The US has Israel’s back… and a fear of the war’s horrendous what-ifs

Joe Biden has expressed his disgust with Hamas’s ‘unadulterated evil’, writes veteran US-watcher Jon Sopel. But behind the public support, America can only watch and pray the conflict doesn’t spread across the region

US secretary of state Antony Blinken and Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (EPA)

Like probably too many of us, I have spent an inordinate amount of time looking at social media this past, ghastly week. Each video showing some new, unfathomable atrocity. The comments below it scaling even greater heights of rage, hatred and intolerance.

Let us hope that the forging of US foreign policy is being done with calmer reflection, paying no heed to the anger machine that is so much of what is now X (it should really be called X certificate given so much of the content), but once was Twitter.

But one post did catch my eye – it was from Ben Rhodes, who was a deputy US national security adviser during the Obama years. He said: “The decisions being made now are going to impact millions of lives and risk all kinds of escalation. The US should have learned from 9/11 the profound cost of being guided by anger and fear. I hope that is what we are telling the Israeli government.”