In the long and sordid history of American foreign policy, there is nothing quite like the Gaza genocide. In the face of loud and insistent warnings, President Joe Biden and his team of best-and-brightest advisers wrapped Benjamin Netanyahu in a “bear hug,” as Palestinians were slaughtered by the thousands with American bombs, American diplomatic support and American intelligence.

But this moral and political catastrophe is not simply a tale of “death and destruction from the sky”, as Pete Hegseth memorably characterised a subsequent criminal enterprise. It is also a story of cowardice and complicity in Washington, where thousands of decisions made in the White House and State Department and Pentagon kept the Israeli-American war machine running at full speed – in defiance of domestic and international law.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed has covered America’s role in the Gaza war with a persistence and depth matched by few Washington reporters. His new book, Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza, delivers an incriminating account of America’s foreign policy establishment, even as Biden’s top staffers are busy whitewashing their reputations elsewhere in the media.

While the President and his allies are desperate to spin this as a series of unfortunate events they were helpless to correct, Ahmed’s reporting leaves no doubt that Biden’s team repeatedly made the choice to aid and abet Netanyahu, that they ignored warnings and silenced dissenters, and even suppressed and manipulated information to circumvent legal accountability.

Jonathan Shainin spoke to Ahmed about the small circle of men who ran America’s Gaza policy, the culture of impunity in Washington that protected them, and whether they will ever be made to answer for what they did.

Jonathan Shainin: At the start of the book you write that “the Gaza war has always been an American war.”

Akbar Shahid Ahmed: Without American weaponry, without the American shielding of Israel on the world stage, and without the real choices made by hundreds of officials in the Pentagon, State Department, the White House – not just Joe Biden or the men closest to him – the Israelis would not have been able to destroy Gaza.

We’ve heard this from Israeli officials publicly; even Hamas leaders told me, ‘we didn’t expect this brutality from America’ – they thought Biden would stop it sooner. American officials eventually began to express worries about what Israel was doing, even some public discomfort, but they also tied their own strategic goals to Israel’s.

If this war is a collaborative enterprise, who was running the American side?

There was a small group of men around the president who ultimately determined what actions might be taken to stop Israel, or what was done to enable and support them.

These are people who were shaped by the arc of post-9/11 policy in the region, and frankly they didn’t look at it with any degree of introspection or reflection. The Biden administration’s preoccupation with a US-Israel-Saudi deal, for instance, was a personal fixation of Brett McGurk, the Middle East advisor, who saw it as a way to build his legacy after serving under four presidents, starting with George W Bush.

McGurk was tapped for his role by Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, who was seen as a future secretary of state, a Democratic wunderkind. He served as national security advisor to Biden when he was vice president, ran policy planning for Hillary Clinton in the State department, won a Rhodes scholarship, graduated from Yale law, the whole shebang – and so inside the government there was a general sense: how can you question someone like Jake Sullivan? This is really important to understanding the culture that enabled the Biden administration to enable atrocities for 16 months.

Officials from larger systems – diplomatic, intelligence, humanitarian officials, military officials – take their signals from the top. That’s why it was so concerning when Sullivan and McGurk questioned whether Palestinians were truly starving. That’s why it was so concerning that no other cabinet member had the chance to confer with Biden on Gaza the way they did on Sudan, or Ukraine, or any number of other issues. It raises real questions about the judgment of these men.

Biden is, generationally, a Cold Warrior, but the men advising him, the ones shaping his Gaza discussions – they were all very much shaped by the War on Terror. Sullivan, for instance, was deeply involved in the Libya intervention, widely seen as a disaster. They all have War on Terror-levels of comfort with civilian casualties, and an executive hubris: you don’t rein in the power of a president, even if the letter of the law and the actual consequences of our policies suggest it’s time to do so.

Your reporting takes us inside a large and complicated bureaucracy. Obviously there were internal disagreements, but to what extent were the more junior staffers following the lead of figures like Sullivan, or did they not need to be told what to do?

I broke the story of Josh Paul, the first official to resign over Biden’s Gaza policy. On 8 October, when he wrote to colleagues saying ‘it’s shocking to me that we’re rushing arms transfers in, we could be enabling something very dangerous,’ he was met with pin-drop silence. Only two colleagues got back to him. One asked, ‘Are you going to be fired?’ And the other said, essentially, ‘There’s nothing we can do about this.’

Where there is dissent, it tends to be couched in terms of strategic expertise. In public, they don’t say ‘we’ve sowed the seeds of disaster’, but privately, if they recognise what’s happening, they can raise warnings. I reported at the time that officials were passing around an essay in Jewish Currents by the Israeli-American genocide scholar Raz Segal, who declared, within a week of October 7, that ‘this is going to be a genocide.’ Officials were actively sharing this with each other.

