If the goal was to get aid in, some people would say that keeping the current government afloat was a bad idea. Another possibility would have been to seriously threaten to stop arming them. How do you respond to that?

Look, I think President Biden was clear immediately after October 7th that he would support Israel in achieving the military objective of defeating Hamas. There was always a debate about what that meant, and we engaged diplomatically on the difference between defeating Hamas as a military and governing authority and eliminating the last Hamas fighter, which we didn’t believe at the beginning and I don’t believe today is possible. But our goal was to help Israel defend its people and its country. That was not something that we used as a general matter to say, If you don’t do other things we want, we’ll stop defending you. Part of it was that President Biden was so clear in his position that it wouldn’t have even been credible.

Well, Biden still had the power to do it. I’m not saying he was going to, but he could have, right?

Right, but when he was Vice-President, Joe Biden was famous for saying great powers can’t bluff. It was something that is deep inside him—his commitment to supporting Israel in a legitimate, just fight was clear, and that had to coexist with pressing them on these humanitarian issues.