Israel-Hamas War Ground Campaign, Biden Hosts Latin American Leaders, Congress Debates Israel and Ukraine Aid, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, U.S. Secretary of State Blinken returns to the Middle East. President Biden hosts Latin American leaders. And, Congress juggles aid packages and an impending shutdown. It's November 2nd, 2023, in time for The World Next Week. I am Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins.

MCMAHON:
Carla, welcome to November, and let's start with what's on the horizon in the Israel-Hamas war. Tomorrow, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is to visit Israel with plans to make additional stops in the region. There have been daily reports, not only of the fighting in Gaza but a worsening situation for civilians there. What should we be looking for on this trip by Secretary Blinken?

ROBBINS:
The U.S. is more influenced with the Israelis than any other country, but it is frankly limited. And privately and increasingly publicly, the Biden team are pressing the Israelis to exercise more restraint, and particularly to limit civilian casualties as they go after Hamas. And I'm not sure how much they're getting through, but I think that is a big part of the mission of this trip. Wednesday evening, President Biden said something that his advisors had been saying but that we hadn't been hearing from the president. He said he thought there should be a humanitarian pause on the war to facilitate the release of hostages, and others are saying the need for a pause, others in the administration, the need for a pause to get more aid in, to get more ill people out. And the Israelis have, until now, consistently rejected the idea. 

One of the things that Blinken is expected to do is he's going to press the Israelis to accept a series of, quote, "humanitarian pauses," potentially to be able to get hostages out and certainly to be able to get more aid in. In announcing Blinken's trip, the State Department spokesman said the secretary was going to discuss American expectations that Israel be, quote, "In full compliance with international humanitarian law and the laws of war." And he added, "We will be direct about that." And that's a really different tone than we'd been hearing from them. And I think that we can expect Blinken to press them pretty hard on what's going on in the West Bank. Something we haven't been talking about.

There's a high and increasing level of violence, and I'm very sad to say this, a good deal of it driven by settlers, backed by Israeli forces against Palestinians there. And there are a growing number of people inside the administration who are afraid that that place is going to blow as well. So that's a good part of that mission. We can talk about what he possibly going to be doing beyond Israel, but I think that's a good part of what's going on there.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, and as you were speaking, I'm thinking about all the other sort of side developments playing out. So I think, in the past week, we've seen some people allowed out of Gaza through the Rafah crossing, which is into Sinai, the Egyptian territory there. But do we think that's going to open up further? Do we think there's going to be any move on the hostage front? You don't hear a lot about the hostages, one was rescued, I guess recently, but that's about it.

ROBBINS:
Well, I thought it was quite interesting that the president when he talked about this pause, it was about getting prisoners out. Does he know something I don't know? Maybe. Maybe there's some sort of exchange there. I don't know. I think that there is some measurable progress there about Rafah. There is a trickle of aid coming in that's pretty important but nowhere near what they need. And there is this deal that the U.S. helped broker in talks with Israel, Egypt, Hamas, and Qatar to open the border to a limited number of people.

On Wednesday, a few hundred people, some seriously injured Palestinians foreign passport holders, crossed from Gaza into Egypt. And today, Thursday, Americans are coming out, and there's some expectation that as many as the thousand foreign passport holders, as well as Palestinian staff members of international organizations, are expected to be able to leave each day. Now, no one's saying those people are going to leave permanently, the people who work for international organizations, but they'll be able to swap out so that they can basically have aid agencies be able to function there. If that happens, it's not going to relieve what is a humanitarian disaster inside of Gaza, but it's some progress. And I assume that Blinken is going to push for more progress on the humanitarian front, but I think a big part of this focus here is what's happening in the war. And I don't know how much progress he's going to make on that.

MCMAHON:
And again, what seems to be happening is an Israeli military effort to really press into the north, to seal off the north and going into Gaza City, in particular, it has continually said civilians should flee south. There's still hundreds of thousands, I believe, in the north, though, and that's only going to make this more difficult. The reports coming out are pretty wrenching. It's one of these situations that is defining this conflict, which is the Israeli insistence that this is self-defense, and then this is an existential fight for them. And it's the Palestinians caught... innocent Palestinians caught up in this who the Israelis are being used as human shields by Hamas.

