How Biden Broke His Promise on American Arms

This week, after 15 months of war, the Israel-Hamas ceasefire went into effect. The deal is still tenuous, but it offers the first real hope for Gazans that, after more than a year of unfathomable suffering and more than 40,000 reported dead, the bombardment will stop.

Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump took credit for the ceasefire. Trump, as he prepared to take office, used it to prove he’s the “peace through strength“ president. Biden, in the waning days of his term, framed the ceasefire as part of a broader defense of his foreign policy legacy. Biden said the deal was possible because of the “extreme pressure Hamas has been under and the changed regional equation after a ceasefire in Lebanon and weakening of Iran — but also of dogged and painstaking American diplomacy.”

But Biden unquestionably owns the 15 months of war that preceded this ceasefire. Specifically, his decision to continue supplying Israel with weapons, despite buckets of evidence that Israel used those weapons to flagrantly violate international law and commit war crimes, including acts of genocide. 

That refusal to meaningfully curtail or restrict arms deliveries to Israel represents the ultimate betrayal at the heart of Biden’s foreign policy. Biden promised that “human rights must be the center of our foreign policy, not the periphery.” That promise is impossible to square with Israel’s campaign in the Middle East, carried out with American-made weapons. The result is a Biden administration policy on arms that weakened the international human rights protection he said he sought to defend. 

“I think the legacy is one of using U.S. weapons to help undermine and erode international law,” said Brian Finucane, Senior Adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group. “What I’m referring to here is the unconditional supply of U.S. weapons to Israel, notwithstanding whether or not Israel uses those weapons consistent with the law of war, and notwithstanding whether or not Israel uses those weapons consistent with the [United Nations] Charter and the prohibition on use of force.”

Biden’s commitment to a “world where human rights are respected“ was always likely to be imperfect and incomplete, as it was coming from the United States. America, of course, is in the war business. It is the world’s largest arms exporter, accounting for nearly 40 percent of the conventional arms exports worldwide, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). 

Trump’s disdain for human-rights talk, and his rejection of international institutions and allies, made the contradiction more explicit. Biden framed his presidency as a reset – “America is back” – but also a kind of repentance for the coarseness of the Trump years. “We must start with diplomacy rooted in America’s most cherished democratic values: defending freedom, championing opportunity, upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law, and treating every person with dignity,” Biden said in a major foreign policy speech in February 2021. “That’s the grounding wire of our global policy — our global power.” 

In that speech, Biden also announced that the United States would end support for Saudi Arabia’s offensive operations in Yemen and offensive weapons sales to the Saudis. There was long-standing, bipartisan support to end backing for Saudi Arabia because of the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen, and Biden had made it a 2020 campaign promise, saying that “America will never again check its principles at the door just to buy oil or sell weapons.” 

The U.S. continued to sell billions of “defensive” systems to Riyadh – and the line between what is an “offensive” and “defensive” weapon is always squishy. But the pressure from Washington likely helped sway Saudi Arabia to curtail its involvement in Yemen and buy into a United Nations peace process. Biden’s Saudi weapons policy had glaring gaps, as some lawmakers pointed out, but it showed the administration was willing to use some of its arms leverage with its strategic partners.

Then came Ukraine, where Biden explicitly tied U.S. and allied support for Ukraine as a way to protect and defend the rules-based international order and the ideals of democracy and freedom. The U.S. provided more than $65 billion in weapons assistance to this end. The javelins, the HIMARS, the tanks, the Patriots – it went to Ukraine so the country could resist Russian aggression and protect itself from gross violations of international law. 

The Biden administration was cautious – some critics might argue overly so – in weighing which advanced weapons to give to Ukraine, and in restricting how they could be used to avoid escalation with Russia. At the same time, the Biden administration took controversial decisions, such as providing cluster munitions and, more recently, anti-personnel landmines, to Ukraine. Both rolled back U.S. policy. The administration went around congressional restrictions on cluster munitions transfers, and it violated its 2022 guidance on landmines, which was an attempt to get the U.S. closer in line with the international ban on these weapons. Russia had already deployed these arms against Ukraine, many made the case that Ukraine needed any help it could get, but that justification turned on the moral case of standing with Ukraine.

In February 2023, the Biden administration released its Conventional Arms Transfer (CAT) policy, essentially the administration’s guiding principles on arms transfers. Trump’s CAT talked a lot about how transferring weapons was good for the U.S. economy. Biden’s was notable for its strong human rights focus. The policy stated that the U.S. will not transfer weapons if it is “more likely than not” that the arms will be used by the recipient country “to commit, facilitate the recipients’ commission of, or to aggravate risks that the recipient will commit: genocide; crimes against humanity … including attacks intentionally directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such; or other serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law.”

