Joe Biden just got canceled in the Arab World

President Joe Biden’s overnight trip to Israel on Wednesday sent all of the right messages to The White House’s intended audience. 

To Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli people, it was a resounding show of support by the United States as a strategic and longtime ally that will not bend to terrorism. 

To Hamas, Hezbollah and their principal state-sponsor, Iran, it was a one word message:“Don’t.” And Biden backed it up with a show of force. The USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group is currently in the Mediterranean Sea. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower strike group will soon join it. In addition, there is the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan — “a rapid reaction force capable of conducting special operations” and supporting a large-scale evacuation, in a mission preparation phase.  

But the message is not resonating — not in the Middle East, and not across college campuses in the U.S. 

Before Air Force One touched down at Ben Gurion Airport early Wednesday morning, and before Biden could give Netanyahu a bear hug on the tarmac, the President had already been canceled by the Arab World.

The ostensible reason was the explosion at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, which Palestinian health officials claimed to have killed nearly 500 people. This narrative was later all but refuted, but it is Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who is controlling the narrative — and the anti-western repercussions.

Jordanian King Abdullah, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas are in control of their governments. But when it comes to Israel and the plight of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Khamenei and his Mullahs control the Arab street.

Faced with this Iranian fait accompli and fast-growing Palestinian protests across the Middle East, Abbas canceled his scheduled meeting in Amman, Jordan with Biden — and in doing so, he precipitated the cancelation of Biden across the region. Biden had been scheduled to participate in a four-way summit with Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority to discuss humanitarian initiatives and efforts to deconflict. But that, too, was canceled. 

“If you are explaining, you are losing,” the adage goes. Biden is learning a hard lesson about this now. In the Middle East, perception is often more convincing than reality to the Arab street. So too is the Arab street’s inherent bias against the U.S. and Israel. As a consequence, both Washington and Jerusalem continue to lose the information war to Iran and Hamas, both regionally and globally. 

Once again, the Biden Administration, like Netanyahu and his national unity government, finds itself in reactive mode, unable to get ahead of the curve. Iran, in this regard, keeps outfoxing the U.S. and Israel. Consequently, Iran is now able to foment instability across the Middle East at times and places of its own choosing.

Biden and Netanyahu are unlikely to win that war of perception, regardless of the reality, due to Iran and the Arab street. Despite ample evidence that the explosion was caused by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad projectile that fell short — including a recorded conversation between two Hamas officials to that effect, independent Al Jazeera drone video of the incident, and crater analysis — the Arab world is running with the Iran-Hamas version of the story.

The Biden Administration continues to ignore the 800-pound gorilla in the room — Iran. That word, escalation, has worked its way back into the White House’s lexicon. Biden’s  message to Israel was simple — “You are not alone” — but he is treating the attack, and the terrorist acts that were conducted against innocent civilians, as a crime rather than a threat to Israel’s existence.

Israel does not need America to ensure it has everything it needs to “defend” itself. The Israelis are beyond that. What they need is help eradicating the Hamas threat — the close fight, to isolate and destroy the enemy. Then they need a plan that addresses the root cause of the problem — Iran, all the while addressing the long-term plight of the Palestinian people caught in the middle.

Washington will never be able to work itself out of this cycle in the Middle East until the White House addresses the support provided to terrorist groups throughout the region by Iran. Chasing normalization talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia was always going to be a fool’s gold-like endeavor as long as Tehran, can derail the process with terrorist attacks such as that of Oct. 7.

Getting there will require Biden to acknowledge something presidential administrations rarely do — that his overall Middle East policy has been a failure. His permissive environment and policies of appeasement, established early in his tenure, have contributed to the collapse of regional security in the Middle East. 

What could go wrong, did go wrong. Afghanistan, Ukraine, Sudan, Niger, and now Israel. Taiwan and the Korean peninsula loom in the not-so-distant future. Diplomacy, absent an immediate national security threat, must always be the first approach. But for diplomacy to work, there must also be an obtainable end-state.

Iran, when it comes to Israel and Saudi Arabia, is never going to allow Biden’s preferred diplomatic end-state. Biden’s trade of billions of dollars in exchange for hostages, no matter how well-intended have only exacerbated the administration’s foreign policy failures. So have his attempts to revive the Iran nuclear deal. Sooner or later, you have to stop banging your head against the brick wall.

Iran is a cancer in the Middle East. It has metastasized into Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. The U.S. and Israel, along with Sunni Arab partners in the region, need to address this problem at its source.

Much like the initial U.S. strategy in Ukraine was to weaken Russia, they must find a way to weaken Iran, or risk being canceled directly by Khamenei themselves.

Jonathan Sweet, a retired U.S. Army colonel, served 30 years as a military intelligence officer and led the U.S. European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012 to 2014. Mark Toth, an economist and entrepreneur, is a former board member of the World Trade Center, St. Louis.