Biden’s Gaza Dilemmas, 80 Years Since D-Day, Mexico’s Milestone Election, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, the Biden administration faces increasing pressure over its Gaza policy. Western leaders commemorate the eightieth anniversary of D-Day. And, Mexico prepares to elect its first female president. It's May 30th, 2024 and time for The World Next Week.
I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins.

MCMAHON:
Carla, let's start in Gaza. On Tuesday the Pentagon announced that the U.S. built pier that had been set up supposedly to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza have become inoperable due to damage from heavy seas. And with the suspension of this pier, the closing of the Rafah Crossing, humanitarian officials are warning of a collapse essentially in the enclave where people are already in a very treacherous state. On top of the urgency of this situation, the Israeli strike on tent camps in Rafah that was targeting Hamas officials but also killed a number of civilians, has added international scrutiny to what had already been scrutiny of U.S. support for Israel. There's new estimation from Israeli officials that this campaign is going on through the end of the year. So, how is the Biden administration looking to deal with all of these challenges?

ROBBINS:
Who knows? This is just so grim, Bob. The story of the pier is one more reminder of how incredibly difficult and heart rendering the situation is. President Biden first announced during the State of the Union in March that the U.S. was going to build this pier to try to relieve some of the hunger in Gaza. The Pentagon was surprised and really skeptical, not so much because the technical challenges involved. The U.S. has done similar projects for humanitarian relief in Haiti, and Somalia, and in Kuwait. But what worried Pentagon officials at the times and others is what would happen to the aid once it left the pier. U.S. troops are banned by the White House from operating in Gaza, and so the delivery process was always going to be left to the Israelis to decide when it went, where it went, and they're certainly less than sympathetic to the effort, and to poorly defended aid groups.

And once the pier became operational on May 17th, it seemed like anything that could go wrong did go wrong. Trucks were looted on their way from the pier to the warehouses, and distribution convoys, and we talked about this, Bob, were stormed by starving people, and delivery operations had to be suspended several times. And then on Sunday the Pentagon announced that part of this 1,800 foot causeway that connects what was a large floating dock to the pier, which was tethered to the land, had broken apart in rough seas. It had to be towed to Ashdod in southern Israel for repair. And, the Pentagon is saying, optimistically, that it could take a little over week, weather permitting, to get it back in play.

But in under two weeks the pier was operating, the UN reported it transported a total of 137 trucks of aid, and American officials had hoped that at top capacity the pier would be delivering the equivalent of 150 truckloads of aid a day. And even that was only going to be maybe a third of the amount USAID in UN says or needed daily to address the humanitarian disaster in Gaza. So this was a good idea, certainly a portion of what was desperately needed, but really yes, let's hope they get it back working. But just one more sign of how incredibly hard it is to operate there, and just how disastrous the whole situation is.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems unwilling to listen to anyone's advice, certainly not his war cabinet, and not willing to listen to Biden's advice about the cost, including to Israel, of what has become an increasingly indiscriminate war. And Biden seems unwilling to risk a permanent break in his relationship with Israel. The White House tied itself into verbal knots on Tuesday when it said that Israel had not crossed Biden's own red line on Rafah after this airstrike that you mentioned, Bob, killed forty-five Palestinians, many of them children, and injured hundreds of people. Biden had said the U.S. would suspend delivery of offensive weapons to Israel if it went into "population centers" in Rafah, but White House Spokesman John Kirby said that Israel had not "started a major ground operation in the city." The Israelis must have been listening, on Wednesday the Israeli national security advisor said he expected the campaign in Gaza to continue through the end of the year. So, not a lot of influence there, a lot of tying themselves into knots and nothing seems to be going right.

MCMAHON:
Well, and on top of all this you have signs of new frictions between Israelis and the Egyptians. There are reports ahead of this podcast taping, Carla, that Israel had been able to establish control over the full border area where Gaza borders Egypt, and there had been an incident earlier in the week in which an Egyptian soldier was killed and the Israelis were investigating that. Obviously a very important relationship to maintain and to maintain in a calm way. The Egyptians are especially concerned about an influx of Palestinians, and the exporting of instability into their own country as this continues to play out. Is that particular dynamic potentially going to help create some sort of clarity on Rafah, or are we still just seeing a military campaign play out and there's going to be collateral damage?