As the Cato Institute’s Jordan Cohen pointed out, this revised the previous policy, which said the U.S. would stop transfers only if it had “actual knowledge“ of U.S. weapons used to violate human rights. 

Reviewing that policy is all the more jarring given what unfolded months later, after Hamas’s October 7 attack. In the aftermath, Biden backed Israel’s right and “responsibility” to respond, and he surged military assets to Israel and the region. It was a choice most U.S. presidents would make after an assault of such magnitude, one where U.S. citizens were killed and abducted. But then the Biden administration made another choice: not to meaningfully alter or change it after the situation on the ground in Gaza transformed, as Israel blocked humanitarian aid, and as more Palestinian civilians were displaced, slaughtered, and pushed toward starvation. Israeli strikes have killed more than 46,000 Palestinians, though it may be thousands more. Violence has displaced 90 percent of the population. 

As Finucane said, the CAT policy “went out the window after October 7.” State Department agencies also did conclude that Israel blocked humanitarian assistance into Gaza, which would require Washington to cut off aid under U.S. law. In May, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel had violated humanitarian law, but the U.S. did not change its stance. Biden temporarily halted some bomb shipments ahead of Israel’s planned invasion of Rafah, though eventually resumed deliveries of 500-pound bombs.

As Biden and members of his foreign policy team did their good-bye tour, they defended this entire approach. “We’ve had concerns, more than concerns, about the way Israel has conducted itself,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said to Christiane Amanpour last week. Blinken described Gaza as a “unique environment” where “you have a population that’s trapped inside of Gaza” and that Hamas “intentionally embeds itself within the civilian population, in and under apartments, under schools, mosques, hospitals.”

“That does not, in any way, absolve Israel of the responsibility, the obligation to conduct itself according to international law, but it makes it much more challenging,” Blinken added, though what came before sounded quite a bit like an effort to absolve Israel – and the U.S. – of its responsibility.

Then, and now, the Biden administration has insisted that it worked behind the scenes to pressure Israel, and that their behind-closed-doors diplomacy achieved what a public rebuke of Israel, or a cut off of weapons, would not. As ProPublica reported, it is more like the Israeli government ignored these ultimatums and red lines because the Biden administration never did anything to back them up.

It could have. The Biden administration could have implemented its CAT. It could have enforced the weapons transfer laws on the books. Biden could have done what many other U.S. presidents have done and withheld some of the $3.8 billion in annual military aid provided to Israel to exert some real pressure. Washington helped protect Israel from direct attacks, including barrages from Iran. It could have attempted a balance between those obligations to Israel and its obligations to human rights and international law. Though the actual ability for America to use arms transfers to wield influence is hard to measure, Biden never sought to test it when it came to Israel. 

All of this pushed human rights to the periphery of Biden’s foreign policy. The former president tried to pick and choose which rules of the rules-based order he wanted to follow. This is not unheard of in a U.S. president. But Biden’s legacy is defined by the gulf between what his administration promised, and even put on paper – a human-rights-centered foreign policy – and what he delivered, which was American complicity in mass atrocities. 

Legacies are tough to write in real-time. The Middle East looks quite different than it did even six months ago. Iran’s axis of resistance is weakened, Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship has collapsed in Syria. U.S. policy, including its decision to arm Israel, may have contributed to those developments, and certainly that is what the Biden administration is arguing. But those narratives are incomplete – maybe Iran gets the bomb faster now, the verdict is still out on Assad’s replacement. But the outcome shouldn’t matter either way. The rules-based international order works just fine in peacetime. The commitment to it comes when it’s tested. On Gaza, Biden failed, and pushed all the other possible successes, like Ukraine, to the periphery.

This summer, Biden lifted the embargo on the offensive weapons transfers to Saudi Arabia. One of his final official acts will be an $8 billion weapons sale to Israel. And now Trump inherits it all. 

Trump is unlikely to center human rights, or go on about the rules-based international order. Weapons transfers will be good for security and the U.S. economy, and why pretend otherwise. But unlike Trump’s first term, that stance may feel easier to accept than Biden’s hypocrisy.

“It remains to be seen what the Trump administration’s policies are going to look like, but in the last Trump administration, there was not the same level of stated commitment to human rights and civilian protection principles in arms transfers,” said John Ramming Chappell, an advisor on legal and policy issues at the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC). 

“And I think that part of what made the failures of the Biden administration especially difficult and disappointing was that it presented itself as a champion of international law, human rights and the protection of civilians,” Chappell added. “So it was devastating to see those commitments betrayed in the way that they were.”