Veteran NYT correspondent David Sanger observes, “On the Tripwire of a ‘Red Line,’ It’s Often Presidents Who Trip.“
When President Biden declared over the weekend that he was drawing a “red line” for Israel’s military action in Gaza, he appeared to be trying to raise the potential cost for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as their relationship plummets to new depths.
But he never said what would happen, exactly, if Mr. Netanyahu ignored him and continued Israel’s military operation by invading the southern city Rafah, a step that Mr. Biden has said — repeatedly — would be a major mistake. It is unclear whether he hesitated because he did not want to signal what response he might be preparing, or because he did not want to be criticized if he backed away from whatever action he is contemplating.
Or perhaps, given his long experience in the Senate and the White House, he remembered that drawing red lines turned out badly for Barack Obama when it came to Syria, and for George W. Bush when it came to North Korea and Iran. American allies in the Middle East were stunned by Mr. Obama’s reversal. Mr. Bush was later judged to have invaded a country that had no nuclear weapons — Iraq — while the North tested its first nuclear weapon on his watch.
Mr. Biden’s line-drawing was immediately dismissed — and matched — by Mr. Netanyahu, who shot back: “You know, I have a red line. You know what the red line is? That Oct. 7 doesn’t happen again.” The prime minister was referring, of course, to the Hamas attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel, left scores more as hostages and precipitated a war now in its sixth month.
Such talk of red lines is hardly new: Leaders of all stripes, from heads of democracies to vicious autocrats, often invoke the phrase to describe moves that another country should not even contemplate, because the consequences would be more painful than they could imagine. The odd thing in this case is that the lines are being drawn by two allies who regularly celebrate how close they are but whose dialogue has begun to turn somewhat poisonous.
[…]
In public, the White House will not discuss the subject. At a briefing with reporters on Air Force One on Monday, as Mr. Biden headed to New Hampshire for a campaign event, a White House spokesman refused to say what price Israel would pay if it crossed Mr. Biden’s red line. And Mr. Biden himself ruled out cutting off any defensive weapons, like Iron Dome, the U.S.-Israeli missile defense project that has intercepted short-range missiles shot into Israel by Hamas.
“It is a red line, but I am never going to leave Israel,” he said in an interview with MSNBC last week. “The defense of Israel is still critical. So there is no red line I am going to cut off all weapons, so they don’t have the Iron Dome to protect them.”
“But there’s red lines that if he crosses,” he added, drifting off from completing the sentence — or the threat. “You cannot have 30,000 more Palestinians dead.”
In using the red-line wording, with its vivid suggestion of some kind of tripwire, Mr. Biden was also wading into dangerous territory for American presidents. Time and again in the past few decades, Mr. Biden’s predecessors have described limits that America’s adversaries or allies could not step over without invoking the most severe consequences.
And time and again, they have come to regret it.
The number of cases offered is few and, indeed, Obama’s famous Syria declaration is the only one that I recall using the phrase “red line.” But Sanger’s larger point—that declaring that another country “better not” do something without being prepared to deliver on an “or else”—is indeed fraught.
Students often raise the Obama example in seminar and, while I agree that it was an error, I note that he at least had the good judgment not to compound it with a bigger one: following through. Assad’s use of chemical weapons didn’t materially change the level of atrocities in an already atrocious war nor the American interest in intervention. Drawing U.S. forces into that war would have been far worse than having a little egg on our faces. (And there were face-saving maneuvers: putting the ball in Congress’ court, which bought time for a modest deal negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry with the help of the Russians.)
Several OTB commenters argued, in response to my post yesterday morning on Netanyahu’s thumbing his nose at Biden’s red line, that we should immediately halt aid to Israel. But the fact of the matter is that Israel going into Rafah won’t materially change the nature of the conflict nor U.S. interests or public opinion. Biden simply isn’t going to abandon an ally responding ferociously to a horrific terrorist attack.