ROBBINS:
Well, you totally get what the Israelis are saying. I mean, they went through this awful trauma, and Hamas is utterly unrepentant. They're jubilant. They're saying they would do it again if they could do it again. And when people say, "If we don't defeat Hamas, wipe Hamas out, they will do it again." So you can understand why, strategically, as well as tactically, they want to do it, but we're talking about urban warfare with still lots of civilians there. And this is an incredibly hard thing to do, and it's going to be incredibly hard for the Israelis as well. We don't know what the ground troops are doing. There's been an incredible blackout about it. They tell us we're in the next phase. They're very close to Gaza City. They're almost in Gaza City. We hear about that. 

But what we do see is the impact of these... literally the impact of these massive airstrikes that have taken place in Jabalya in this neighborhood of Gaza. It's referred to as a refugee camp. In reality, it's a neighborhood. Israel said it targeted and killed Hamas militants, including a commander who had said it helped plan the October 7th massacres. But what we saw were these images of the results of an airstrike in this densely populated neighborhood just absolutely flattening, an enormous crater. It is believed, and I think utterly true, that Hamas militants are hiding out in these miles and miles of tunnels. And so if you want to collapse the tunnels, that's what you're doing. But what's on top of the tunnels are apartment buildings with civilians. 

And this is drawing in widespread international criticism. The UN Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights wrote on the platform previously known as Twitter, quote, "We have serious concerns that these are disproportionate attacks that could amount to war crimes." And the Israelis don't take the UN very seriously. You can understand what their past experiences with the UN General Assembly, why they might. But you're hearing it from the Australians. You're hearing from lots of other countries. And I think that Blinken is going to go there, and he's going to warn the Israelis that while international sympathy was enormous in the wake of October 7th, it is not limitless.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. And I think it's worth mentioning, as you were citing the different sides that are weighing in, that we rely on the mainstream vetted media and the credible, vetted media as well as any sort of press traveling with Blinken in this trip, for example, to be our sources on this, that we're not going with some of the wild claims that are flying around social media. But we're going with reputable reporting images and so forth. And that's the way that media should be approaching this. But it's extremely difficult environment to be relating information at this point.

ROBBINS:
And it's very hard to report. In a war, it's very hard to comment about wars, and you're in a particular situation right now in which the Israelis, of course, a democracy, but they have a huge news blackout about what they themselves are doing. But on the other side, and I really do criticize any media outlet that just does not caveat that any number they have for casualties, and they just say, "Well, the Gaza Health Ministry said that." Well, who controls the Gaza Health Ministry? That's a Hamas-controlled health ministry. So we saw this with the hospital, of course, and there may well be... Who knows what the figures are of what's going on, but we have seen these photographs because that's the other thing that has happened with the internet is that we have seen real photographs. We've also seen-

MCMAHON:
Right.

ROBBINS:
... doctored photographs, so we all have to do this. But there is definitely real photographs out there taken by legitimate news photographers, and the level of destruction is enormous. And the Israelis are in the midst of getting an enormous amount of pressure.

I don't know how much they're going to listen to that pressure. They're determined to destroy Hamas. And when they say things like, "If we don't, they'll come after us again," you can understand why they feel that way. On the other hand, urban warfare is a horrible thing when you're surrounded by civilians and they're surrounded by civilians.

MCMAHON:
And we should note just one other element which continues to draw concern is the other actors outside of the region getting involved. There were reports this week of a Houthi attack that was intercepted by U.S. forces. For example, the Houthis are Iran-aligned forces based in Yemen. So we continue to watch the other interested and sometimes involved parties in this.

ROBBINS:
Blinken is going to be sounding some positive notes on this trip. I recall President Biden wanted to go to Jordan that was canceled when he was there because of the hospital explosion. I think Blinken is going to go on this trip. He's also going to start talking a lot about the need for a post-conflict two-state solution, something that has never been top of mind for the Biden Administration. And not surprisingly, lots of administrations have tried and gotten nowhere.

