Power

Biden confronts his first foreign crisis

- Gabriel Debenedetti

JOE BIDEN WOULDN’T PUT IT THIS WAY, but for nearly four months he was lucky. Yes, he had to confront a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, a crumbling democracy, a stalled economy, and a cascade of attendant crises. But he seemed to be handling the load in surprisingly deft fashion—which is what made the intrusion of the first foreign calamity of his administration especially jarring. The violence between Israel and Hamas that has left hundreds of people in Gaza and a dozen in Israel dead has tested Biden’s style of governance (deliberate, commit unswervingly to a plan, deliberate some more) in ways that the domestic horror show has not.