Editor's note: Sumaya Chowdhury, a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN, is an independent columnist and freelance journalist based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

In his resignation letter, Josh Paul, a senior official at the U.S. State Department who recently quit his job opposing the Joe Biden administration's stance on the Gaza war, criticized the administration's and Congress's response to the conflict as being "an impulsive reaction built on confirmation bias, political convenience, intellectual bankruptcy, and bureaucratic inertia" and aptly described the U.S. Middle East policy as having "blind support for one side," namely Israel. Paul's observation epitomizes the administration's approaches, both in words and deeds, from the moment the conflict erupted.

More than anything else, what these past two weeks have demonstrated is the inability of the U.S. to be the world leader that it often claims to be. The whole episode so far has patently manifested that the United States lacks the requisite analytical skills, regional knowledge, brainpower, and capacity to make a rational move on any emerging tensions or conflicts. It has nakedly exposed America's inherent knack for prioritizing its strategic objective above the world's peace and stability.   

For example, in his October 20 prime-time address to the nation, President Biden, while arguing for the merit of his $106 billion request to Congress for military and humanitarian aid for Israel and Ukraine and humanitarian assistance for Gaza, drew a parallel between Vladimir Putin and Hamas. "They both want to annihilate a neighboring democracy," namely Ukraine and Israel, said Biden. Once again, a black-and-white dichotomy has been brought into the play, with little consideration for the issue's accompanying historical and geopolitical nuances and ground realities. Blinded by dogma and preoccupied with its hegemonic priorities, America's perennial propensity to divide the world into Manichean opposites – democracy versus autocracy, the Judeo-Christian world versus Islam – has increasingly limited its capacity to place reasons before emotion and objective understanding before ideological tenacity.  

In his speech, Biden also argued why "far away" conflicts like those in Ukraine and the Middle East "matter to America." He argued that "when terrorists don't pay a price for their terror, when dictators don't pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction."

However, what Biden did not inform American citizens is the insurmountable price the world has paid throughout its history due to its perennial tendency to associate so many of these far-flung tensions with its so-called national security and subsequent militaristic overstretch. According to the Cost of War project by Brown University, an estimated 4.5-4.7 million people were killed during the longest war on terror, including 38 million becoming refugees or internally displaced and persistent chaos across most of the Middle East to date. And, America's misguided maneuvering of the conflict in Ukraine as a battle between "autocracy vs. democracy" has effectively shut off every potential diplomatic window for a negotiated solution to the war, pushing it to a possible stalemate at an immense cost to the people of Ukraine and the world.

A truly global leader prioritizes peace above all else, even being readily willing and equipped to sacrifice self-interest for the sake of the greater global good. Lamentably, according to internal emails viewed by HuffPost, the State Department was initially discouraging diplomats working on Middle East issues from making public statements that imply the United States desires less violence, discouraging them from using three specific phrases in public statements: "de-escalation/ceasefire," end to violence/bloodshed" and "restoring calm."

The way the U.S., a preeminent geopolitical power in Middle Eastern affairs, entered into the fray, however, only added fuel to the fire of Israel's revenge instinct, emboldening Israel's currently fiercest far-right government to go ahead with its slaughter of Palestinian civilians, which has already claimed around 6,000 Palestinian lives, including more than 1500 children.

Initially, it was a fanatic display of brash proclamations from the top-echelon leaders across the U.S. political spectrum, such as equating the event as "Israel's 9/11" and referring to the conflict with Hamas as "Israel's religious war," which only fed Israeli leaders' genocidal rhetoric. Straight after, those were followed by actions that have only reeked, even to date, of U.S.'s one-sided support and solidarity for Israel – a defining trait of U.S. Middle East policy for decades.

Rather than demanding an immediate ceasefire, the U.S. vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a pause in the fighting to allow humanitarian assistance into Gaza. With the biased, entirely Israel-centric display of condemnation, uproar, and empathy, the U.S. made millions of Palestinians feel that their decades-long sufferings are something worth ignoring or, at most, taken for granted.

In sum, throughout the unfolding aftermath of the October 7 Hamas assault, America's words, actions, and approaches have only consolidated the question of America's perceived leadership, casting huge doubt on its claim that the United States purportedly stands for global peace and human rights. It has lost touch with the values it claims to uphold.

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