<\/a><\/p>\nThat\u2019s not to say the president is pursuing a purely progressive foreign policy, or that progressives are entirely pleased with him. \u201cThe left thinks it\u2019s getting a raw deal from Biden on foreign policy generally,\u201d said Van Jackson, a former Obama-era Pentagon official now at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. That perception, he said, has to do with Biden tying domestic issues to competition with China and resisting making deep cuts to defense spending.<\/p>\n
Still, Jackson acknowledges, \u201cthere is a greater opportunity to influence policy from the left than any time since I\u2019ve been alive.\u201d<\/p>\n
But privately, progressives share their concern that their wins so far came in areas where Biden already agreed with them. On the campaign trail, Biden said he would end \u201cforever wars\u201d and focus his attention on motivating the world to confront climate change.<\/p>\n
The real test would be when progressives and Biden differed on a major issue. Then came the Israel-Gaza war.<\/p>\n
The progressive pushback on Israel proved their staying power<\/p>\n
Following weeks of aggressive and at times violent Israeli actions toward Palestinians in Jerusalem, the militant group Hamas launched rockets at Israel on May 10. Israel responded with devastating airstrikes and artillery fire on the group\u2019s positions in Gaza. <\/p>\n
The disparity between the two sides \u2014 Hamas has thousands of imprecise rockets while Israel has one of the world\u2019s strongest militaries and most effective missile defense systems \u2014 meant it wasn\u2019t a fair fight. Before a ceasefire ended the nearly two weeks of fighting, Israel had killed nearly 250 Palestinians, including 66 children, while Hamas had killed 12 Israelis, including two children.<\/p>\n
Biden, as he has throughout his career, backed Israel\u2019s \u201cright to defend itself\u201d while initially saying very little about the plight of the Palestinians. Progressives countered the president, saying support for Israel could and should be coupled with defending Palestinian rights.<\/p>\n
Among the most vocal critics was Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress. On May 13, she gave an impassioned speech on the House floor about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and why the US should reconsider its unconditional support of Israel.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I see the images and videos of destruction and death in Palestine, all I hear are the children screaming from pure fear and terror,\u201d she said, holding back tears. A statement from a Palestinian mother she read about putting her kids to bed during the bombings \u201cbroke me a little more because … my country\u2019s policies and funding will deny this mother\u2019s right to see her own children live without fear and to grow old without painful trauma and violence.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Five days later, Tlaib confronted Biden on a Detroit tarmac during the president\u2019s visit to a Ford electric vehicle center and spoke to him quietly for eight minutes. <\/p>\n
\u201cPalestinian human rights are not a bargaining chip and must be protected, not negotiated,\u201d a Tlaib aide said to NPR that day. \u201cThe US cannot continue to give the right-wing Netanyahu government billions each year to commit crimes against Palestinians. Atrocities like bombing schools cannot be tolerated, much less conducted with US-supplied weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a speech at the Ford center after their conversation, Biden addressed Tlaib directly, saying: \u201cI admire your intellect, I admire your passion, and I admire your concern for so many other people.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom my heart,\u201d he continued, \u201cI pray that your grandmom and family are well. I promise you, I\u2019m going to do everything to see that they are, on the West Bank. You\u2019re a fighter. And, God, thank you for being a fighter.\u201d<\/p>\n
And Tlaib did keep fighting. In response to reports that the administration had approved the sale of $735 million in precision-guided weapons to Israel, Tlaib and two other progressives, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Mark Pocan (D-WI), put forward a resolution on May 19 to block the transaction. <\/p>\n
The next day, May 20, Sanders filed his own resolution with the same goal in mind. And by May 21 in Israel, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, with some crediting the congressional pressure for ending the fighting after just 11 days.<\/p>\n
US officials, including previous presidents from both parties, had sought to condition aid to Israel before. But to consider doing so while Israel engaged in a war with Gaza was different, and underscored the shift in Washington.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe politics of Israel have changed,\u201d said Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX), a progressive House Foreign Affairs Committee member. \u201cPeople are standing up for what they believe, to be fair, but also to speak out against injustice, and I\u2019ve seen many of my colleagues do it sincerely.\u201d<\/p>\n
