In his final months in office, President Joe Biden is signaling new willingness to use U.S. military assistance to Israel as both a carrot and a stick to influence its high-stakes confrontation with Iran and Iran-backed militant groups.
But while the approach increases Washington's involvement in Israeli decision-making just weeks before the US presidential election, it is unclear whether it will help achieve Biden's goals, including preventing a broader regional conflict and getting Israel to address the increasingly dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, experts say.
Biden's administration announced on Sunday it would send about 100 soldiers to Israel along with an advanced U.S. anti-missile system, a rare deployment that came as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government weighs a retaliatory attack on Iran after an Oct. 1 Iranian missile strike.
The Biden administration also delivered Israel a letter on Sunday warning that it must take steps in the next month to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza or face potential restrictions on U.S. military aid.Publicly, U.S. officials say the seemingly opposing moves fit within longstanding policies that aim to both ensure Israel's defense and to advocate for protection of civilians in the year-old war in Gaza.
But current and former officials privately acknowledge that they are milestones that increase U.S. involvement in Israeli strategy even as Biden heads for the door.
Israel has frequently resisted U.S. advice and has caused political difficulties for the Biden administration, which faces pressure from some liberal activists in the Democratic Party to use U.S. leverage to rein in Israel.
Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that the administration's carrot-and-stick approach "implies at a time when you might not think the administration is all that active … that they are clearly thinking and acting.”
But he cautioned that Washington is unlikely to scale back its military support for Israel if the conflict with Iran deepens.
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