If you were keeping an eye on the news over the weekend, you probably noticed that Secretary of State Antony Blinken was popping up all over the place. He was dispatched on unannounced “surprise.
If you were keeping an eye on the news over the weekend, you probably noticed that Secretary of State Antony Blinken was popping up all over the place. He was dispatched on unannounced “surprise” trips to Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Cyprus, and elsewhere, all in an effort to find some support for the Biden administration’s position on the war in Gaza. Biden is trying to walk a narrow path between supporting Israel’s right to defend itself and providing humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza. But as the Associated Press reports, his “frantic” efforts largely fell on deaf ears. Most of these largely Arab nations hate Israel and they have no interest in a “humanitarian pause” in the fighting. They want a ceasefire and the chance for Hamas to regroup. So it appears that the conflict in Gaza is now costing Joe Biden both at home and abroad, at least politically.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was wrapping up a grueling Middle East diplomatic tour on Monday in Turkey after only limited success in his furious efforts to forge a regional consensus on how best to ease civilian suffering in Gaza as Israel intensifies its war against Hamas.
Blinken met in the Turkish capital of Ankara with Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan after a frantic weekend of travel that took him from Israel to Jordan, the occupied West Bank, Cyprus and Iraq to build support for the Biden administration’s proposal for “humanitarian pauses” to Israel’s relentless military campaign in Gaza.