The question now is if the progressive momentum can be sustained. <\/p>\n
Foreign policy progressives are getting wins. Can they keep winning?<\/p>\n
Progressives make three main arguments for their recent success and why they believe they\u2019ll remain a force in years to come.<\/p>\n
The first is that Trump\u2019s disregard for human rights and relationships with autocrats like Saudi Arabia\u2019s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and right-wing leaders like Netanyahu brought disparate progressive factions together. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe Trump years gave the progressive community time to formulate what their ideas really were,\u201d said a senior House Democratic aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren\u2019t authorized to speak to the press. <\/p>\n
Progressives expect the misbehavior of foreign leaders to continue, providing endless fodder for their case. Netanyahu, for example, \u201cis all about short-term, Pyrrhic victories and he\u2019s fucking himself in the long run,\u201d said Vietor, the progressive podcast host.<\/p>\n
The second is that the ubiquity of social media will continue to broadcast atrocities around the world. That will allow progressives to unite around whatever injustice goes viral online and then do something about it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe burden of knowing, and being faced with reality, is acting on that reality you\u2019re aware of. That wasn\u2019t true for generations,\u201d said Castro. \u201cNow you\u2019re faced with the facts and you have to govern accordingly.\u201d<\/p>\n
And the third is that the progressive ranks in government keep swelling. \u201cProgressives are saying things about foreign policy interests and values that a lot of Americans believe in and agree with, and have for a while,\u201d said Duss, the Sanders adviser. \u201cThanks to years of hard organizing and policy work, there are more and more people in Washington who reflect those views.\u201d<\/p>\n
New progressive voices keep arriving. In one 2020 election result that many saw as a sign of the times, Jamaal Bowman defeated pro-Israel House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel in New York. <\/p>\n
During the Israel-Gaza fight, now-Rep. Bowman put out a statement that was far more sympathetic to Palestinians than anything Engel likely would have offered. \u201cIt is imperative that the United States have an even handed approach and ensure our nation is not complicit in stoking the flames of conflict through continued settlement expansion and home demolitions that undermine the two-state solution, perpetuate endless occupation, and threaten the long-term security of both Israelis and Palestinians,\u201d Bowman said on May 11.<\/p>\n
More support in the capital gives progressives like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib even more political space to push their views and challenge Biden from the left. <\/p>\n
But experts wonder what will happen if the progressive foreign policy movement becomes too successful. <\/p>\n
One possibility is that receiving more attention and notoriety could force progressives to concretize and homogenize their views. \u201cThe risk of movements becoming more institutionalized is they lose their radical edge,\u201d said Marie Berry, an associate professor at the University of Denver.<\/p>\n
And what if the movement becomes so successful that some of its proponents become the national security adviser, defense secretary, secretary of defense, or even president? That, ironically, could be a problem.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you have to make hard choices about what you care about, things are going to get messy very fast,\u201d said Josh Shifrinson, an associate professor at Boston University. And if a progressive finds themselves in the Oval Office, the problem will be that \u201cyou\u2019re no longer the leader of the progressive movement, but the leader of US, which requires different choices, priorities, and thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n
The progressive foreign policy movement will have to contend with those risks as it moves from the wings to center stage. But for now, their perceived successes during the Israel-Gaza crisis will likely keep them in the spotlight.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt will give us more confidence to conduct more foreign policy from the House and Senate,\u201d said Khanna, one of the leading progressive lawmakers. \u201cThe voice of members of Congress can make a huge difference in standing up for human rights and for peace.\u201d<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As the Israel-Gaza war raged, President Joe Biden made clear to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that there was a problem. Full-throated support for Israel among Democrats was waning, namely because of progressives. Among the clearest signs were moves in the House and Senate to block a $735 million weapons sale to Israel, a deal…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}