“The Party of War”: Matt Duss on Biden, Gaza & How Democrats Lost Foreign Policy Argument to Trump

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

As Gaza ceasefire talks continue and less than a week before President Donald Trump takes office, outgoing President Joe Biden defended his foreign policy in a major address at the State Department yesterday, where he was met by protesters with signs that read “Biden’s policy is genocide.”

PROTESTER: Shame! Shame on you, you war criminal! Shame!

AMY GOODMAN: In his speech on Monday, Biden said his administration spearheaded a ceasefire plan that the U.N. Security Council approved in June, even as he continued to provide Israel with weapons and claimed to be, quote, “on the brink of a proposal I laid out months ago,” he said.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: We’re pressing hard to close this. The deal we have structured would free the hostages, halt the fighting, provide security to Israel, and allow us to significantly surge humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians, who have suffered terribly in this war that Hamas started. They’ve been through hell. So many innocent people have been killed. So many communities have been destroyed. The Palestinian people deserve peace and the right to determine their own futures. Israel deserves peace and real security. And the hostages and their families deserve to be reunited. And so we’re working urgently to close this deal.

AMY GOODMAN: Biden also touted his administration’s role gaining NATO support for Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion and defended the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 after two decades of occupation.

For more, we go to Jerusalem. We’re joined by Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. His new piece for The Guardian, “Democrats have become the party of war. Americans are tired of it.”

Matt, welcome back to Democracy Now! Respond to President Biden’s address.

MATT DUSS: Well, I think, looking at it as a whole, I mean, I think there are things that President Biden can claim credit for in his foreign policy. The break from the neoliberal economic order, a new approach to economics that invests in jobs and American manufacturing, that has important domestic and foreign policy implications. I think his work defending Brazilian democracy is something that’s not mentioned enough. He very likely helped avert a coup against Lula in Brazil. And I do think he can claim some credit for rallying allies for the defense of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion.

On the other hand — and I do think this is what his foreign policy will be remembered for — is Gaza. There’s just no other way to look at it. I think being here in Israel and Palestine and Jerusalem — I’ve traveled in the West Bank — talking to Israelis and Palestinians, there is a lot of anger, of course, at Hamas and at Benjamin Netanyahu, but there’s also a great bit of anger at Joe Biden himself for not applying enough pressure on Netanyahu to get this deal, which, let’s remember, Joe Biden announced this proposed deal back in May. Months have passed. Tens of thousands of people, more people have been killed. More lives have been destroyed. More Israeli hostages have been killed. So, I think there’s a great deal of anger for him here, and I think that’s going to impact American foreign policy and in this region, around the world, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt, you are in Jerusalem. You’re usually in Washington, D.C. Why are you there?

MATT DUSS: I’m here with some colleagues just, as I said, speaking with Israelis, with Palestinians, members of the governments, analysts, journalists, activists and regular citizens, just to try and get a sense of what people are thinking and feeling here, as we see the handover between — you know, from Biden to Trump, what are people’s fears, what are their hopes, just to kind of share those perspectives with colleagues back at home and to better inform the conversation.

AMY GOODMAN: And where have you gone?

MATT DUSS: We’ve been in Ramallah. We’ve been in Jerusalem. We’ll be in the West Bank later today. Earlier this morning, my colleagues and I visited one of the communities near Gaza that was attacked on October 7, were able to see some of the sites of these attacks, talk to members of this community. It is hard to talk about. I mean, what happened on that day, I think everyone understands, was unspeakable. That pain is still very, very real in these communities and in Israel, as well as the pain of what is happening in Gaza amongst Palestinians.

There’s great anticipation for the end of this war, great anticipation for the release of Palestinian prisoners that would be part of this hostage release and ceasefire deal. But I do want to relate something I heard from a member of one of the kibbutzes that were attacked on October 7. He understands that this war is doing no good. He wants the ceasefire. He wants the hostages released. He wants Palestinian civilians to stop being killed. And I think that is a message that President Biden has not heard loud enough, very tragically.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Duss, you write in your piece, “Biden showed that international law is little more than a cudgel to be used against our enemies while being treated as optional for our friends.” Explain.

