Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your Tuesday foreign policy edition. I’m Julia Ioffe.

Tonight, new reporting on Biden’s damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t Israel policy and how it’s playing out inside the West Wing. Plus: One final reminder that tomorrow, May 29, at the French Embassy in D.C., Puck and Prime Video will host a screening of For Love & Life: No Ordinary Campaign. I’ll also interview the stars of the film and the filmmakers behind it. You can RSVP here.

But first…

• Catch-22 Ukraine policy: Russia continues to push westward, not just outside of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, but along the entire (very long) front. Every day brings news of another village captured by the Russian army, as well as deadly missile strikes on Kharkiv. Most of them seem to be deliberately targeting unmistakably civilian infrastructure. One double-tap strike last week killed 11 people, including a woman who was seven months pregnant, at a lakeside resort. Another, over the weekend, killed at least 18 people, including a 12-year-old girl, at a home improvement store. Hard to imagine the military value in bombing a Home Depot on a Saturday afternoon.

  Two weeks ago, Ukrainian officials were in Washington, trying to lobby the Biden administration to allow Kyiv to use the long-range weaponry America has provided, like ATACMS, to strike targets inside Russian territory. They were met, once again, with a “no.” But yesterday, the NATO parliamentary assembly voted to allow Ukraine to use Western-supplied weapons however it wants, including inside Russian territory. So… does this change anything for Ukraine and ATACMS? “Nothing,” a senior NATO official told me. “Long range is every country’s sole decision,” said a defense official from another NATO country. “Of course,” the official added, “many (including me) do not understand” the Biden administration’s stance.

• Thank you for your service?: It’s very hard to gauge public opinion inside Russia right now. People are terrified, making polling unreliable. Real journalism is, effectively, banned. Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been in prison for over a year, and a growing number of his Russian colleagues have been joining him. Elections are elaborately rigged, so there’s no real feedback to the system. But sometimes, something slips through.

  This past weekend, Putin’s ruling party, United Russia, held its primaries across the country ahead of local elections in the fall. And despite Vladimir Putin’s recent proclamation that veterans of Russia’s war in Ukraine should be the country’s “new elite,” almost all the fresh war veterans running this year lost—and lost badly. Many of them, according to the independent Russian outlet, placed dead last.

  So what does that mean? Hard to say. But my gut says it’s another subtle sign that the war isn’t as popular in Russia as the government would want us—and Russians themselves—to believe.

  I was surprised at the result, especially given how much the Kremlin propaganda apparatus has invested in glorifying the Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine as heroes that deserve every perk: loan forgiveness, huge payouts, preferential admission of their kids to college, etcetera. Russia’s war in Ukraine has been compared—accurately, I believe—to America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq: no one really wanted it, and most people pretty quickly realized it was a mistake, but once boots were on the ground and national pride was on the line, they didn’t want to actually lose. (Also, it didn’t affect life back home much.)

  Iraq War veterans were welcomed back with honor and almost immediately began winning elections, including Tulsi Gabbard, Tom Cotton, and Tammy Duckworth. Why is it different in Russia? Perhaps, given how many crimes returning Russian veterans commit, the population sees them not as heroes, but people to be feared and avoided. Anyway, who knows, but it’s an interesting little sign.

• Bad news for Bob Good: Earlier today, the hammer fell on embattled House Republican Bob Good, beginning with Donald Trump endorsing his Virginia primary rival, John McGuire, in what was clearly payback for Good backing Ron DeSantis in the G.O.P. presidential primary. On Truth Social, Trump wrote, “Bob Good is bad for Virginia, and bad for the USA.” (I’ll spare you the all-caps treatment.) Embarrassingly, this came on the heels of Good’s recent pilgrimage to New York, where he showed up outside the courthouse to support Trump during his criminal trial. McGuire, of course, was there, too.

  Then this afternoon, Marjorie Taylor Greene retweeted the Trump endorsement. She will also reportedly hit the trail with McGuire next week, having donated $1,000 to his campaign in March. But even before all this, outside groups aligned with former speaker Kevin McCarthy were spending big money against Good, and a slew of more establishment-oriented House Republicans have likewise been either campaigning against him or have donated to McGuire, including Austin Scott, Derrick Van Orden, fellow Virginian Jennifer Kiggans, and House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers.

  For now, the four other House members who endorsed DeSantis have yet to feel Trump’s wrath: Laurel Lee of Florida, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Rich McCormick of Georgia, and Chip Roy of Texas. Lee has yet to face her August 20 primary, but the other DeSantis endorsers breezed through their respective contests.

• Wrangling inside Texas G.O.P.: Meanwhile, with Texas voters heading to the polls on Tuesday, Roy endorsed Brandon Herrera over Tony Gonzales, the embattled establishment House Republican, in the Texas 23rd runoff. (In this case, the inciting incident appears to be Gonzales’s decision to rip Matt Gaetz and Good on CNN. )

  For almost two decades, the delegation has punched above its weight because Texas Republicans largely marched in lockstep. But those bonds have frayed over the last several cycles as wave after wave of retiring institutionalists were replaced by younger and more rebellious members. Roy, after all, succeeded uber-institutionalist Lamar Smith in 2019.

