“It’s a fundamentally incoherent policy. On the one hand, they’re saying too many Palestinian civilians have been killed. With the other hand, they’re depriving the Israelis of the precision guided weapons that actually cut down on civilian casualties.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Senator JD Vance (R-OH) joined CNN’s State of the Union with Dana Bash to discuss President Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
Watch Senator Vance’s remarks here and read excerpts below.
Senator Vance on President Biden’s approach to the Israel-Hamas war:
“I think there are two big problems with what the Biden administration is doing. First of all, it’s a fundamentally incoherent policy. On the one hand, they’re saying too many Palestinian civilians have been killed. With the other hand, they’re depriving the Israelis of the precision-guided weapons that actually cut down on civilian casualties. If you’re worried about Palestinian casualties, the stated policy here actually doesn’t make a ton of sense.
“The bigger problem here if we zoom out is, and I hate to say this, but America is not good at micromanaging wars in the Middle East. Joe Biden has been president for four years, but he’s really presided over, as a senator and a vice president, many of the biggest disasters we’ve had in foreign policy in the Middle East over the last 40 years and I think that our attitude vis-a-vis the Israelis should be look, we’re not good at micromanaging Middle Eastern wars, the Israelis are our allies, let them prosecute this war the way they see fit …
“I completely concede, by the way, it was a Republican president in Iraq, though with Democratic buy-in from people like Joe Biden, but I think to learn the lessons of multiple conflicts, we have not been good at this and that’s been a bipartisan failure. By the way, it’s one of the reasons why I think Donald Trump was a good foreign policy president: he departed from that wisdom.”
Senator Vance on President Biden’s stated goal of pressuring Israel to change its strategy:
“The fundamental problem here is the Israelis have a goal in mind. Hamas started a war by murdering a large number of Israeli civilians, and now that they’re 80% defeated, they’re throwing up their hands and saying ‘uncle’.
“Now yeah, Palestinian civilian casualties [are] a real issue, and our heart certainly goes out to them. We have to ask ourselves: ‘why are Palestinian civilian casualties so high?’ It’s because Hamas started the war and now, they hide behind Palestinian civilians. So if you want to learn the lessons of the last 40 years, the most important thing is we have to defeat Hamas as a viable military organization. You’re never going to defeat the ideology of Hamas, but you can root out those commanders, those final military-trained battalions, and I think you should empower the Israelis to do it.”
Senator Vance on how the U.S. approach to the Israel-Hamas war affects wider geopolitical goals for the region:
“Our goal in the Middle East should be to allow the Israelis to get to some good place with the Saudi Arabians and other Gulf Arab states. There is no way that we can do that unless the Israelis finish the job with Hamas. If they can’t even do that, the attitude in the Middle East will be: ‘you can’t trust these guys, they’re not pursuing their own national security.’ So we’ve got to let them finish this job, and I think hopefully, on the other end of it, get to a new era in the Middle East.”
###