The Biden Administration’s Quiet Regrets Over Israel, Gaza, and Iran

When you ask a senior adviser like Jake Sullivan what the Biden team wishes it had done differently in the fallout from the Oct 7 2023 attacks, the answer comes out in a hushed, almost weary tone: “We should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach.” It isn’t a grand public pronouncement, but a private admission that the administration’s diplomacy often felt like a balancing act on a razor‑thin wire.

That sigh of regret isn’t just anecdotal. In March 2024, Mirjana Spoljaric—who leads the International Committee of the Red Cross—sent a confidential note straight to the Oval Office. She warned President Biden that Israel’s conduct in Gaza “is incompatible with the Geneva Conventions.” The letter, discussed in a recent New Yorker profile, was the first time the ICRC had ever been barred from visiting detainees in the occupied territories, a move that put Israel in the same diplomatic black‑list as North Korea and Eritrea.

Behind the scenes, a cascade of policy tools tried to tip the scales. In late 2023 Washington rolled out National‑Security Memorandum 20 (NSM‑20), a document that tethered the massive $3.8 billion annual U.S. aid package to a State‑Department review of Israel’s compliance with humanitarian law. The memo was supposed to be a lever—an attempt to nudge Israel toward less indiscriminate tactics while still keeping the strategic partnership intact.

Yet the lever often felt more like a feather. While Biden publicly called Israel’s Gaza campaign “indiscriminate” and “over‑the‑top,” his administration continued to approve billions in weapons transfers. In an August 2024 CNN interview, Biden even claimed he had halted a shipment of “large bombs” to prevent a full‑scale assault on Rafah, a statement that later officials said was more a diplomatic gesture than a concrete block.

Complicating the picture is the parallel, simmering Iran issue. The same administration that struggled to rein in Israel also grappled with a stalled nuclear deal. Tehran’s occasional “talk‑down” overtures in late 2024 were met with cautious optimism, but no decisive breakthrough materialized, leaving Washington with a lingering sense that it was playing catch‑up on two very different fronts.

What ties these threads together is a growing sense of “have‑it‑both‑ways” frustration inside the White House. Officials recall internal memos noting that even as the State Department flagged potential war‑crimes violations, senior advisors feared a hard‑line stance could jeopardize the fragile U.S.–Israeli bond. Meanwhile, the Iran team watched the Gaza carnage, wondering whether the U.S. could ever be a reliable broker when its own allies appeared to be acting with impunity.

Today, the regret is less about specific missteps and more about a lingering question: could Washington have leveraged its unparalleled influence to shape a less catastrophic outcome in Gaza while still keeping Tehran at the negotiating table? The answer remains elusive, tucked away in drafts of memoranda, whispered hallway conversations, and, perhaps most poignantly, in the quiet letters that never saw the light of day.