“Look, I don’t believe there is going to be an all-out war,” Biden told reporters that same week. “I think we can avoid it.”
It is an open question, though, how something that certainly seems to be underway already could somehow be avoided.
A regional conflict could always escalate further, growing more catastrophic and protracted, especially if Iran and Israel intensify their confrontation. If the U.S. goal is to avoid such a scenario, then the better question is “how.”
The Biden administration is relying on the same approach that helped march the world to its current precipice. There are obvious limits to U.S. influence, but it cannot — or will not — apply whatever leverage it has left, specifically in its unconditional aid for Israel. The presidential election undeniably makes a shift even more difficult for Biden, but the awkward timing amplifies the administration’s policy failures since last year. All of which makes it hard to see how the U.S., or anyone else involved in this conflict, could avert the all-out catastrophe that is already unfolding in the Middle East.
“We’re on the brink of war – a regional, full-fledged, open-ended, direct war between Iran and Israel,” said Bilal Y. Saab, Head of the U.S.-Middle East Practice at TRENDS Research & Advisory. “It all now depends on how the Israelis choose to respond to the Iranian attack.”
If It Looks Like an All-Out War…
Israel has renewed operations in northern Gaza, potentially trapping hundreds of thousands Palestinians in an active war zone. Netanyahu has threatened Lebanon with suffering and destruction “like Gaza,” an explicit promise of collective punishment for Lebanese civilians despite boasting of Israel’s success in degrading Hezbollah. Israeli citizens are also sheltering from cross-border rocket attacks from Hezbollah and Hamas. Both the U.S. and Israel have struck Houthi targets in Yemen. Israel is also bombing Syria, conducting at least 17 strikes there since October 1. On Wednesday, Israel struck an apartment building in Damascus, killing at least seven civilians in an attempt to take out one Hezbollah weapons smuggler.
The Syrian strike was close to Iran’s embassy in Damascus, and it was unclear whether it was an opening to Israel’s expected response to Iran’s ballistic missile barrage last week.
Iran’s salvo was the largest since April, the last time it looked like Israel-Iran might be on the brink of a war. But back then, Iran telegraphed the attack, Israel and its allies deflected it, and the U.S. encouraged Israel to take the win. But a lot has changed since then, most notably Israel’s dismantling of Hezbollah’s leadership. Netanyahu is now emboldened, escalating in Lebanon to fully take down the infrastructure of Hezbollah, which was the most valuable player in Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance,” the network of militias and proxies Iran uses to confront the U.S. and Israel in the region.
This apparent success may push Israeli leadership to see debilitating Iran as an opportunity it cannot pass up. Hardline voices in Israel (and exactly who’d you expect in the U.S.) are pushing for a more aggressive strike, potentially on Iran’s energy infrastructure, or an even more sensitive target, like Iran’s nuclear facilities. “We must act *now* to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, its central energy facilities, and to fatally cripple this terrorist regime,” former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett wrote on X Tuesday. “The octopus’s tentacles are temporarily paralyzed — now comes the head.”
If Israel targets Iran’s critical infrastructure, whether oil refineries or nuclear infrastructure, or even Iranian leadership, that is “certainly going to lead to a forceful response from the Iranians,” Saab said. “At that point, it would be incredibly difficult for any president, politically speaking, to stay on the sidelines.”
That escalation could explode into that full-fledged war between Israel and Iran, which could pull the U.S. into a war to defend Israel. U.S. assets and troops – there are some 43,000 stationed in the region – could become targets for Iran and its proxies. In January, Iranian proxies killed three U.S. service members and injured dozens in Jordan; Iran de-escalated and cautioned restraint among those groups to avoid provoking the U.S. But the peril to U.S. troops still looms.
This would be a precarious situation at any time, but it is heightened by the extraordinarily tight U.S. presidential election. “The U.S. administration is not going to massively change support for Israel a month before an election. The U.S. is pretty locked into the support now,” Rosemary Kelanic, the director of Middle East Engagement at Defense Priorities, told reporters last week.