MATT DUSS: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think if you look at the Ukraine, you know, Biden’s approach to Ukraine, and compare that to his approach to the Gaza war, the contrast could not be starker. I think in helping rally to the defense of Ukraine, President Biden and his administration articulated a very strong set of principles of international law, the right of countries to be sovereign and defend their own borders, you know, to defend themselves against invasion. At the same time, we see Israel, even though Israel, of course, had the right to respond to October 7 and prevent such an attack from happening again, the tactics it’s been using in Gaza have violated almost every protection of civilians. It has violated many of the same rules of war that Russia has been violating in Ukraine and for which Russia has been rightly condemned. And yet we hear, you know, month after month after month, over a year now, nothing like that condemnation — in fact, no condemnation whatsoever from President Biden, in fact, continuing not only not to condemn them, but continuing to send a massive flow of arms that is facilitating this mass slaughter in Gaza. And I think many Americans understand that, and I can guarantee people around the world understand that, many who have questions about what is this so-called international order that President Biden is talking about, when we see the stark disparity between Ukraine and Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to a headline just last week, the Biden administration announcing new sanctions against Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces after concluding the paramilitary group committed genocide. And it goes on to say —

MATT DUSS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — that Secretary of State Tony Blinken said he had made the determination “after reviewing the horrifying information of suffering inside Sudan.” More than half the population faces crisis-level hunger. The New York Times reports Biden administration had been reluctant to admit that the Rapid Support Forces were committing genocide in Sudan, for fear it would highlight Biden’s refusal to make the same determination about Israel’s killing of Palestinians in Gaza. Matt?

MATT DUSS: I think that fear is well founded. While I am glad to see that determination, and our organization welcomed it — I think a lot of people were happy to see that, the administration calling this for what it is — he should be willing to call out these same crimes being carried out against the people of Gaza, even if he’s unwilling to use the word “genocide.” There are any number of other words and terms that he can use: crimes against humanity, atrocities, war crimes, violations of international law. He has been unwilling to do the most basic of those.

And there’s simply no question at this point that the laws of war have been egregiously violated. They are being violated right now as I stand here. When I was in southern Israel, we could look just two kilometers away and see the smoke rising from Gaza as we were there. This war is ongoing, and yet President Biden seems very — you know, he’s quite willing to use these terms of condemnation when these crimes are being carried out by America’s adversaries, but, as I wrote, when it comes to America’s friends and allies, he has a different standard. And I think that is corrosive to the very idea of international law.

AMY GOODMAN: And then you have the House of Representatives in the U.S. voting last week to sanction the International Criminal Court in protest at its arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and the former Defense Secretary Gallant. This was Democrats joining with Republicans in this vote.

MATT DUSS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt, you talk about Democrats now — 

MATT DUSS: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — becoming the party of war.

MATT DUSS: Yeah, right. I mean, I was talking, I think, about — in that piece, I was referring to the way that Vice President Harris campaigned — not just about Vice President Harris, because, obviously, she was holding up the Biden administration’s record and essentially had to run on that, so she carried the weight of, you know, a number of policies, including Gaza. But even if you look at the way she campaigned, starting at the convention and then on, highlighting national security bona fides, guaranteeing that she would oversee the most, quote, “lethal military in the world,” she really seemed to be leaning in to a kind of militarist status quo, leaving that space open for Donald Trump essentially to run as an antiwar candidate. This is something no one should believe. Donald Trump is certainly not an antiwar candidate, if you look at his record, if you look at the actual things he did when he was president. And yet, the fact that that space was left open for him, I think, is a criticism of the Democrats that I was trying to make, but it also shows that this is something that American voters are really thirsty for, someone to give them a different vision of an America that is not constantly at war. And that is something that Democrats really need to start figuring out how to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Duss, I want to thank you for being with us, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. We’ll link to your new essay in The Guardian headlined “Democrats have become the party of war. Americans are tired of it.” Thanks for joining us from Jerusalem.