When mayhem erupts in the Middle East, the Biden Administration reflexively reaches for the band-aid of a ceasefire as if a small strip could staunch a hemorrhage. For months, the U.S. has invested in a hapless Hamas deal. Yet Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, resembles the horse in Animal Farm, who pledges after each setback: “I shall work harder.” A U.S. official just confided to the Wall Street Journal: “No deal is imminent. I’m not sure it ever gets done.”
Surely not in the weeks to come, as Israel has turned against Hezbollah, which began to rain missiles on the country’s North right after the Hamas massacre of 1,200 on October 7. Yet old reflexes don’t die. “We don’t believe,” NSC spokesman John Kirby told Israelis, that “escalating is in their best interest.”
The handwringing stretches from Washington to the UN General Assembly. Yet neither Hamas nor Hezbollah is the real problem. Nor are the Houthis far South, who want to close down the Red Sea, a premier global shipping lane.
The real problem is Tehran. "The Three H" are not autonomous actors, but stand-ins for Iran, America’s mightiest enemy in the Greater Middle East. Iran has paid, trained, and armed them all. Let them fight and die for the greater glory of the Islamic Republic. The playbook is an easy read. Hit Israel, Washington’s only reliable ally, and wound the American giant it dares not take on directly. So, demoralize him to kick him off the Mideast chessboard.
The Biden Administration has oscillated between conciliation and modest power gestures. Now, Israel has taken matters in its own hands. The opening move was “Paging the Party of God.” The exploding beepers and walkie-talkies injured some 3,000 Hezbollah operatives. Then the army (IDF) doubled down with a deadly attack on Hezbollah’s top brass and the relentless bombing of its armories.
These strikes are part of an offensive to restore deterrence and make Northern Israel safe for tens of thousands who have escaped inland. Galilee’s Kiryat Shmona is a ghost town. In addition to deterrence, the IDF has moved two divisions to the Lebanese border.
Cynicism, a hallmark of the Middle East, is warranted. Washington might be secretly grateful to Israel, which is doing America’s dirty work. By degrading Hamas and Hezbollah, the IDF weakens Iran, the mastermind, which seeks to weaken the U.S. Whatever talks a U.S. Administration might launch again, it won’t be All Quiet on the Mideast Front,” to borrow from the title of an Oscar-winning 1930 movie.
Antony Blinken might have lifted his eyes from the interminable talks with Hamas to take in the whole tableau. It shows the Middle East at its worst – light years away from the peace treaties between Jerusalem, Cairo, and Amman shepherded by the U.S. As in those cases, armistices work when the combatants are no longer willing or able to fight. Hence the Versailles settlement of 1919 with Germany and the Korean truce of 1953 that still holds today.
Yet Gaza and Lebanon show that no party has reached that point. Hamas has been decimated, but not vanquished, as its continuing missile fire demonstrates. Hezbollah still has a vast hoard of short and long-range missiles. And the IDF can raise more soldiers than Britain or France. Hence count nobody out. None has lost the will and the means to fight.
Which raises an excruciating question: Why would Washington play the honest broker to Israel and Hamas – and perhaps Hezbollah? For the Bidenistas there is little more in this game than a pause, a final hurrah before January. The bitter reality: If a truce has not worked with Gaza’s “Islamic Resistance,” why would it with Hezbollah when both serve as the spearhead of Iran?
In this accursed region “war is us” has ruled since pre-Biblical times. Begin with the sideshow that is Gaza. It does not take a Westpoint graduate to measure the staggering cost of the six-week truce still on the table. These tend to persist for a while, and the price will be Hamas, rearmed and resurgent. And back to the future – to Politbureau member Ghazi Hamad after the massacre of 1,200 on October 7: “We will do it again and again!”
There goes the U.S. investment after the October 7 massacre. Great powers can afford to write off far bigger losses like Vietnam and Afghanistan with their death toll of 50,000. But any fighting pause, long or short, in Gaza or Lebanon, will not crack Washington’s most vexing problem, which, to repeat, is Iran. On the larger stage between the Levant and the Gulf, Hamas, and Hezbollah play but supporting roles. Iran writes the script and directs the action.
This story goes back to the fall of the Shah 45 years ago, a pillar of U.S. strategy. Jimmy Carter would not have dropped him if he could have peered into the future. After the Khomeinist takeover, he was rewarded with the 440-day occupation of the U.S. embassy. The hostages were sprung with a ransom of 50 tons of gold. It has gone downhill ever since.
Why keep trying with carrots and brittle sticks, given America’s bitter experience with Khomeinist Iran? On a mission from God, it is a revolutionary power. Unlike traditional players who just want a larger piece of the action, revolutionary actors can’t soothed with a bigger role or larger letters on the marquee. Not when the troupe is up against a want-it-all-the-spin – direction, theater, and cash register.
In the case of Iran, usurpation comes in three parts. One is subversion, get rid of the traitors to the true faith, all those potentates who cower behind America. Second, don’t confront this Goliath face-to-face; he might just start flailing. Third, push your proxies forward. Let them hit Israel, the “Little Satan,” to weaken and ultimately extrude the Great One.
