SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
After the assassination of Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, President Biden called it, quote, "a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis and Lebanese civilians." And while Biden celebrated the assassination as a win, it is also an escalation of a conflict, which is the exact scenario his administration has spent the past year desperately trying to contain. The Atlantic writer Franklin Foer got an inside view on Biden's diplomatic efforts in Israel, Gaza and Lebanon, going back before the October 7 attacks. He concluded in his deeply reported piece that those efforts have to be viewed as a failure. I began our conversation asking why.
FRANKLIN FOER: I think there's no other way to read it because they set out goals. One of their goals was to prevent regional escalation. One of their goals was to have a cease-fire in Gaza and the return of the hostages, and that still hasn't happened. One of their goals was to achieve normalizations of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which would have transformed the Middle East, and that hasn't happened. And I think what's frustrating is that there was a vision for a better world on the other side of this war, and they knew the steps to get there, and they just weren't able to execute them.
DETROW: There's a lot to go over, but I want to rewind to October 6 of last year. Because you start your piece, in this moment of progress and guarded optimism from the Biden administration. Can you talk about what the conversations were like between the administration and Saudi Arabian officials, what they were talking about when it comes to Israel and Palestine before all of this happened.
FOER: So my piece begins in the office of Brett McGurk, who works in the National Security Council. He oversees the Middle East for the White House. And on October 6, he was having conversations with Saudi diplomats about the Palestinian piece of the normalization deal. Because the Saudis wanted there to be a Palestinian state in exchange for the normalizing of relations.
And they were getting really into the weeds of all of this. They were talking about the steps to make the Palestinian authority less corrupt, reforming the education system. The Saudis had drawn up plans for what an electrical grid in a Palestinian state would look like. And then several hours later, McGurk gets a text from the Israeli ambassador that says, we're under attack. Secretary Blinken was going to fly out to Saudi Arabia to discuss these plans with Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince. That trip was canceled, and American foreign policy was changed.
DETROW: There are many instances where Israel doesn't heed the advice and warnings from the U.S. about the scale of their military actions, about the civilian deaths, about the neighborhoods being destroyed. And a top IDF official responds at one point, saying look, everything we do, we learn from American war colleges. What was the American response to that statement?
FOER: Actually, to concede that fact...
DETROW: Yeah.
FOER: ...That in a lot of the criticism of Israel - they're saying, you know, you're flattening these cities - well, there are a lot of people within the administration who oversaw the operation against ISIS, and they said, well, we did the same thing in Mosul. So both nations have a ratio that they use when they're going after high-value targets about how many civilian deaths they can tolerate. The Israelis have a slightly higher tolerance for killing civilians than the United States does, at least on paper. But there are instances when the United States has shirked its own guidelines when pursuing terrorists.
DETROW: How would you summarize the change in the relationship between Netanyahu and Biden from last October to this September? And how has that affected how this war has gone?
FOER: Well, first of all, they have a very long relationship. They happen to be two world leaders who have been on the global stage forever, and they know each other extremely well. So there was nothing that Netanyahu did during this war that actually surprised Joe Biden. But Joe Biden has - I call it, like a Scranton code of morality, which is based on gratitude. And so Biden was just bleeding politically on behalf of this war, domestically, that he was getting heckled wherever he went. And he was furious with Netanyahu for not showing reciprocity, for not expressing gratitude, for not thanking him publicly or making the concessions that he needed politically in order to navigate his own constituencies.
DETROW: I want to zoom back and ask a few big-picture questions. I think the real value of this piece is that you were bringing people inside the room of these intense meetings that have been happening over the past year where decisions were being made. What do you think - having learned all that, what do you think the biggest differences between the public statements we have heard from all of these key figures over the past year - about what they wanted to happen, about what they thought was happening and what was really going on as decisions were being made?
FOER: I think if you listened to American diplomats, you would think we were always on the cusp of a deal to end this war. And there were moments when that was true - notably, the weeks before the six Israeli hostages were killed by Hamas - when a deal was actually plausible.
The other thing that I thought a lot about after just pondering this was, what would a president be able to do differently than the Biden administration pursued over the course of this last year? Sometimes the interests of nations are not as easily caricatured as we tend to do. Israel is a state that is existentially threatened, and they do have an interest in getting their hostages home, and they do have an interest in deterring Hezbollah. And I'm not sure there's anything an American president could do to change any of that.
DETROW: Franklin Foer is a staff writer with The Atlantic. His new piece, "The War That Would Not End," is out now. Thank you so much.
FOER: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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