How the Israel-Hamas war sidelined other world hot spots

President Joe Biden was asked a week after the devastating Oct. 7 attacks on Israel whether the United States could handle both the war in Ukraine and the new crisis in the Middle East. “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake,” he told CBS News. “We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.”

Now, some administration officials say that the White House has had to make hard calls to divert attention and resources away from other foreign policy priorities as it focuses on the Israel-Hamas conflict. And Biden’s support for Israel has also complicated U.S. efforts to build relationships in some other parts of the world.

“More than any other crisis, it exposed the limits of U.S. power,” said Comfort Ero, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group think tank.

As one senior administration official said of the Israel-Hamas conflict: “It became our foreign policy priority whether we liked it or not.”

Biden, after his withdrawal from Afghanistan, was supposed to be the first president to finally close the chapter on the costly war on terror era. But the U.S. is once again bogged down in the Middle East, unable to contain Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offensives in Gaza and Lebanon and struggling to head off a full-scale regional war.

“Oct. 7 changed everything,” said another senior administration official. “Of course we were going to support Israel, that’s not a question. This president believes in that strongly. But then the goalposts kept moving, Bibi kept walking away from a cease-fire deal. And we were put in an impossible position that distracted from everything else.”

In some cases, U.S. attention and resources have been diverted from the administration’s priorities in the Indo-Pacific, Europe and Africa. In others, the U.S. approach to Israel has hurt its standing with countries it is trying to woo away from adversaries Russia and China.

That’s according to interviews with more than a dozen U.S. officials, foreign diplomats, lawmakers, and analysts. Many were granted anonymity to share their views candidly.

“Our response to Ukraine helped truly restore our global credibility after Trump,” said the senior administration official. “And I still think we come out ahead, even after what’s happened in Gaza. But it’s undeniably perceived as a more muddled picture now.”

The official said much of that is because of anger in some parts of the world about the Biden administration’s support of Israel’s offensive despite rising civilian casualties. “The president has managed it as well as anyone could — he both supported and restrained Israel as well as anyone could have. But he paid the price on the world stage and politically here at home.”

Granted, every White House has to react to the realities of new global flashpoints. And different arms of the administration certainly manage to work on different crises all the time.

The Biden administration argues it is doing just that — and with concrete success to show for it.

“I can’t think of a single policy priority of ours that we haven’t been able to achieve or that has been made more difficult to achieve because of our focus on the Middle East or the support we have provided to Israel” said Sean Savett, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council. Savett pointed to Biden’s work on the Quad partnership with Japan, Australia and India, strengthening of the NATO alliance, and mobilizing more humanitarian and diplomatic resources for the war in Sudan.

Biden is also arranging his first trip to Africa, to visit Angola, this month and a trip to Germany to marshal more support for Ukraine even as he responds to the latest escalations in Lebanon.

And in some cases, the Biden White House is likely making progress abroad that simply isn’t getting the attention it might without the Israel-Hamas fight dominating news coverage.

But the Israel-Gaza crisis stands out as one of the world’s thorniest diplomatic challenges, as well as a grave humanitarian catastrophe. It’d be tough for any administration to navigate without making a few tradeoffs. And the areas that don’t get as much attention now could become tomorrow’s drop-everything emergency.

Here are a few of the Biden administration foreign policy priorities that have been sidelined or disrupted by the crisis in the Middle East:

The pivot to Asia stumbles again

The Biden administration has been forced to reroute major military assets, including aircraft carrier strike groups, from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East. And that’s happening just as nervous allies Japan, South Korea and the Philippines seek to boost the U.S. footprint in their own backyard in a signal to China.

“The pivot to Asia has been delayed again, again,” one administration official wryly declared.

U.S. support for Israel has also dented its reputation in the region as it competes with China for influence, particularly in Muslim-majority countries Malaysia and Indonesia. Recent public opinion polls in those two countries show support for aligning with the U.S. instead of China dropping from 61 percent last year to less than 50 percent this year.

“It is surely no coincidence,” said Michael Singh, managing director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “I think that we can hope these trends will reverse when the dust settles in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the dust shows no sign of settling — quite the opposite.”

It’s worth noting that past administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, have struggled to make the pledged pivot to Asia as well. Additionally, the Biden administration has won plaudits for seeking to ease tensions with China and boost visits of top officials between the countries.

Yet shows of military might have become increasingly significant as China ramps up its aggressive actions toward Taiwan and around disputed territories in the South China Sea near the Philippines, a key U.S. ally.

It isn’t all about Ukraine

Three senior eastern European defense and security officials argued the Middle East crisis has diverted Western attention from the war in Ukraine, where Russia is stubbornly making incremental gains despite steep losses in eastern Ukraine.

“We realize the U.S. can’t do everything everywhere all at once, and the Middle East certainly takes attention from Ukraine,” said one of the officials. Ukrainian officials and other analysts have also voiced fears that Ukraine’s own peace plans are being overshadowed by Middle East crisis diplomacy. Data also showed Biden dialed back his rhetoric on the Ukraine war in the immediate months after the Israel-Hamas war began.