The answer, according to multiple administration officials and people close to the president’s national security team, seems to be: You can’t. Biden’s policy, which stems from his own deeply held views, has evolved with the war but has still managed to infuriate just about everyone. To wit: When Biden announced that he would be pausing a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel because of the civilian carnage in Gaza, absolutely no one was happy with the micro-adjustment. The left sneered that it was too little too late, and the right screamed that Biden was abandoning Israel during a time of existential danger. Senior officials and Biden advisors sighed: What could they do that wouldn’t precipitate this kind of bipartisan fury?

On some level, it’s always been impossible to navigate these issues. It’s why this decade-old Jon Stewart bit about trying to discuss Israel-Palestine only to get yelled at by everyone is still so painfully relevant. “I don’t think there’s a path that pleases everyone,” said a senior administration official who is frustrated with both the policy and the response to it. “This is an issue that’s going to alienate and even infuriate large swaths of America.”

For decades, after all, America has committed itself to a foreign policy of bipartisan support for Israel, with very few conditions. And, despite the loud criticism from progressives over the past few months, most polling indicates that a majority of Americans believe this is the right course of action. They still see Israel as a key ally—even if Americans do increasingly feel bad for the Palestinians—which means there’s only so much wiggle room any president has, let alone one who hails from a generation of American politics when unflinching allyship was an article of faith. “Joe Biden’s support for Israel is reflexive; it’s not analytical,” said a source close to the administration. “Once you commit to that, there are costs to departing from that that are just as big as there are to sticking with it.”

Then again, some of the administration’s policy positions are simply irreconcilable with the complex reality of the situation. How do you allow Israel to wage a war with American-made weapons while telling it to limit the number of civilian casualties when you know that Hamas is doing everything it can to maximize Palestinian casualties to further isolate Israel as a pariah state? How can you simultaneously appease critics on the left, who want you to cut off Israel entirely, and critics on the right, who want you to support Israel even more while disregarding the Palestinians, whom they see as terrorist sympathizers and unreliable narrators of their own demise?

“They’re trying to strike a balance between ensuring that Hamas doesn’t emerge from this war and reconstitute itself on the one hand, and, on the other hand, having the Israelis conduct the war in a way that minimizes the civilian loss of life and addresses humanitarian needs of the population,” said retired ambassador Dennis Ross of the Biden administration’s policy. “That’s a hard circle to square. These objectives are in and of themselves very hard to reconcile.”

That has all changed with the war in Gaza. There have been constant petitions, resignations, and—worst of all if you’re sitting on the N.S.C.—leaks, including those of classified information. Some administration officials tell me it’s the result of a deepening frustration with an insular policymaking process where only a select few trusted by Biden—Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Amos Hochstein, Brett McGurk—have true input.

But others ascribe the frustrations—and the leaks they spawn—to the unbridgeable divide outlined by Ross. When it came to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for example, there were internal disagreements on tactics, not on strategy. The question was more Should Washington send Kyiv ATACMS and F-16s? not Should we stop supporting Ukraine and agree with Vladimir Putin? Now, there are people in the administration who don’t like what they perceive as the president’s wavering on his commitment to Israel, and others who feel just as strongly that the president should abandon Israel entirely.

When the I.C.C. requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders, I’m told, some in the administration wanted to support the court’s request, while others demanded the U.S. return to the Trump policy of imposing sanctions on the court. How do you reconcile that? “The spectrum of policy debate is much wider and the views are much more fervently held,” said a second senior administration official, “and it leads to people becoming more radical in how they express those opinions.” (“[Biden] knows,” N.S.C. spokesman John Kirby told me when I called him for comment. “He’s not insensitive that there are many views and many opinions and there’s a lot of critique for everything he’s doing, but he believes that trying to do both things”—supporting Israel, an American ally, and getting aid to Palestinians, “who didn’t ask for this war”—“while being very candid with the Israelis, is still the right approach.”)

In other words, if people have such radically opposed and mutually incompatible policy proposals, and the president believes what he believes, how productive would a more inclusive policymaking process even be? And is it then surprising that those whose input is not included turn, as one senior administration official put it, to “policymaking by other means”?

“It’s inevitable that we’ll lose some people for a period of time,” said the second senior administration official of the progressives frustrated with Biden’s Israel policy. “Some percentage of them will come back. If the war ends anytime soon and we get into the period of rebuilding and reconstruction [in Gaza], then we get even more of them back. I don’t think we’ll get all of them back. And I don’t think we had all of them before.”

That’s a sentiment I’ve heard a lot from Biden officials: How many of the president’s critics on this issue were ever in his camp, or even winnable? Would Republicans really ever flip their vote to Biden because of his support for Israel? And of the young people fuming on college campuses, how many of them even vote? There’s still a weary optimism that progressives, young people, and voters of color will pull the lever for Biden when faced with the choice between the man who tried to follow through on his promise of a Muslim ban and another with whom they disagree but who at least hears them and responds.

But there’s also a grim acceptance in Bidenland that there simply won’t be enough time before the election for the images from Gaza to recede and other concerns to take a front seat. The I.D.F. recently said that they will need another six months to root out Hamas, ceasefire talks have broken down, and both Hamas and Netanyahu refuse to end the war. After eight months of this horror, there’s an increasing sense that some Biden voters have been lost for good. “It’s unusual for foreign policy to be a prism through which people are expressing their discontent about their own society,” said the source close to the administration. “The plight of the Palestinians has become a way to conjure up the way people of color are treated here—this crisis has become an emotional touchstone that no policy solution can really address because we’re now swimming in a soup that is in many ways about us. I don’t think ending the conflict in Gaza would solve it. The genie’s out of the bottle.”

Julia