How Biden's Middle East Policy Fell Apart
About this episode
Published almost a year after October 7, the episode opens with Klein's accounting of what Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar set out to do: recenter the Palestinian cause, expose Israel's vulnerability, draw Hezbollah and Iran into the fight, and lure Israel into a brutal, open-ended occupation of Gaza that would shred its international legitimacy. A year on: more than 40,000 Palestinians dead, no day-after plan, hostages still held, war in Lebanon, exchanges of fire with Iran — while Netanyahu has gone from reviled to leading in the polls. Klein then turns to America's failures: no regional war avoided, no hostage deal, no political process, no leverage. Franklin Foer joins with his Atlantic reporting, built on dozens of interviews across the Biden administration and the Middle East, to reconstruct the 'anatomy of a failure': why Washington could not move the governments it most needed to influence.