The following article first appeared in West Wing Playbook.

As Senate Democrats tried to revive President Joe Biden’s request for billions of dollars in foreign aid last month, national security adviser Jake Sullivan put in a call to Sen. Chris Van Hollen.

The Maryland Democrat and a dozen progressive colleagues had recently gone public with an amendment to require that any country receiving U.S. weapons comply with humanitarian laws. That effort threatened to produce a messy intraparty debate over whether Biden should be doing more to encourage Israel to protect Palestinian civilians as it fights Hamas.

But Sullivan wasn’t calling to complain. To Van Hollen’s surprise, the administration was open to converting the amendment — which would have applied only to new funding — into a memo with the force of law, meaning it would apply to all U.S. military aid and stay in effect even if the president’s supplemental bill didn’t make it through the House.

Biden issued the order last week and it won the approval of most Senate progressives. The chamber passed the supplemental on Tuesday.

“There’s no requirement right now that if you want to receive American weapons, you have to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance in conflict zones where those weapons are being used,” said Van Hollen. He called the new policy “a very important tool to both pressure recipient countries but also to pressure the Biden administration to take action to insist on what the [policy’s] promise requires.”

White House officials have stressed that the directive didn’t impose new standards for military aid and that the administration had already been following the........

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