I think they're going to want to push forward and give a vision for regional allies and give a vision for the Palestinian people that there's something after the Gaza War. I don't know how much progress they're going to make that with those images on the television, but that's going to be, I believe, the second part of this trip and a big commitment and push forward with that. So I think we're going to be talking about that as well, Bob.

MCMAHON:
That's right. And we'll see whether... how many other venues Blinken goes to.

ROBBINS:
So Bob, back to Washington. Tomorrow, Friday, President Biden will host the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity. Is there an acronym that goes with that?

MCMAHON:
Yes, there is.

ROBBINS:
Okay. Leaders' summit. It's the leaders' summit. He's invited leaders from South American nations to discuss regional economic growth and migration, which, of course, is not just a challenge for the U.S. These are really big issues to cover in one-day summits. So anything really going to get done there?

MCMAHON:
Well, let me first lay out the acronyms, Carla.

ROBBINS:
Oh, good.

MCMAHON:
Okay, so this is APEP, A-P-E-P. Okay. Not to be confused with APEC, which is a summit that's coming up in San Francisco in just about two weeks or less than two weeks.

ROBBINS:
Is there going to be an APEP rally?

MCMAHON:
Well, we'll see if it's successful. We could, and we can come back and really have a lot of fun with that. But first things first, there's another acronym that we should also understand, which is IPEF, which is sort of the sister acronym to APEP, which is... These are sort of twin regional initiatives involving increasing economic ties that are short of any sort of free trade agenda because that's kind of taboo these days in American politics. However, there are compelling needs to expand economic ties. IPEF is the Indo-Pacific version of APEP, although it's been much more involved and had much more legs than APEP has.

APEP has eleven countries, and if you go alphabetically, it's Dominican Republic to Uruguay, which are somewhat smallish. But then, if you get into the middle of it, you get into Chile and Mexico and Peru and so forth. And as you say, there's the two primary issues that regional growth and migration, and that's a narrowed focus. It was originally launched back in 2022, and it was supposed to focus on areas like digital trade and decarbonization, anti-corruption, and so forth. And now it's in more narrow to developing regional supply chains. We've heard that quite a bit recently, managing migration and producing clean energy.

A lot of experts say these seem to be attainable areas for some sort of progress. Certainly, I think there's a desire to get the U.S. into the mix with these countries at a time when China's Belt and Road has made pretty big inroads into the region, including some of these countries. Although when you talk about migration, for example, while it's important, Mexico is there, the so-called northern triangle countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras are not, in part because they don't meet the criteria of the robust democracies that Biden would like to be talking to, the Biden Administration would like to be talking to.

So again, it's a one-day event. It's in a moment in a season of discussing trade and trade-related issues and integration with like-minded partners. And so the administration is hoping, in the midst of all these other things going on in the world, they're able to kind of make some common ground. And again, this migration issue, it's really about having a common playbook for how to deal with the huge numbers of people moving around the region. 

One final thing I'll say about that, Carla, is that the administration is taking steps with a number of countries, especially Venezuela, to try to deal with the flows. Venezuela has been a large source country of migrants. The administration has been working with the Venezuelan government on reform on its end and, in exchange, easing up sanctions on Venezuelan oil. And there's an agreement for the administration to accept temporarily almost half a million Venezuelans into the U.S. while still deporting others as they process their cases. So there's a lot of things circulating here. Again, there's hope that a narrowing of the agenda will allow them to claim at least some progress.

ROBBINS:
So can we talk a little bit more about Venezuela? Because it used to be when you had these regional meetings, it was all about what a disaster Venezuela was under Chavez and then under Maduro. And then, when the Ukraine war came around, it looked like they were willing to say, "Well, Maduro is not so bad because they've got oil. So we're going to look the other way." Do we really believe that there's progress in Venezuela? So this easing of sanctions is less about oil prices or less about feeling pressure on migration. I mean, is there really progress there?

