“Richard Haass, the distinguished global analyst, once wrote: “Consistency in foreign policy is a luxury policymakers cannot always afford.”

“But, equally, glaring national hypocrisy can come with a high price tag, in terms of lost credibility, damaged global prestige and diminished self-respect.”

So Joe Biden’s decision to defend Israel’s methods in Gaza so soon after, in a different context, condemning Russia’s in Ukraine, is not just an occasion for hand wringing.”

“It is already having a real-world impact on relations between the global north and south, and west and east, creating consequences that could reverberate for decades.”

“The Biden administration, reluctant to change course, may say the parallels between Gaza and Ukraine are far from exact, but it also seems to know it is gradually losing diplomatic support.”

“When the US and Israel are joined at the UN general assembly by only eight other nations, including Micronesia and Nauru, as happened when they rejected a ceasefire resolution for Gaza this December, it is harder to argue that America remains the indispensable nation – a phrase from former secretary of state Madeleine Albright frequently referenced by Biden.”

“By contrast, Vladimir Putin, after a period of his own global isolation, “really feels everything at this point is trending in his favour”, according to Fiona Hill, the former US state department official specialising in Russia.”

“For Hill, Biden’s speech in October linking Ukraine and Israel together in his effort to persuade Congress to release funds for the former “may have been good congressional politics, but perhaps not good global politics.”

“Now with Gaza, the latent anti-American mood has been given boosters. That any legal or moral parallel exists between Russian and Israeli behaviour is of course rejected by the Biden administration, which instead says the true parallel lies between the war crimes of Hamas and the Russian army.”

“Putin’s invasion and destruction of Ukrainian cities was not an act of self-defence. It was not a response to a specific outrage in which Ukrainian forces had crossed into Russia and massacred young party-going Russians. It was a Russian assertion of empire and its sphere of influence.”

“But once the bombed-out buildings of Gaza get juxtaposed on social media alongside those of Mariupol on social media, it gets more complex. The issue of proportionality comes into play. The Israeli response looks closer to the US post-9/11 revenge, which Biden had specifically counselled Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, against.”

“Yet, by and large, the west, with some exceptions, fell silent about Gaza when Israel’s assault began. Josep Borrell, the EU foreign affairs chief, was one who broke ranks, saying: “I think that to deprive a civilian population of the basic services – water, food, medicine, everything – is something that looks like being against international law.”

“By contrast, the UK representatives at the UN in no less than 11 security council debates urged Israel to comply with humanitarian law yet never said whether the country had failed to do so.”

“Pressed for weeks to say if the loss of 18,000 mainly civilian lives could be in breach of international law, western leaders spoke only in conditional tense, adding they could not pass judgment since this was a matter for the courts. “We will not be drawn into a judge and jury role in the midst of all this,” Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, recently said.”

“Or Biden in Poland on the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “They have committed depravity, crimes against humanity, without shame or compunction. They’ve targeted civilians with death and destruction. Used rape as a weapon of war. Stolen Ukrainian children in an attempt to steal Ukraine’s future. Bombed train stations, maternity hospitals, schools, and orphanages.”

“Nor was this just presidential stump rhetoric. In March 2022 the state department formally declared that, based on information then available, the US government assessed that members of Russia’s forces had committed war crimes in Ukraine. “

“Moreover, Ukraine broke a logjam in the US Senate about war crimes and its ambivalence towards the international criminal court, to which the US is not a state party. Within weeks, the Senate, under the urging of the Republican Lindsey Graham, had unanimously passed a resolution pushing for accountability measures, both internationally through the ICC and bilaterally.”

“At the same time the US as a member of the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group for Ukraine started furnishing the ICC with its evidence of war crimes, deploying a team of investigators and prosecutors to assist the Ukrainian prosecutor, general Andriy Kostin, “in documenting, preserving and preparing war crimes cases.”

“By contrast, after two months of destruction in Gaza, the US state department has said it sees no need to begin any formal internal examination of whether Israel has committed war crimes, even though the weapons it has been using were supplied by the US, and by some counts more civilians were killed in Gaza in two months than were killed in Ukraine more than two years.”

“Even the news that unguided dumb bombs had been used in almost half of the Israeli strikes, or that the president himself said he feared the bombing was indiscriminate, led the State Department to say it felt the need to conduct a formal investigation into breaches of humanitarian law.”

“A cursory journey round the world reveals the impact this has had. The US, whether it likes it or not, risks becoming synonymous with double standards.”