ROBBINS:
So, we don't know exactly how much control or how large an area the military announced they had "tactical control" of this border strip between Gaza and Egypt. We know that Cairo's furious, are furious about this soldier that got shot. They'd been warning them about not trying to seize this area itself. The Israelis insist they need this as part of their attempt to wipe out Hamas, but this relationship is an important relationship. It's an important relation for the United States—we can debate whether Sisi's the guy you want to have a relationship with. It's an important relationship for trying to negotiate some sort of ceasefire for hostage deal, Cairo's often hosts these negotiations. Alienating one more neighbor, raising tensions is not a great thing. And, this is one more trouble that Biden has. And Biden also has got these political problems at home, Bob, that he's got to deal with.

MCMAHON:
Can you talk a little bit about what he's facing in his own chambers in Washington?

ROBBINS:
Speaker Mike Johnson has been proudly crowing about inviting Netanyahu to speak to a joint session of Congress, and "calling senator majority leader Schumer's bluff to co-sign this invitation letter." I don't know whether the letter's gone out. Senator Ted Cruz says he's planning to file a War Powers Resolution that would, if it passes, forced the administration to abandon the Gaza pier altogether. I don't know if that itself is going to go forward, but so you have the problems with Egypt, you've got the problems in Washington, you've got the problems with the pier. This is a really hard situation to manage for the United States, but just everywhere you look right now it's just really a disaster.

MCMAHON:
And it's been a particularly hard front for the U.S. to try to unpack or disconnect the humanitarian policy from Israel's war aims obviously. And some of this is just, as you said at the outset, coming up with some sort of plan there is going to be a pier, or if that's going to be a fixture in the horizon in the months, maybe even years ahead, what is the process in which goods coming over that pier are safeguarded and brought into the public in a coherent way? It just doesn't seem to exist at all, let alone the viability of a peer getting hit by ocean currents, and waves, and so forth.

ROBBINS:
This question about the future of Gaza, the United States supposedly has a plan. It's all caught up in the two-state solution, some sort of big deal with the Saudis, but Netanyahu says he's not giving it up, and it's really his own coalition, his war cabinet was threatening to tear itself apart over this. Netanyahu's got to work out his deal with his own people, and the United States, which supposedly has influence over the Israelis, has got to push a hell of a lot harder than it's been pushing. This day after plan is absolutely essential, but right now getting aid to people and limiting the vast civilian casualties is also absolutely essential.

Bob, happier note, as much as a memorial can be a happy note, next Thursday is the eightieth anniversary of D-Day. This is the allied invasion of Normandy and World War II that led to the liberation of France and the beginning of the end of the war. Is this going to be just a ceremonial event, or is there going to be substance? You've got several heads of state going to be there, and you got a current war on Europe that really matters with Ukraine.

MCMAHON:
Yes, indeed. And those two are going to be intertwined as this anniversary is marked, and partly it's because of the guest list. At latest report I saw, President Biden is going to be in attendance, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Rishi Sunak is invited—I believe he's going to attend—German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine's president, and that is significant obviously because of the current state of the transatlantic alliance and its posture toward Ukraine, and its increasing discussions about enabling materials provided to Ukraine to be used against Russian territory.

That issue is front and center, as we were taping this podcast it was being discussed rather intensely by NATO foreign ministers in Prague, and there are different opinions among the alliance about how vigorous to be in allowing the Ukrainians to use this material. The U.S. was particularly alarmed that Ukraine had been attacking sites that had housed Russian radar facilities that were dealing with nuclear alert systems. This gets really tricky and really, really serious, because if there is a fracturing in the confidence and in the reliability of those types of facilities, you're talking about a completely different order problem involving Russia and Western countries, including the United States and including nuclear readiness. So, I think that has to be crystal clear about what is and what is not allowed to be targeted, for one thing. And then I think you continue to see the formulation the U.S. is saying, which is Ukraine's going to make the decisions it needs to make to defend itself and hide behind that for the moment. So, that's going to play out.

