Can the United States use its leverage over Israel to stop the war in Gaza? Does it have significant leverage to begin with?
To some, those questions are downright ridiculous because the answers are so self-evident. In a passionate column this week, Mehdi Hasan, the former MSNBC broadcaster who is now a columnist for The Guardian, wrote that to claim otherwise is to dabble in "disingenuous nonsense." He highlighted a particular time, in 1982, when former President Ronald Reagan got on the phone with former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and pressured him to stop bombing Beirut, Lebanon. The tactic worked. The Israeli airstrikes ended immediately and Israeli ground forces would soon redeploy from the Lebanese capital further south. The Israeli army would remain in southern Lebanon until 2000, when it finally withdrew after concluding that maintaining a buffer-zone near the Israel-Lebanon border in the face of Hezbollah guerilla attacks was too high a cost.
If Reagan was brave and bold enough to be forceful, why not President Joe Biden?
It's not like he doesn't have any levers to pull. The U.S. is Israel's primary political backer in international bodies, frequently employs its veto to defend Israel at the United Nations Security Council, provides Israel with more than $3 billion in military aid every single year and furnishes Israel with the best weapons (like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter) in the U.S. arsenal. Whereas most of the........