The American approach to the Gaza War—unconditional support for Israel with public pressure for humanitarian restraint—is neither strategic nor moral.
As the dust settled on yet another round of failed ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, the United States found itself cutting short Gaza ceasefire talks and bringing its negotiating team home from Qatar after accusing Hamas of lacking “good faith.” This is followed by giving Israel a green light to continue its military operation in Gaza.
This familiar pattern of diplomatic theater masquerading as serious statecraft reveals the fundamental contradictions at the heart of American policy toward Gaza—and indeed, the broader Middle East.
The Biden administration, and now the Trump administration, have approached the Gaza crisis with the same mixture of moral posturing and strategic incoherence that has characterized American Middle East policy for decades. Washington’s insistence on positioning itself as the indispensable mediator between Israel and Hamas does not reflect strategic wisdom. Rather, it merely reveals the persistence of outdated assumptions about American leverage and regional dynamics.
The Illusion of American Centrality
The recent collapse of ceasefire talks in Doha demonstrates the harsh reality that American policymakers seem reluctant to acknowledge: the United States is no longer the primary driver of Middle Eastern politics.
The United States cannot hope to fill the role of honest broker when it vetoes Security Council resolutions demanding permanent ceasefires in Gaza and supports Israeli policies unconditionally. This contradiction reflects more profound strategic confusion about America’s role in a multipolar world. The assumption that regional conflicts require American solutions, and that American solutions are inherently superior to local or regional arrangements, has repeatedly led Washington into diplomatic dead ends.
The Hamas-Israel Dynamic Is Beyond American Control
Hamas’s apparent strategy to refocus attention and resources on its doctrinal mandate of jihad against Israel suggests that the organization views the current conflict through a fundamentally different lens than American negotiators. For Hamas, the ability to “wave its flags in Gaza” after months of devastating warfare is a form of strategic victory that transcends immediate tactical losses.
This disconnect between American diplomatic frameworks and regional realities has profound implications. When proposed ceasefire frameworks involve complex hostage release schedules over 60-day periods, they reflect the bureaucratic mindset of American diplomacy rather than the existential calculations of the actual combatants.
The Regional Context: Beyond the Gaza Strip
American policy toward Gaza cannot be divorced from broader regional dynamics that are often lost on Washington. The cyclical nature of ceasefires and renewed conflicts reflects not merely the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, but the failure of American policy to address underlying structural issues in regional security architecture.
The Abraham Accords represented a brief moment of strategic clarity in American Middle East policy. The agreements understood that Arab-Israeli normalization could proceed without resolving the Palestinian question. Yet, the Gaza crisis has revealed the limits of this approach, as regional dynamics continue to be shaped by unresolved conflicts that American diplomacy has consistently failed to address.
Realistic Engagement on the Israel-Palestine Issue
A more realistic American approach to Gaza would begin with acknowledging the limits of American leverage and the counterproductive nature of performative diplomacy. Rather than positioning itself as the indispensable mediator in conflicts where it lacks both the tools and the credibility to succeed, American policy should focus on:
1) Encouraging regional powers—Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and even Turkey—to take greater responsibility for Palestinian governance and reconstruction. The fiction that American involvement is essential for Middle Eastern problem-solving has outlived its usefulness.
2) Supporting economic arrangements that create stakeholder relationships between Palestinians and neighboring Arab states, reducing dependence on both Israeli and international aid while creating sustainable foundations for political stability.
3) Recognizing that not every regional conflict requires American involvement, and that American diplomatic capital is often better preserved for issues where Washington possesses genuine leverage and strategic interests.
The Price of Strategic Incoherence
The current American approach to Gaza—combining unconditional support for Israeli military operations with public pressure for humanitarian restraint—satisfies neither strategic logic nor moral consistency. It alienates regional partners while failing to achieve stated humanitarian objectives, and it perpetuates the cycle of conflict by avoiding difficult questions about long-term regional arrangements.
The temporary ceasefires that have emerged represent tactical pauses rather than strategic solutions, largely because American policy continues to treat symptoms rather than underlying causes. The assumption that sufficient American pressure can transform the fundamental calculations of regional actors has been repeatedly disproven, yet continues to drive policy.
American policy toward Gaza requires a fundamental reassessment based on strategic realism rather than diplomatic wishful thinking. This means acknowledging that regional conflicts often have regional solutions, that American involvement is not always helpful or necessary, and that the persistence of conflict may reflect deeper structural issues that American diplomacy is ill-equipped to address.
The alternative to this approach is not American withdrawal from the Middle East, but rather a more selective and effective form of engagement based on genuine strategic interests rather than the illusion of indispensability. Until American policymakers develop the intellectual honesty to distinguish between what they can control and what they cannot, diplomatic failures like the recent Gaza ceasefire talks will continue to define American Middle East policy.
About the Author: Leon Hadar:
Dr. Leon Hadar is a contributing editor with The National Interest, a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) in Philadelphia, and a former research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. He has taught at American University in Washington, DC, and the University of Maryland, College Park. A columnist and blogger for Haaretz (Israel) and a Washington correspondent for The Business Times of Singapore, he is a former United Nations bureau chief for The Jerusalem Post.
Image: Gaza Survival Journey / Shutterstock.com.
