NEW YORK (news agencies) — President Joe Biden is set to deliver his final address to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday as Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon are edging toward all-out war and Israel’s bloodyoperation against Hamas in Gaza nears the one-year mark.
Biden is expected to use his wide-ranging address to speak to the need to end the Middle East conflict and the 17-month-old civil war in Sudan and to highlight U.S. and Western allies’ support for Kyiv since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
His appearance before the international body also offers Biden one of his last high-profile opportunities as president to make the case to keep up robust support for Ukraine, which could be in doubt if former President Donald Trump, who has scoffed at the cost of the war, defeats Vice President Kamala Harris in November.
Biden came to office promising to rejuvenate U.S. relations around the world and to extract the U.S. from “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq that consumed American foreign policy over the last 20 years.
He achieved both goals. But his foreign policy legacy may ultimately be shaped by his administration’s response to two of the biggest conflicts in Europe and the Middle East since World War II.
The Pentagon announced Monday that it was sending a small number of additional U.S. troops to the Middle East to supplement the roughly 40,000 already in the region, because of the rising tensions. All the while, the White House insists Israel and Hezbollah still have time to step back and de-escalate.
“It’s in everyone’s interest to resolve it quickly and diplomatically,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters as Biden made his way to New York on Monday ahead of his address at the U.N.
Biden administration officials will be speaking to their counterparts on the sidelines of the U.N. about ideas that they believe could prevent the fighting between Israel and Lebanon from escalating, according to two senior administration officials.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, declined to offer any further details on the potential off-ramps. One of the officials said that other countries were also keen to present ideas to reduce tensions.
Biden had a hopeful outlook for the Middle East when he addressed the U.N. just a year ago. In that speech, Biden spoke of a “sustainable, integrated Middle East” coming into view.
At the time, economic relations between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors were improving with implementation of the Abraham Accords that Israel signed with Bahrain, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates during the Trump administration.
Biden’s team helped resolve a long-running Israel-Lebanon maritime dispute that had held back gas exploration in the region. And Israel-Saudi normalization talks were progressing, a game-changing alignment for the region if a deal could be landed.
“I suffer from an oxymoron: Irish optimism,” Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when they met on the sidelines of last year’s U.N. gathering. He added, “If you and I, 10 years ago, were talking about normalization with Saudi Arabia … I think we’d look at each other like, ‘Who’s been drinking what?’”
Eighteen days later, Biden’s Middle East hopes came crashing down. Hamas militants stormed into Israel killing 1,200, taking some 250 hostage, and spurring a bloody war that has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza and led the region into a complicated downward spiral.
Now, the conflict is threatening to metastasize into a multi-front war and leave a lasting scar on Biden’s presidential legacy.
Israeli strikes on Lebanon on Monday killed more than 490 people, including more than 90 women and children, Lebanese authorities said, in the deadliest barrage since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.
Israel has urged residents of southern Lebanon to evacuate from homes and other buildings where it claimed Hezbollah has stored weapons, saying the military would conduct “extensive strikes” against the militant group.
Hezbollah, meanwhile, has launched dozens of rockets, missiles and drones into northern Israel in retaliation for strikes last week that killed a top commander and dozens of fighters. Dozens were also killed last week and hundreds more wounded after hundreds of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah militants exploded, a sophisticated attack that was widely believed to have been carried out by Israel.
Israel’s leadership launched its counterattacks at a time of growing impatience with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah’s persistent launching of missiles and drones across the Israel-Lebanon border after Hamas started the war with its brazen attack on Oct. 7.
The stepped-up Israeli operations were launched shortly after a White House senior adviser, Amos Hochstein, visited Israel last week and urged the Israelis to avoid an escalation that could risk spurring a regional conflict.
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