U.S. Middle East Policy: A Lack Of Imagination? Steve Williamson and Karen McClelland welcome Andrew Bacevich, Jr., retired Army colonel and Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University.
Asked to speculate on what goals Hamas hoped to achieve by its terrorist attack on Israel, Bacevich says, “My guess is that nobody in Hamas ever imagined that Hamas could defeat IDF in any meaningful sense.” However, since the horrific attack, he says, “The amount of sympathetic attention given to the Palestine cause has gone through the roof. And that is accentuated, I think, by the humanitarian consequences of the ongoing war.”
Asked to predict the outcome of the war, Bacevich responds it’s impossible to say. “My general view of war is that one should be very careful predicting the course of any war or predicting the outcome of any war.” He notes that it does not appear that Israeli leaders had a clear conception of what political outcome they were seeking at the beginning of the conflict. Now he says, “It has become more urgent for Israel, for the United States and for other actors to be able to say, ‘This is what we intend the outcome to be.’”
And despite President Biden’s call for a two-state solution, Bacevich remarks, “I would argue that the two-state solution is as dead as a doornail.”
So, what should the U.S. do? “We need to be more imaginative,” says Bacevich. He stresses the importance of the upcoming presidential election saying, “We need to have a very serious national conversation about what America’s role in the world ought to be given our own strengths and weaknesses, given the way the international order has changed in many respects, given the emergence of new threats such as climate change. And I’m worried that we won’t have that kind of serious discussion or debate…I fear the election will end up being a missed opportunity.”