MCMAHON:
Ultimately, we'll see when these elections turn around. They're supposed to be happening in 2024. The administration has gotten guarantees, electoral guarantees that Venezuelan government in the political opposition will work together on holding such elections. The track record is not great, if not bad on this front.

ROBBINS:
Yeah.

MCMAHON:
But as you say, that there's the compelling leverage of the getting Venezuelan oil online. And Venezuela possesses, I believe still to this day, the largest reserves, oil reserves in the world. And it's had a battered, beaten-up oil sector that was abused under Chavez and manipulated, face sanctions. And so that's certainly going to get attention. Can we get some sort of grand bargain that involves political and also somehow eases the stress on migration? In the height of the Venezuelan crisis, something like seven million Venezuelans had fled the country in different directions.

Again, they've been a large contingent of people coming to the U.S., and some of this is the natural kind of progression of migrants who come because they have family members or acquaintances who are already in the U.S. and see that as an attractive option. But I don't know if this summit is going to have any of the migrant deliverables beyond some further discussion, especially with the Mexican leadership. I mean, that's going to be a big one. I'm looking for some progress because the Mexicans themselves hosted a Latin American summit not too long ago, talking through some of these issues. 

Carla, I'm going to stay in D.C. because quite a bit is happening on Capitol Hill. Just this very day, as we're taping this podcast, the House was due to vote on stand-alone funding bill for Israel, and this is because newly elected speaker Mike Johnson has pushed to separate such a bill from military assistance for Ukraine, which a number of lawmakers from both parties, as well as President Biden, would like. There's other aspects about this bill, including a poison pill aspect that we can talk about, but there's also other appropriations bills to be considered. So are we looking at Congress that's going to continue to play out the really kind of bitter divides, or is there going to be any sort of meeting in the mind after maybe some theater is over?

ROBBINS:
Oh boy, I wish I could tell you that things were going to get better.

MCMAHON:
I do too.

ROBBINS:
There's finally a speaker in the House, which, in theory, means Congress can get some work done. And Louisiana Congressman Mike Johnson... who? I had never heard of him. As they say, a relative newcomer, got the job after all the big names had knocked each other out of the race. And so he came in because his caucus was so exhausted. And I... And you would think that I'd spent so many years in Washington that I would not have a optimistic or idealistic bone left in my body, but I do. I thought there was a chance everyone was so exhausted for him to exercise some real leadership here and pass ambitious legislation, even bills, dare I say, that might require some votes from the other side of the aisle, but it appears not to be.

He seems more concerned than anything else about keeping his divided caucus together and not suffering the same fate as Kevin McCarthy. Although on the theory of exhausted, I think that he had some running room here, and instead, he decided not to use any of it. So what did he do immediately? He's got two issues that are right there. One, of course, was this big gulp, $106 billion supplemental for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan order money that President Biden asked for and that Mitch McConnell very much wanted to play with. And then, of course, the other question is the money that runs out in a couple of weeks for funding the government to keep it open. 

So the Ukraine money was something that he could have run with. Now, we do know he voted against Ukraine money himself, but he had room to show real leadership. And instead, what did he do? As you said, he carved the money out for Israel, and he put a poison pill in it as well. He proposed a $14.3 billion  stand-alone funding bill and then said he was going to take the same amount of money from the IRS budget, money that had been put in as part of the Inflation Reduction Act that is intended to help the IRS go after wealthy tax cheats. And the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, estimated the bill would actually decrease revenues by $26.8 billion over the 2024-2033 period.

So while it was a feel-good thing for people who hate the IRS, it was actually going to mean less revenue, not more. You could grandstand and say, "We're saving money," but in reality, you're actually losing money by doing this, and tying security aid to Israel to this it's just political grandstanding. And I don't think... It's probably going to pass the House. I don't know what's going to happen. Well, by the time this goes out, we'll know what happened. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called it a joke and stunningly unserious. Mitch McConnell's not happy with it either. 