For members of the rank and file who wanted to express their concerns, there was a dissent channel, and meetings, particularly with Secretary of State Antony Blinken – who had worked with Biden for two decades – and sometimes with Jon Finer, Biden’s principal deputy national security advisor, rarely with Sullivan. They could attend, convey their points, and express their feelings. But they were facing a brick wall. Nothing they said was getting across, it did not affect outcomes.

Even the top human rights official at the State Department, Uzra Zeya, who now runs a group called Human Rights First, essentially said to people under her: if you want to make a difference in the world, focus on Myanmar, look at Congo, don’t try to do it in Gaza.

I was told by a senior State Department official that you have people up and down the government who are constantly dealing with the Israelis, whereas fewer than five were in regular contact with Palestinians. How does that shape the thinking of the decision makers?

How would you describe the ideology of people like Blinken, Sullivan, and McGurk? What, specifically, is their vision of America’s role in the world?

The UN General Assembly is occurring right now, and the hottest event of the week featured Brett McGurk – who, it is worth adding, was also associated with some of the worst policy errors in Iraq.

McGurk is coming out with a book soon – in fact, it will be released on 6 October – that presents the Biden administration as saviors of the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas-led fighters, when dozens of hostages were killed on the Biden administration’s watch. And several experts have argued that the atrocities of October 7 might not even have happened had the Biden administration taken a different approach to Israel and Palestine to begin with.

So that’s the culture and the ideology – one of impunity, of climbing the ladder without having to reckon with your choices.

In my book, I reveal that, when Sullivan was told that countries in the Global South were really concerned about the situation in Palestine, because they could see echoes of their own experience – and South Africa, specifically, was mentioned as a strategically important country whose population had begun to question the US role in Gaza – his response was ‘fuck South Africa’, because Pretoria had not supported the Libya intervention a decade earlier.

That, in a nutshell, is how they see America on the world stage. The message to other countries is: if you don’t get in line, you don’t matter. It is a bone-deep commitment to primacy.

Sullivan and Blinken were the architects of a grand strategy that was basically about competition with China – which entailed stitching up this post-Abraham Accords Saudi-UAE-Israeli alliance, so America could shift its attention from the Middle East. Was that the mission before October 7?

They were very much focused on China. That is why they needed American dominance to be entrenched, particularly in the Middle East. It’s worth stressing that his strategy was a bipartisan venture. Sullivan, for instance, saw Lindsey Graham as his biggest ally – because Graham could clinch Republican support for the US-Saudi-Israel deal, which was built upon Trump’s Abraham Accords.

There’s a real hubris there, as well as an abdication of liberal values and a real cynicism. Think of how Biden embraced the Saudis after previously saying, ‘I will treat them as a pariah’ for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Whatever they say publicly, they are guided, to a large degree, by what they see as the realism of hard power.

To your point about the Middle East not being the priority – Sullivan wrote, famously, “the Middle East is quieter than it’s ever been” just before October 7. He empowered McGurk, which was his way of saying: this guy knows the region, let him handle it, because my attention is elsewhere, and so is Blinken’s, we’re looking at Ukraine and China. So the region was dismissed, even though there was so much unfinished business there. They were blind to how that business could suck the US back in.

There seems to be a recurring pattern of contempt for outside voices – the answer to every criticism is basically, ‘if you don’t listen to us then you’ll get Trump and he’ll be worse than we are.’ Similarly, with Netanyahu, their attitude is ‘you better be glad we’re restraining Bibi, because we know what we’re doing, and you idiots have no idea what the consequences of imposing sanctions or withholding weapons will be.’

Yeah, their basic message is: ‘you don’t understand the consequences of your anti-war proposals – and we’ll tell you when it’s right to adopt such a position.’ In fact, in July 2025, Sullivan came out and said: actually now is the right time to halt arms sales to Israel, because Donald Trump is president. When people called for the same thing in 2023 and 2024, his response was ‘we’ll handle Netanyahu, don’t get involved’. Neither the public imperative, in terms of polling that showed Americans didn’t want to be part of what was by then widely seen as a genocide, nor the legal advice of their own experts, mattered.

When Trump took over from Biden, I noticed a very different tone from liberal institutions like the New York Times and the Guardian. Did you feel like things you’d been writing about for two years – including the failure to deliver aid to Gaza – were suddenly getting a lot more attention from the press and commentators?

Conditions were definitely getting worse on the ground, and that played a part. But the US government was aware that famine was occurring in Gaza in the spring of 2024; other outside experts said it had begun by October 2024. It didn’t start in 2025 – but the reason lawmakers and journalists came out under Trump and said ‘it’s time for a dramatic policy shift’ was that there was a formal declaration of famine, which the Biden people could now claim ‘didn’t happen on our watch.’