Biden’s policy toward Israel and Gaza has divided the Democratic Party, but Donald Trump and the GOP will exploit any whiff that Biden is not fully supporting Israel against Iran. Trump has framed the global chaos as a consequence of Biden’s weakness, and Kamala Harris, of course, is attached to this administration and its decisions. Trump has said Israel should “hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later,” but he gets to say insane things without having the consequences fall back on him. Instead, everything leads back to Biden, and Netanyahu may be keenly attuned to this political inertia – this may be the time, before Biden officially becomes a lame-duck president, to box the U.S. in.
The Biden administration also understands the risks of this escalation, and they have warned Israel against attacking energy infrastructure and nuclear facilities because they understand what it could unleash: oil prices spiking, American troops under threat, the U.S. engulfed in another Middle East war. “Do I have any confidence that the Israelis would entertain the American preference?” Saab said. “No, because we’ve been telling them what not to do for months now, and not at any juncture did they actually respect our wishes.”
Exactly how far Israel can go in defiance of U.S. wishes is also a bit murky. Israel may still need a lot of American help and coordination to fully take out something like Iran’s nuclear facilities, but Israel likely does have the capabilities to inflict a great deal of damage on their own — which is why U.S. officials remain on edge. Yet some experts thought Israel would not risk going it alone here.
“I don’t think we’ll go after the nuclear capacities. I don’t think that’s within the scope of where Israel is at the moment,” said Nimrod Goren, senior fellow for Israeli Affairs at the Middle East Institute (MEI). “It is expected that it needs to be so closely coordinated with the Americans, for whom the main objective is preventing the regional war.”
On Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant reportedly said Israel’s retaliation will be “deadly, precise, and above all, surprising.” “Iran,” he added, “would not understand what happened and how it happened, they will see the results.” Gallant abruptly postponed a meeting in Washington with the U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, which was supposed to go over Israel’s response. Yet President Biden and Netanyahu did speak Wednesday, apparently – wildly — their first phone call since late August, an entire invasion ago. Kamala Harris was reportedly also on the call. The White House called it “productive” and “direct.”
What Now?
Israel is going to retaliate against Iran. Even if it does not take the most dangerous gamble of going after Iran’s critical or nuclear infrastructure, that may just postpone the risks of all-out-escalation until the next miscalculation or provocation.
As Israel wages a largely unrestrained multi-front war and attempts to rebalance power in the Middle East, Iran will also recalibrate, even if it’s not clear how just yet. Will it reinvest and rebuild and remake proxy networks like Hezbollah? Will it shift its security strategy, instead focusing on its own capabilities – including, potentially, its nuclear program? Nasrallah’s death prompted Iran to launch its most brazen attack on Israel, and though Israel said it intercepted most missiles, some intelligence analysts noted dozens of direct hits on military targets, showing Iran was capable of penetrating Israeli defenses and could do real damage. A war with Iran will look different than a war with Hamas or Hezbollah.
And Israel has no plan for what happens after this war, which increases the chances it finds itself in a protracted conflict or occupation in what is left of the places it is destroying. Civilians, thousands and thousands of them, are suffering, starving, dying, furious. Israel may seek to reshape security in the Middle East, and it may – but as the U.S. could probably tell it, it comes with costs and mostly bad outcomes.
The U.S. has remained ironclad in its defense of Israel, even as Israel’s decisions put its own troops at risk. Israel’s repeated failure to inform the U.S. of its plans – including its strike on Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader – has angered U.S. defense officials, as it leaves them unprepared to reposition American troops who might be more vulnerable to retaliation. Though the U.S. and Israel are reportedly closer to an agreement on the Iran response, Israel had been cagey on its Iran plans.
Yet the U.S. weapons and cash still flow. These may be the only real levers the U.S. has left and it’s not going there. Of course, even if the U.S. cut off the arms spigot tomorrow, it would not halt the war, and it would not disentangle the U.S. from this conflict. But the U.S. would be following international law, which it once believed in upholding, and its own laws on weapons transfers.
Some experts I spoke to did not think Israel would take the most escalatory approach against Iran, while others worried that the chances to prevent such an escalation were already vanishing. Even if Israel and Iran avoid an open confrontation this time, Israel’s multi-front war is not ending. It is intensifying, with explicit U.S. support. The months of death and destruction in Gaza did not motivate the U.S. to change course, and now Washington looks willing to gamble its security and more civilian lives in Israel’s attempt to destroy Hezbollah, and by extension, weaken Iran. As Saab grimly put it, you might “need some kind of escalation to get into de-escalation.”
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