The anniversary itself though, it's worth noting. First of all because it's the eightieth anniversary, this really will be the last big anniversary in which many of these veterans, remarkable veterans, that are still alive can be there in person to commemorate. I had the great fortune of being able to visit those beaches right around the forty-ninth anniversary. I went with my father, who was part of a field hospital that arrived a couple of weeks after the invasion, but he had rich resonant memories of Omaha Beach when he arrived, and going to those sites in the '90s, it was remarkable because they were unchanged. The French left them as is, the cemeteries that are nearby are stunning and unmoving, and the sacrifice that was involved by the one hundred sixty thousand or so troops from the UK, United States, Canada and other nations, there is still awe-inspiring. And it should be noted that they were in alliance with the Soviet Union, which had borne the brunt of the Nazi war effort. Certainly up to that point, the biggest battles in the war were fought on the Soviet-Nazi front, and Russians will remind their counterparts of that on every occasion.

It was noted that Macron did not invite Vladimir Putin to this anniversary, but did say he was going to extend an invite to a Russian representative. It's not clear yet whether there is going to be any Russian showing up there, certainly will be interesting if a Russian shows up while Volodymyr Zelenskyy is around or in the room, so to speak. But it does raise the question about past relationships with Russia and when common cause was made in difficult moment, and what this anniversary means for the alliance and for standing up to aggression, and tyranny, and real threats to collective security.

ROBBINS:
So of course, if he had invited Putin then he could have arrested him and sent him to The Hague since he's under indictment at the ICC.

MCMAHON:
There's that as well, yes.

ROBBINS:
Politico had this quote from one anonymous White House official. The White House seems sort of peevish that Macron had invited any Russian, but this White House official said, "At least it might remind the Russians that they actually fought real Nazis once, not imaginary ones in Ukraine," which I thought was quite to the point. This is the beginning of a series of meetings in which Ukraine is likely going to be the major focus. I mean, you've got a big NATO summit, you've got G7 coming up, and we've joked a lot about Zelenskyy. He's everywhere, he's everywhere, but he hadn't been traveling because things are so dire, and he is making a really compelling case these days that things are so desperate. And why is NATO at a minimum not shooting down things coming into his airspace? Maybe not necessarily Russian planes, but certainly missiles.

And this is something, an argument he started making at the time when the U.S. helped defend Israel when the onslaught from Iran, and we noted it at the time, quite an interesting argument. It seems like there's a shift going on, certainly the Brits are much more proactive in their argument about the Ukrainians can use equipment to go after Russian territory, French much more. The Germans seem to be shifting in that direction. The Americans seem very resistant to it. Do you think that these summits are going to push forward into a more active role taking it on? Because it seems like Ukraine needs it.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, I think I would say again vis-a-vis the discussion of allowing Ukrainian forces to use acquired Western military material in Russia versus protecting Ukraine in other ways, I think that is going to be fair game and I think you are going to see the administration try to square that, and step up efforts to try to help Ukraine. Part of this problem is just what's available to help them. Like we've mentioned previously in our discussions on this, are there available patriot missile batteries that can be provided, for example? Are there other systems that, which have been readily supplied to Israel, that in some way could be brought into Ukraine's defense? So, I think that's going to be something worth watching in these meetings coming up.

As you say, the eightieth anniversary of D-Day kicks off a series of other meetings, there's a big peace meeting in Switzerland in the middle of June. The NATO summit's obviously a very big deal in the United States in July, and it's all coming at a time where Russia is really ramped up its attacks on Ukraine. Lest we forget, there are daily reports of really intense Russian bombardments. Ukraine seems to have held off a move on Kharkiv, or near Kharkiv, but it's happening and it's unrelenting. And so, it's going to continue to be in the discussion, Carla.

Carla, I'm going to take us south of the border, that is south of the U.S. border to Mexico. This coming Sunday, June 2nd, Mexican voters will head to the polls to choose a new president, all members of the legislature, that's 628, and as well as nine governors and about twenty thousand local officials. I said at the outset, perhaps presumptuously, the next Mexican president is going to be a woman because the top two candidates vying to be president are women, and continue to hold strong poll positions, especially the lead poller at the moment. But, is this president going to be able to separate themselves, herself from the current outgoing president known as AMLO?

ROBBINS:
This is quite the spectacle on all sorts of levels. This is, as you said, a massive election, and it's also been just a hugely violent political season in a country that's suffering as the cartels and their underlings battle for control of territory and political influence, particularly at the local level where you see so many people who are up for election. The New York Times found that thirty-six candidates have been killed this electoral season, which is really a chilling number, and at least twenty-eight of those were attributed to organized crime groups. So, whoever wins really has a lot on her plate. What's most notable of course, about Sunday's election is that a woman will almost certainly win the race. The two leading candidates are both female, and that's a really extraordinary thing in a country where women didn't win the right to vote until 1953, and where femicide is still really a massive, massive problem. Another thing that she's going to have to face.