It feels insane that so many journalists ignored the famine confirmations in 2024. It’s hard not to read their denial as stemming from a belief – based on received ideas – that the Democrats were, at the end of the day, responsible professionals, unlike the Republicans, whose motivations had to be questioned, because of potential corruption scandals, like those surrounding Jared Kushner or Steve Witkoff, or simply because they had not been Rhodes scholars and Carnegie fellows.

After I appeared on NPR this week to talk about my book, Sullivan quietly reached out to several people to accuse me of lying about things he had said – though I’ve asked him to speak with me on the record for almost three years now. The colleagues who told me this found it funny – but I’m certain there are other people in the media who believe it.

At one point the White House basically accused you of lying.

Yes. This was January 2024, when upwards of 20,000 Palestinians had been killed, and there were hundreds of allegations of war crimes, particularly around the massive bombing of civilian areas.

By the end of 2023 there was real concern about whether the policy was going to shift, going to adapt – was the US going to take a different position? What happened instead was that McGurk took policy back to where it was on 6 October: we’re going to talk about a US-Israel-Saudi plan, which will serve as a magical way out of this conflict and into this imagined tremendous future. I revealed that there were classified documents outlining McGurk’s vision on this. I gave the White House extensive time to reply, as I did with every story. I even extended my deadline at their request.

Once the story came out – and started to go viral – the White House then issued a statement saying I fabricated quotes. They slowly walked it back, after other journalists defended me. But they never retracted their initial claim that the entire story was false.

The Biden staffers who are trying to rehabilitate their reputations today have depicted this as a situation in which no other choices were available. Sullivan told David Kirkpatrick of the New Yorker, “When you look back at it in the cold light of day, the trap in that kind of thinking is easier to recognize. I will say straightforwardly, we should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach.” Another senior staffer in that same piece says, basically, we tried to stop Bibi but it was impossible, he wasn’t listening to us.

Your reporting shows the opposite: this disaster was a choice, or a series of choices. It didn’t have to happen this way.

Preventable mass killing isn’t just a stain on American foreign policy, it paves the way for a much more violent world. The Biden administration’s Gaza choices didn’t only enable the horrors in Israel-Palestine – they have helped normalize terrifying practices: gambling with the laws of war, regarding the treatment of medical workers and journalists, the provision of humanitarian aid, and so forth.

Activists are now campaigning to prevent future Democratic administrations from hiring some of these figures. I’m not here to tell you who to hire. But what I can tell you is that the failure of the Biden administration has made Gaza a litmus test for democracy across the West, particularly in the US. If you want to uphold human rights and values and sustain liberal democracy in the face of rising autocracy and fascism, a Gaza reckoning is key.

It’s also personally important to me – I grew up in Pakistan, a country defined by conspiracy theory, a fog around why things are so bad, accusations of hidden hands and foreign forces. Providing factual detail and specificity is how you empower people to actually change their circumstances. That’s why it is so important to report the details of how these decisions were made. This notion that ‘we should have done things differently, but that is evident only in hindsight’ – that insults the public’s intelligence. I talked to more than 150 people who worked with Jake Sullivan. Many of them told me, at the time, that the US could have done things differently, that there were other options.

You describe a series of specific episodes and general practices in which senior officials obstructed processes, manipulated reports and almost outright lied, in order to avoid triggering legal accountability mechanisms.

Yes – that vagueness was deliberately sustained. In April 2024, experts had finished a required report to Congress on Israel’s conduct in the war, known as NSM-20. Its conclusions were written by a very small coterie, at the final moment, essentially to make it possible for Blinken to permit the continued flow of weapons to Israel. He decided the conclusion he wanted, and then the top of the report was written by figures like Tom Sullivan – Jake’s brother and a senior advisor to Blinken – to match that. This is a systemic issue of impunity; it’s not just about the senior-most individuals.

There is a great line in the book, from someone in the State Department, that under Blinken there was a system of herd impunity, where “if everyone is responsible for the decision then no one is responsible”.

Yes. And that’s why it’s so alarming when officials come out now and say ‘in the cold light of day, we should have shifted our policy’. What I heard from lawyers and other experts who worked on these issues was that policymakers did not want to hear clear answers requiring a policy change. One lawyer told me: if they wanted us to find a war crime, we definitely could.

And that avoidance of responsbility continued right up until the moment Biden left office. Blinken had on his desk, approved by every relevant office in the State Department, a recommendation for sanctions on Israeli forces that he could have chosen to trigger before Trump returned to the White House.

There is a long-running argument, even among critics of US policy, about the influence of the Israel lobby. How does that look in your reporting? Are officials influenced ideologically by lobbying or is it more about a kind of careerism, where you are only taken seriously if you hold certain opinions?