Johnson went over to private lunch with the GOP senators across the Capitol, very traditional thing for a new speaker to do, and he didn't get a lot of rave reviews. Certainly, Josh Hawley liked him, and there were people who were opposed to the Ukraine aid who liked him, but McConnell sat there in stony silence from all the reports out of this meeting. So McConnell's theory of the game is that if you don't put the Ukraine money together with the Israel money and you don't do it all in one big gulp, given the electoral season that's coming up, given the fact that Donald Trump is going to campaign against the spending, you're never going to get it. And McConnell is such a believer in it that what was he doing while this was all being put together? He was hosting the Ukrainian ambassador. So we see a big fight that's developing, and we'll see whether McConnell holds his line or Johnson holds his line.

MCMAHON:
And as if to put an exclamation point on the Ukraine side of it, we heard news this morning that Ukraine face its biggest barrage of Russian air attacks in the year. And Ukrainian officials have been active in giving interviews to a number of Western media, major Western media, talking about the gloomy state of affairs on the eastern front stalemate at best and heading into a difficult winter, which is always very difficult.

And as we get close to two years of this war, we've also seen figures coming out of Russia or projections out of Russia for their longer-term budgeting where they are seemingly in for the long run in terms of how they want to prosecute this war. So it's all the more reason to step up and show Ukraine has support from its most important ally, a signal to other U.S. allies as well, and to Russia, which has been calculating that it can play the time game better than the West.

ROBBINS:
Well, Tony Blinken, the secretary of state, and Lloyd Austin, the secretary of defense, were up testifying in the Senate this week, and they tried to tie this all together that Israel, the Russians, Iran and Hamas, and I don't think they were overreaching, to be perfectly frank. I think we live in a very dangerous world right now. And we certainly know Iran is backing Hamas. We certainly know the Russians and in Syria, playing around in Iran. I think there are a lot of bad actors out there who are messing around in the world. And if this funding gets caught up in political grandstanding, I think it's really bad for American national security.

And I think that Mitch McConnell gets it, but whether he's going to push back and whether Johnson... I mean, there are members of Johnson's caucus, a few of them who don't even want to vote for the Israel money. There was an isolationist wing of the Republican Party that is increasingly ascendant. Johnson did tell the senators that he will bring up a Ukraine bill after this, and I don't know if he's trying to mollify McConnell or what. But McConnell's feeling, and I think the feeling of the Democrats in the White House and pretty much anybody else who handicaps this is, "If you don't do it now, it's not going to happen." So we'll see how it plays out. 

The other thing that we have to watch the space is the government funding is going to... government's going to shut down in two weeks if they don't move quickly on this. He told the senators he wants to fund the government through January 15th. He'd originally floated an idea through April 15th, as another funding deadline. But I think he was warned that if you don't... nothing focuses the brain like a clearer deadline and a sooner deadline. Nothing focuses the brain like having a deadline to deal with. And so he's now saying January 15th. McConnell wants to pass appropriations bills. So we'll see how the two of them work that one out. But I think the big test right now is it's a big Funding Bill, and we're going to see how that fight plays out. And interestingly enough, it's as much a Republican-on-Republican fight as it is a Republican-on-Democrat fight.

MCMAHON:
And a few signs within the Democratic side as well of discontent, although not enough, I don't think to block any sort of funding measure at this stage. But yeah, we're at a very fraught political moment.

ROBBINS:
And I can't imagine for the Ukrainians who we were all following on such a daily basis what was going on, and then this news about this barrage. And it barely makes it into anybody's consciousness because we are rightly paying attention to the horrors of what's going on in the Middle East. But that doesn't mean that there aren't two wars going on. The two wars that are of fundamental national security interest to the United States as well as a fundamental human and moral concern. And to get that caught up into this sort of American political grandstanding is of grave concern here. 

Well, Bob, it's time to discuss our audience figure of the week. This is the figure listeners vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at cfr_org's Instagram story. And this week, Bob, our audience selected "6.9 Million Displaced in the Democratic Republic of the Congo." So we were just talking about displacement in Sudan. What's happening now in the DRC?

