From Gaza to Iran: The Cost of America’s Failure to Say No to Israel

By Said Arikat

July 21, 2026

News analysis

Washington, D.C. — Wars rarely begin with a single decision. More often, they emerge from a succession of choices not made, warnings ignored, and opportunities deliberately squandered. David Kirkpatrick’s remarkable investigation in The New Yorker, published on July 20, offers perhaps the clearest account yet of how the United States failed to restrain Israel’s war in Gaza—and how that failure helped lead Washington into today’s war with Iran. Drawing on confidential documents and interviews with senior officials, Kirkpatrick dismantles the comforting fiction that the Biden administration lacked leverage. The evidence points to the opposite conclusion: it possessed extraordinary influence but repeatedly chose not to use it.

The defining document in Kirkpatrick’s investigation is a confidential letter delivered to President Joe Biden on March 5, 2024, by Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ICRC, guardian of the Geneva Conventions, rarely appeals directly to heads of state in such stark terms. Spoljaric warned that Israel’s conduct had become “incompatible” with the laws of armed conflict, condemned the denial of Red Cross access to Palestinian detainees, and noted that suspending legal dialogue placed Israel alongside North Korea and Eritrea. Most importantly, she urged Biden to halt the transfer of weapons unsuitable for densely populated areas, warning that abandoning “minimum standards of humanity” would become a moral failure history would not forgive.

That appeal arrived when the administration possessed ample legal authority to act. Biden had already issued a policy barring U.S. weapons transfers if they were “more likely than not” to facilitate war crimes. The Leahy Law prohibited assistance to military units credibly implicated in gross human rights violations. National Security Memorandum 20 required Secretary of State Antony Blinken to certify Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law or risk suspending military assistance. The legal framework existed. According to Kirkpatrick, what followed was a systematic effort not to enforce those safeguards but to circumvent them whenever they threatened Washington’s political commitment to Israel.

Years later, senior officials openly acknowledge that the administration repeatedly allowed itself to be manipulated. Former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan admits, “We should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach.” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin compared Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a gambler “playing with house money.” Israeli officials repeatedly assured Washington the war would end within “two more weeks,” a prediction that became an internal joke after Ron Dermer jokingly substituted “fortnight.” Each promise delayed confrontation while casualties mounted. Even Biden’s widely publicized decision to suspend deliveries of 2,000-pound bombs proved largely symbolic. Kirkpatrick reports that the administration quietly continued shipping 500-pound bombs separately, diluting the intended message.

The consequences extended far beyond Gaza itself. More than 70,000 Palestinians (mostly civilians) were killed, much of the enclave was devastated, and the overwhelming majority of its population was displaced. Yet Kirkpatrick demonstrates that the administration’s strategy also accelerated a broader regional conflict. Fearing that visible disagreement with Israel would embolden Iran and Hezbollah, the White House maintained near-unconditional public support even as Netanyahu repeatedly expanded the confrontation through operations in Damascus, Tehran, and Beirut. Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer warned internally that this created a classic moral hazard: unconditional American backing encouraged the very escalation Washington claimed to oppose. Philip Gordon, then Vice President Kamala Harris’s national security adviser, summarized the problem bluntly: Israeli leaders understood that “we were going to defend them.”

That expectation proved decisive. Twice, American forces helped intercept large-scale Iranian attacks on Israel, minimizing Israeli losses while reinforcing confidence that Washington would ultimately absorb the costs of escalation. According to Kirkpatrick, Biden’s advisers warned the incoming Trump administration that Iran had become strategically vulnerable and that Israel would almost certainly seek to exploit the opportunity. Those warnings became prophecy. When President Donald Trump later ordered American participation in strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, followed months later by a joint surprise assault on Iran, the decisions reflected years of accumulated precedent. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s explanation—that Washington acted because Israeli operations would inevitably draw the United States into the conflict anyway—captures the logic of successive administrations that chose following Israeli strategy over shaping it.

Perhaps the investigation’s most disturbing conclusion is not the exposure of hidden misconduct but the normalization of self-deception. The State Department’s NSM-20 assessment became what one official called “a complete whitewash,” while another described it as an exercise in bad faith. Internal legal concerns were acknowledged, softened, and ultimately neutralized through carefully crafted language. Likewise, an effort under the Leahy Law to suspend assistance to an Israeli base accused of abusing Palestinian detainees stalled because Blinken believed a ceasefire was imminent. The ceasefire never materialized. The recommendation remained unsigned, and months later Israeli authorities dismissed the case entirely.

Kirkpatrick’s reporting is ultimately less about Israel than about American statecraft. It exposes a foreign policy establishment that mistook access for influence, loyalty for strategy, and restraint for weakness. Again and again, Washington deferred difficult decisions in the hope that tomorrow would solve the problems it refused to confront today. Instead, each postponement deepened the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza while narrowing America’s own strategic options. By the time successive administrations confronted Iran directly, they were no longer shaping events—they were reacting to them.

History will judge this episode not simply by the devastation left behind in Gaza or by the widening war now consuming the region, but by the squandered opportunities that made both possible. The United States possessed the leverage to alter the course of events and repeatedly chose not to exercise it. That was not merely a policy failure. It was a moral failure with strategic consequences. The greatest lesson of Kirkpatrick’s investigation is that blank-check support does not prevent wider wars; it makes them more likely. When a superpower refuses to use its influence in the service of accountability, it eventually forfeits both its credibility and its ability to shape history.