The administration regularly points out that it has continued to send billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine despite its attention to conflict zones elsewhere, and that it remains fully committed to helping Kyiv defend against Russia. The Biden admin also pushed through Ukraine aid by tying it to Israel funding.

The Middle East crisis has also fueled debates about whether the U.S. is stretched too thin to simultaneously supply weapons to Israel, Ukraine and allies in Asia even with its defense industrial base under strain. The U.S. has already depleted its excess military stocks by arming Ukraine in its war against Russia. But delivering military aid and munitions to Israel is further straining those dwindling supplies, while the U.S. Navy uses up precious stocks of air defense missiles lobbed by Iran-backed militants in Yemen across the Red Sea.

Russia, meanwhile, has seized on the Gaza crisis to undermine Western messaging on its war in Ukraine, holding it up as a sample of Western double standards.

“These messages [that] Russian propaganda is blaring out — that the U.S. hypocritically pretends to care about European lives but not lives in the Middle East — it’s not true but it’s clearly resonating a lot in the Global South,” said a third administration official.

Russia at a summit of the BRICS countries in 2023 condemned the war in Gaza as a failure of U.S. Middle East policy, in what was seen as a boon for its campaign to gain favor in countries outside of the West.

Troubles elsewhere in the Middle East

The Oct. 7 attacks may have entirely derailed U.S. efforts to strike a deal to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, a pact the U.S. has been pursuing for nearly two years as a way to forge long-term stability in the Middle East.

U.S. officials who work on Middle East policy, as well as regional analysts, widely agree that a Saudi-Israel normalization deal is extremely difficult to broker for Riyadh without a meaningful plan to establish Palestinian statehood — a prospect that Israel’s government has repeatedly said it would not accept.

Top White House officials say they are still pursuing a diplomatic breakthrough on a Saudi-Israel deal in parallel with cease-fire talks in Gaza and de-escalating the crisis in Lebanon.

Biden also vowed early into his administration to try to end the war in Yemen, tapping a senior envoy, Tim Lenderking, to tackle the issue during his first month in office. But a permanent peace in Yemen now seems further away than ever.

And while active fighting between the internationally recognized government and Iran-backed Houthi militants has subsided, the conflict has flared up in an entirely new way. Houthis have fired missiles at Israel and U.S. naval forces and commercial ships in the Red Sea — all in response to Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Africa waits its turn

Sudan’s civil war is considered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with some 25 million people on the brink of famine, yet U.S. officials who work on Africa policy privately fume that it is getting a fraction of the attention the Middle East is receiving from the Biden administration.

The United Arab Emirates is funneling arms to one of the warring parties, the Rapid Support Forces, accused of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Some analysts argue that the Biden administration is downplaying the UAE’s role in Sudan because Washington needs its help on the Middle East crisis.

Administration officials deny these charges and insist the U.S. prioritizes this in meetings with the UAE.

Biden hosted the UAE leader in Washington last month, where he extolled the two countries’ “strategic partnership.”

“You can’t say you want to end the war in Sudan and praise the UAE as a constructive partner,” said Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Africa program. “By saying that, Biden has advanced his Middle East policy objectives with the UAE entirely at the expense of his credibility in Africa.”

Other conflict zones getting short shrift are Somalia and the eastern Congo. To be sure, U.S. Director for National Intelligence Avril Haines visited Congo in 2023 and Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Congo the year prior. But by comparison, Blinken has traveled to the Middle East nearly a dozen times in the past year.

“Failure to treat any of Africa’s crises with half the rigor of Oct. 7’s fallout is a direct point African governments bring up” in meetings with U.S. lawmakers in Washington, said one congressional aide who works on foreign affairs issues.

Human rights on trial

Several administration officials said the Middle East crisis has damaged Biden’s long-stated effort to restore U.S. leadership on human rights.

Human rights groups have repeatedly hammered Biden for not holding Israel to the same standards on adhering to international humanitarian law as other countries, particularly on its use of U.S.-made weapons.

“We’re hearing from human rights defenders all over the map that they want nothing to do with the United States anymore, that they don’t believe the U.S. is a good actor in the world,” said Sarah Yager, Washington director at Human Rights Watch, citing conversations with activists in Jordan and Yemen. “That’s how far the U.S. reputation has sunk because of the president’s handling of Gaza and now Lebanon.”

Egypt offers another stark example. Cairo is playing a key role in U.S.-led efforts to broker a cease-fire and hostage deal in Gaza, but human rights groups charge that Biden has eased pressure on Egypt over its own dismal human rights record in exchange. The Biden administration in years past withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Egypt over its crackdown on political opposition, the media and treatment of political prisoners. Egypt has routinely dismissed the accusations.

This year, the Biden administration reversed its stance and granted Egypt all of its allotted $1.3 billion in U.S. military aid, saying that the funding decision “is important to advancing regional peace and Egypt’s specific and ongoing contributions to U.S. national security priorities.”

White House officials have said the administration continues to press human rights issues in conversations with foreign counterparts around the world. But behind closed doors, some officials say the damage is done.

“We made a lot of strides on human rights messaging up until last year,” said one of the administration officials. “Now, the world just doesn’t trust us on this anymore.”

Phelim Kine contributed to this report.