After Bill Clinton’s first official meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, he turned to an aide and said: “Who is the fucking superpower here?”
Four US presidents later, nobody would think of posing that question about Israel’s pugilistic prime minister. Netanyahu long ago established what military analysts call “escalation dominance” over whoever sits in the Oval Office — none more so than Joe Biden.
No president more than Biden has wanted to disentangle from the Middle East. Yet none, in the wake of Israel’s latest ground incursion into Lebanon and the spectre of a full-blown war with Iran, is likelier to be defined by the region than him.
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