The hands down front-runner is Claudia Sheinbaum. She is a PhD environmental engineer, the former mayor of Mexico City, and she is the protege, the chosen successor of the current president Andrés Manuel Obrador, AMLO. The other major candidate is Xóchitl Gálvez, she's a former conservative senator, a tech entrepreneur, also an engineer, and she's heading up a coalition of parties brought together, really the only thing that they share is their opposition to AMLO.

The rise of these two women candidates can in good part be explained by Mexican law. In 2002, they mandated that 30 percent of all congressional candidates had to be women, that was then raised to 40 percent. And in 2014 that quota was said at 50 percent. And since 2018, Mexico's Congress has had a 50-50 gender split and this is also spread out. It's spread out to the number of governors, and now these two candidates. And this has been debated a lot, do quotas on corporate boards, do quotas and legislatures have an impact? They apparently do, and these are two quite strong candidates, and here they are in what is a very macho country, suddenly with two women running for president, the two leaders.

While Sheinbaum owes her political career to AMLO, he made her his environment secretary when he was mayor of Mexico City, she's really temperamentally very different personally from AMLO. He's this charismatic populist, she comes from the elite and is a far more reserved technocrat. She's credited with reducing crime in Mexico City, although I think there's serious doubts about her claim that homicides dropped by half. While AMLO has been criticized for this increasing militarization of law enforcement, she invested in the city civilian police force. She's an environmental engineer, she promoted some public transportation, didn't do enough to maintain the metro, but she did a lot with solar panels and all of that.

So, she gets reasonably high marks for what she did in Mexico City, but she's really been in lockstep with him in the campaign, including on this continued militarization of law enforcement. And the opposition has focused on that. The opposition has also said it wants to do privatization, very much focused on allegations of corruption with AMLO, and been very concerned on his authoritarianism. And he really has gone after journalists, he's gone after the electoral board, he's gone after the courts, and I think it's going to be one of the big tests for her when she comes in, particularly whether she's going to stick to his call for constitutional reform, which would lead to Supreme Court justices being voted in. And if that were to go forward, his Morena party, her Morena party could end up controlling all three branches of government.

So we will see, can she break away from AMLO? Will she be more of a democrat than he is? She has been saying, when those questions are raised, "What do you think, a woman can't stand on her own?" And he says he's going to retire to his ranch. We'll see if he really does.

MCMAHON:
So, another big election in the year of elections certainly, but certainly for Americans, one that's right next door, and that is hugely consequential because of this issue of the U.S.-Mexican border and migrant flows. Any sense at all, Carla, whether from her campaigning or any other signaling whether there's going to be any kind of change in Mexico's policy involving migrants, AMLO, for all his populism, seemed to have handled the issue fairly deftly, whether it was President Trump or President Biden.

ROBBINS:
I think AMLO has been quite cooperative by American standards on migration issues. Certainly the numbers have been huge, but this keeping migrants in Mexico debate, whether or not that's a safe place. But he's been quite cooperative by American standards, committed to slowing things down. More recently, he's been making pledges itself. She says that people should be treated with dignity, she said all the right things, so she's not committed to making a major change in that policy.

AMLO has been very resistant to cooperating on security issues, whether it's been the fentanyl issue, sharing intel on the cartels in Mexico, he's insisted this is a sovereignty issue. We'll see whether or not she's more cooperative on that front. I think that's one thing that the U.S. is going to be watching very closely.

MCMAHON:
It's very interesting also that she will be inheriting, I guess a set of policies, a set of growing trade ties between Mexico and the U.S. because of the way global supply chains have really shifted in recent years. And this nearshoring issue that our colleague Shannon O'Neil's written about quite a bit where things that used to be made in China or expected to be made in China are being made in Mexico, and the U.S. has a renegotiated trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, under the Trump administration, that will be revisited again under the next presidency, whether it is a second Biden or a second Trump. Any sense where she stands on those issues? Or again, is it potentially status quo?

ROBBINS:
Well, the opposition would say, and the opposition is very much a business opposition, certainly the leader is a business opposition, would say that this has been too much of a statist economy under AMLO. She comes from the left, we'll see whether or not they seize this opportunity. The Economist magazine had a very sniffy piece about her right now of the wasted potential that has come, and that hoping that she wouldn't waste more of this potential. So, we'll have to watch that space.