Israel is the target of choice because the United States has no other confederate of weight. Turkey is a destructive force, unpredictable and spiteful. Cairo, Riyadh, Amman, and the “Gulfies” are net consumers of security Made in USA. They do fear Iran, which has turned Iraq into a quasi-fiefdom while pushing its tentacles into Syria and Lebanon. Still, America’s clients will not act on their angst.
They are too feeble to contain it the Mullahcracy. None of them will commit fully to Washington; they will balance and maneuver while crouching behind Mr. Big who underwrites their life insurance policy. To boot, Saudi Arabia plays footsie with Russia and China, America’s top global rivals.
What about Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who obsessively clings to power while posing as the one and only savior of the Jewish state? He is not a snuggly American bedfellow. Still, this desperate PM has strategic reason on his side when resisting ceasefires and American pressure to yield control over the porous border between Gaza and Egypt. As handmaiden of Iran, Hamas will again smuggle in hardware for the next assault. The same logic holds for a far stronger Hezbollah in the North. No, Israel cannot vanquish the “Party of God.” But it could deter it without a remake of the hapless occupation from 1982 to 2000.
U.S. brokered deals have never held. They will last as long as it takes Hamas and Hezbollah to rearm with Iran’s munificence unless Israel establishes reliable deterrence. This would serve American interests, as well. But the U.S. is stuck between incompatible goals: arm and support Israel while playing go-between.
Then why not attack the roots of the conflict said to be statehood denied to the Palestinians? Both justice and stability might be served. Hence resume America’s quest for a two-state solution. Yet neither Tehran nor its proxies want it. Nor do the Palestinians; they crave the whole piece. Nor does Israel want two states after so many spurned offers, the last one in 2008 – not to speak of the two repulsive settler parties in the current coalition.
Yet give American diplomacy its due. It did corral the “Gulfies” into the “Abraham Accords” and paved the way for peace between Israel and Egypt plus Jordan. Iran and its satraps are a different breed. They seek to extinguish the Jewish state. This is the meaning of “From the River to the Sea.” Plus thousands of lethal slogans.
If the Islamic Republic pushes its pawns forward, then the United States, in its own cold interest, should not want to hurt Israel. We do business with Bad Guys like Xi who wants to swallow Taiwan, hence a “one-state solution” for China. With all his flaws, Nasty Netanyahu heads the only democracy between the Med and the Himalayas. If his worst rival, defense minister Yoav Gallant, were to form a new government minus the vicious Right, this ex-general would not suddenly ditch Israel’s strategic imperatives.
So, why would the Biden Administration ignore American priorities vis-à-vis Iran? Apart from its global travails – Russia, China, a hostile UN – the answer is “democracy.” The same goes for Israel where hundreds of thousands have taken to the street to force a hostage-cum-ceasefire deal. In the U.S., democracy claims its due, as well. Israel is not exactly popular in the progressive part of the electorate. Any Democratic president must pay respect to his or her party’s left. So, play the honest broker.
This is democracy in action, the West’s most precious treasure. But icy strategic logic is not democracy’s forte this side of existential ordeals like World War II, which the U.S. entered only after Japan’s attack. None has put it better than George F. Kennan, the architect of Containment in the Cold War.
He likened the United States, indeed, any democracy, to a dinosaur. “He lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment. You have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed.” Kennan’s point: “It would have been wiser for him to have taken a little more interest in what was going on” to prevent calamity.
Iran is playing a long game, and it is smarter than Nikita Khrushchev who implanted nuclear missiles in Cuba in the Kennedy era. Tehran has a “bomb in the basement” with all the ingredients save weapons-grade uranium. But there is a heartening upside. Not taking the last step betrays salutary caution when up against nuclear-armed Israel and America.
So there is reassurance amidst mayhem. Deterrence does work. But it must be credible. This Administration seesaws between appeasement and power gestures like hitting proxy targets in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. Iran’s Supreme Leader is not impressed, savoring America’s pressure on its frontline confederate Israel.
Course, Washington is caught in many binds, seeking to satisfy all sides at home and abroad. But in the end, Forrest Gump had it right with his terse quip: “Stupid is as stupid does.” America’s problem is not the "Three H," but their master in Tehran who arms and directs them.
Distasteful as its current coalition is, Jerusalem remains America’s only forward bastion - shall we say “proxy?” It is what Prussia was to Britain in the 18th century, its “continental sword.” To blunt it is Ali Khamenei’s No. 1 priority on the way to Tehran’s hegemony.
Great powers like America need not take up arms. Credible deterrence will do against a foe who, for all his blood-curdling rhetoric, plays chess, not football. And he measures American might correctly. Yet great powers do not score with ambiguity. And lo, the Administration is regrouping. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has called the elimination of top Hezbollah commanders in an Israeli air strike a “good outcome.” While he still sees a “path of a ceasefire,” the U.S. is “not at a point right now to put something on the table.”
Kennan’s advice is still as fresh as it was a lifetime ago. “The United States has it in its power to increase the strains under which Soviet policy must operate, to force upon the Kremlin a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection” that will cause the “gradual mellowing of Soviet power.” Substitute Tehran for Moscow.
Distinguished Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, the author has taught international politics and security at Harvard, Stanford and Johns Hopkins.