MCMAHON:
Yes, these major conflicts are playing out with fewer people watching, but they're no less important. And that number really stood out, I think, to a lot of people. Eastern Congo, where a lot of this displacement is happening, is no stranger to difficulty and war and privation and war crimes, frankly. And there's more of that playing out now. A lot of it centers around fighting involving a group known as M23, and this has seized a pretty large chunk of territory in the east. It's fighting-government aligned militias. And M23 is led by ethnic Tutsis. There have been reports that it's supported heavily by Rwanda. Rwanda leadership denies a claim that is backing the group, but it's clearly is able to sustain itself and has been for a long time. 

And so with that, you have the abuses happening to individuals. We should also note that this is an area where the UN has had a large peacekeeping contingent for almost twenty years. At last report, Carla, there more than sixteen thousand peacekeepers in the DRC, and there's a budget of roughly a billion dollars. So it's one of the largest, if not the largest peacekeeping operation that the UN runs. But the writ of their mandate sometimes limited in what they're able to get involved in terms of keeping the peace. They have also faced claims of abuses as well. Still, it's facing huge and daunting problems in its ability to be effective. And these peacekeepers themselves come in harm's way and have had a number of casualties in recent years. 

Again, it's a region that, if people have not focused on it before, is a vast resource-rich region, very remote from the capital of Kinshasa. But there are terrible cases of abuse playing out there. The blog that CFR runs from its Women in Foreign Policy program noted a huge rise in sexual assault cases against displaced women that Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, has been providing a lot of information about female victims of sexual violence that it treats. It's one of the few groups that's active in the region, that's Médecins Sans Frontières. 

And the International Organization of Migration is running scores of camps to deal with displaced people, and they're going to need to run hundreds more to properly help these populations. But there are very few people who have the ability to step in and stop the abuses from happening in terms of an armed presence. And it just continues to get worse. And oh, by the way, the DRC is still planning to hold elections in December that will kick off an election season. So we're not sure whether or how much of the eastern part of the country is going to be involved in any fashion in that.

ROBBINS:
So the UN, unlike in Sudan is in the DRC.

MCMAHON:
Yes.

ROBBINS:
But is it a force that can actually make a difference in this situation?

MCMAHON:
It has been a large force of a number of thousands of peacekeepers, but a large force in an extremely large area. And again, it relies on... as any peacekeeping force, it relies on what its mandate is from the UN Security Council. Its ability to engage and to not only defend itself but to defend defenseless people. And so I think its ability to be assertive is somewhat limited at the moment. We'll see if this plays out in the Security Council. Again, as we've discussed before, Security Council has not been a forum in recent years for effective action to preserve peace but more like an arena for competition between some of the major powers in the Security Council.

And as I said, when you talk about Congo, and you talk about its interest, you can't get away from its resources, especially resources that are needed in the new emerging economies like rare earths and things like that. There's a mining element that is also involved here, as well as other things. I would note for those wanting to get up to speed really quickly, we have a conflict tracker from our Center for Preventive Action on the Democratic Republic of Congo that is very comprehensive, and it will bring you up to speed pretty quickly.

But again, back to the UN and its abilities, I think it would require a lead country or countries to kind of step in and say, "It's time to put an end to this" and provide a safe haven for these people. It has been a lot of trial and error over the years, but the UN is best situated to do something about it. 

And that's our look at the world next week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visits China, the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders meeting takes place on the Cook Islands, and the G7 Foreign Ministers meet in Tokyo, Japan.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you're at it. We appreciate the feedback. If you'd like to reach out, please email us at [email protected]. The publication mentioned in this episode, as well as a transcript of our conversation, are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on CFR.org.

Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the hosts, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's program was produced by Ester Fang, who's wearing an extraordinary sweater, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks to Sinet Adous and Kaitlyn Esperon for their research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Markus Zakaria. This is Carla Robbins saying so long.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye, and please be careful out there.