MCMAHON:
The Economist is sniffy? I'm amazed.

ROBBINS:
Yes, as only they can do it.
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 they selected what you predicted, "North Korea's Second Spy Satellite Explodes." So, who do they want to spy on, and does this mean that their technology is better or worse than we thought?

MCMAHON:
Well, let me take the second one first, because the technology extends to floating balloons across the border filled with manure, and batteries, and such. That was something that we saw happen over the last couple of days.

ROBBINS:
Not our border though.

MCMAHON:
This is the border with South Korea, and we should say South Korea has been known to send things over the border promoting or provoking North Koreans about where they stand on a number of issues, but really extolling freedom and democracy. And the North Koreans resent that mightily, and so responded in kind, in their kind, with this latest gesture. But more seriously, most recently they have fired reportedly about ten short range ballistic missiles off their east coast, and they flew about two hundred miles. South Korean military is watching this closely. This is an ongoing set of tests involving ballistic missile capacity. They have intercontinental ballistic missile capacity as well, and we'll be keeping an eye out for those tests. We're going to be keeping an eye out for what's been called a seventh nuclear test to see what their nuclear capabilities are.

But the most recent issue that spurred our audience figure happened to be with a spy satellite. So, they have successfully launched a spy satellite, and they are keen to harvest more information about military maneuvers on their own peninsula and in the region as the U.S. continues to bind itself more tightly with South Korea and Japan, and importantly, South Korea and Japan are improving their relations because of the growing dangers in the neighborhood. And this is all a backdrop to these messages that Kim has been sending out, or has been ramping up shall we say, since the beginning of the year about how North Korea sees South Korea.

In January 10th, it declares South Korea to be an enemy state. They ended talk about any peaceful reunification, and consider their nuclear arsenal and their capacity to develop missiles as a key part of their strategic profile going forward. They are getting less and less pressure collectively from the UN Security Council, certainly Russia and China are not pressing them in ways that they had in the past. There was a panel that the UN had set up fifteen years ago or so to review their activities related to sanctions, and that panel was not renewed this spring because of a Russian veto, although the sanctions still remain in place. Growing development has been the North Korean-Russian ties, especially in the military front. And that has been a factor of concern, and that could also involve technology. Russia's got loads of technology that could be very useful to North Korea, North Korea has loads of armaments that are useful in the Russian campaign against Ukraine.

So, all of this is to say that here's a reminder that North Korea likes to remind people that it's around and it could cause problems. Our colleague, Sue Terry, has a new piece in the Foreign Affairs where she cites this, and cites the fact that particularly in election years, U.S. election years, North Korea likes to make its presence known. There's actually data showing that in election years there's a huge ramp up in North Korean activities and tests, military tests and so forth, and we should continue to expect something like that in the run-up to election day. We should also note that there was a fascinating period of diplomacy involving former President Trump and Kim Jong Un. There was a bromance, and it was really a bromance for a while there. They did not yield much of anything, although there were all sorts of historic meetings that took place. But Trump, at the end of the day, would not take the sanctions off the table, and that ended that. Although he's continued to reference on his current campaign stumps to this day, the warm letters he received from Kim Jong Un-

ROBBINS:
Beautiful letters.

MCMAHON:
Beautiful letters. There is concern that based on the comments from some officials who are rumored to be in the national security circles of the Trump campaign, that they would be taking a tougher line towards South Korea in terms of any sort of umbrella help for South Korea, vis-a-vis North Korea, Trump related officials have mentioned South Korea needs to develop its own nuclear turn, for example, and its own ability to defend itself. So, there's that kind of language coming out at the same time. So all of which is to say, expect North Korea to be an item of concern, but also an item that should give pause to people who are considering the U.S. policies in that part of the world. It is a rogue state that is getting more and more capable militarily.

ROBBINS:
Getting rogue-er.

MCMAHON:
Getting rogue-er, indeed. And that's our look at the rogue world next week, Carla. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. India reports the results of its multi-week election. The annual Shangri-La security dialogue begins in Singapore. And, European Parliament elections begin.

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 publications mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript of our conversations, 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, with Director of Podcasting, Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks to Kenadee Mangus for her research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Markus Zakaria, and this is Carla Robbins saying so long.

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