Middle East

Biden's Team Wanted War in the Middle East Without Owning It

Crossing the Red Line peels back the curtain on the bureaucratic machinery behind U.S. involvement in Gaza and beyond.

Matthew Petti | 9.22.2026 7:30 AM

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(Illustration: Crossing the Red Line/Akbar Shahid Ahmed/W. W. Norton & Company/JNA PRESS/JNA Press / Mohammed M Skaik/Sipa USA/Newscom)

Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel's War in Gaza by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, W.W. Norton, 368 pages, $31.99

The U.S. government owns a share of what happened to Gaza. Through two administrations, Washington provided much of the money, weapons, and intelligence required to reconquer the Palestinian enclave, and U.S. troops were eventually deployed only a step removed from the front lines. Now the Trump administration has put its full diplomatic weight behind a "Board of Peace" aimed at reshaping Gaza forever, hoping to turn that board into a model for all global diplomacy.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed has been one of the most well-sourced journalists documenting this process. His book Crossing the Red Line presents itself as a comprehensive account of the United States' involvement in the war. But it falls short of its potential. Like many reporters immersed in a specific issue, Ahmed sometimes misses the forest for the trees.

Repeating his sources' accounts of "harrowing mismanagement," the author concludes that there was no "master plan," only a "disaster" that developed "choice by choice." But Ahmed's own reporting suggests that the Biden administration acted with deliberate intention. U.S. officials didn't just commit crimes of omission. They created elaborate schemes to keep the U.S. involved with the war while avoiding restraints, scapegoating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for their own decisions. At times, President Joe Biden and his advisers seemed to let slip that they believed Palestinian bystanders deserved to pay for the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023—and that the expansion of the war across the region could benefit U.S. interests.

A few weeks into the war, Biden told reporters that "innocents have been killed, and it's the price of waging a war." When State Department officials held a briefing the following month about Palestinian civilians' dire situation, Ahmed reports, Secretary of State Antony Blinken "responded by emphasizing emotional trauma among Israelis over October 7." The implication is not hard to read. "This is awful, but they did it to........

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