question did not "merit a response," before saying that "no president" could match Biden’s record of visiting Tel Aviv, supplying weapons to Israel, and defending the Jewish state against Iranian attacks during wartime.
"There is so much wrong with your question," Kirby added. "It just befuddles me, and I don’t have the time to address it right now."
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.