It’s careerism and cynicism – influenced, certainly, by ardent Israel backers, who can derail people’s career prospects, slander them in the media and generally influence their political calculations. But the pressure is not immutable – which is what I wanted to emphasise in the book.

A big argument from Biden administration people remains: how could we have behaved differently? But even people who broadly backed Israel, like Nancy Pelosi, who called to cut off offensive weapons toTel Aviv in April 2024, were saying it was possible to go in a different direction. It’s important to understand why, for instance, the Conference of Presidents was brought into the White House so often – the heads of major Jewish American organisations, who are actually much more conservative than most Jewish Americans on these policies, were treated as representatives. Why were their voices privileged? That has something to do with how the pro-Israel lobby works. But it doesn’t take away the agency of Sullivan, McGurk, and other American policymakers.

That also raises a structural question. Jake Sullivan has to look out for his own career, but how did we create a system in which he also determines who lives and who dies in Rafah?

While his wife Maggie Goodlander is running for Congress, raising more than $100,000 from pro-Israel donors, I might add. I feel like I’m getting worked up in this interview, because you’re asking me to reflect on really deep moral questions. There’s a recording people may have seen, in which Sullivan is asked: ‘how did you, in good conscience, allow Joe Biden, given his reduced cognitive capacity, to run for president in 2024, given the threat Trump posed to everything you claim to value?’ And Sullivan throws his hands up and says, ‘well, I just don’t think about politics, I’m a foreign policy guy’. That’s offensive to what we know to be true about how power works in this country. It muddies the waters, and it’s undemocratic to a degree that simply should not be tolerated.

Your book is about impunity, but it’s also about complicity. How do the people you’ve written about – whether dissenters or policymakers – think about complicity, American or European, in Gaza?

I come up against a consistent desire to avoid acknowledging the consequences of American policy. People told themselves: ‘this is Netanyahu’s doing, the Israelis’ doing, we’re not really part of it.’ They tried very hard to sustain that alienation. I reported that, in November 2024, there were new intelligence assessments that suggested – in greater detail than before – that the Israelis were knowingly committing war crimes in Gaza, discussing this among themselves. This was so serious that it went all the way up to Biden, because the lawyers and intelligence officials were saying this is more alarming than what we’d seen previously.

And it prompted new discussions, at the highest level – Biden, Blinken, McGurk, Sullivan, the US ambassador to Israel – about complicity, what in a legal sense is called ‘aiding and abetting’. Can American officials be held liable on a personal basis for what’s happened? But after extremely heated discussions, top officials walked away assured they would not be held personally liable, with a kind of clean legal chit.

McGurk told me, for the book, that he never received any confirmation of violations of American or international law. Blinken did receive these confirmations, so they were certainly circulating at McGurk’s level, even if he didn’t hear them.

If, as you write, the Gaza war is an American war, and if many, many scholars and human rights organisations and courts have described this war as a genocide, then who are the American officials that might stand to answer for their part in it? Who’s going to the Hague?

I’m very clear that I’m a chronicler and a journalist, not a prosecutor. But it is worth remembering that the assault on the International Criminal Court, which is escalating now under Trump, was blessed by the Biden administration, just as these discussions about US complicity were taking place. More recently, I have been hearing questions on the Hill about whether US officials could at some point be held liable, given that the ICC has now broken the seal on going after the West and its allies. That conversation is occurring with a candour that I haven’t heard before.

When Sullivan says ‘we should have done things differently’, don’t forget that he and his allies closed out the Biden presidency, in December 2024, by watching the fall of Bashar al-Assad – which John Kirby, the State Department spokesman, called evidence of the success of the president’s “assertive foreign policy.” They patted themselves on the back throughout 2023 and 2024, while Israel was escalating attacks against Iran, saying ’we’re defending Tel Aviv against Tehran’. Their fingerprints are very much on Trump’s war against Iran.

It is almost impossible to overstate their desire to avoid responsibility.

One last question: did this all make you angry? Was it overwhelming to report all this?

It’s made it a lot harder to live in Washington, frankly. On a personal level, I’m much less willing now to go along to the embassy receptions, the parties where such-and-such official is treated as a social equal, as though these decisions about life and death don’t matter.

I remember seeing Biden’s deputy national security advisor Jon Finer, a former journalist himself, at the Swiss Ambassador’s after-party for the White House Correspondents’ Weekend in 2024. He was surrounded by chattering, laughing journalists – people who were covering the death toll of the decisions he was making every day.

I think journalists have to look in the mirror and ask: why do we put ourselves in these situations? There are lots of other wonderful people in the world we could be friends with. People in positions of power – our role is to question and challenge them.