For nearly a year, one of President Joe Biden’s top priorities has been to prevent the Gaza war from spiraling into an all-out regional conflict.
Weeks ahead of an election — and just as Biden begins his farewell visit to the UN General Assembly — Israel is pounding Lebanon, highlighting the powerlessness of his warnings.
Biden, meeting the leader of the United Arab Emirates on Monday, insisted that his administration was still “working to de-escalate” in coordination with counterparts.
But events have quickly moved out of US control. Last week, when pagers exploded across Lebanon targeting the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia, the United States said it had no foreknowledge of the operation widely attributed to Israel and appealed for calm.
Israel instead quickly stepped up its attacks, saying it has hit 1,000 Hezbollah sites over the past 24 hours. Lebanese authorities said 492 people died, including 35 children, on Monday.
Nearly a year after a Hamas attack traumatized Israel and prompted a relentless intervention into Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brushed aside warnings of dangers and said Israel’s goal was to change the “security balance” in its northern neighbor by preempting threats.
The operation came after weeks of painstaking US-led diplomacy to reach a Gaza ceasefire failed to seal a deal, with Netanyahu insisting on an Israeli troop presence on the Gaza-Egypt border, and a dispute with Hamas on the release of prisoners.
Michael Hanna, director of the US program at the International Crisis Group, which promotes conflict resolution, said that US diplomats had based efforts for calm in Lebanon on reaching a Gaza ceasefire.
The Gaza truce effort “looks like it’s at a dead-end, and efforts to decouple the two — to reach an agreement between Hezbollah and Israel while the war in Gaza continues, has also proven to be a dead-end,” he said.
Political calendar
Complicating matters is the US political calendar, with Biden’s heir Kamala Harris locked in a tough race against Donald Trump in November 5 elections.
While Biden and Harris would be eager to avoid all-out war and the impression of chaos, few believe that the US administration would take major steps against Israel, with the political risks involved, so close to the election.
“It is not particularly far-fetched to imagine that the US political calendar may have played into Israeli decision-making on when to expand” into Lebanon, Hanna said.
James Jeffrey, a former US ambassador to Iraq and Turkey who takes a hard line on Iran, said that US policymakers instinctively promoted ceasefires but that Netanyahu, like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, was more concerned about his country’s security.
“We are already in a regional war and have been for the past 20 years,” said Jeffrey, now at the Wilson Center in Washington.
“Iran is now being pushed back and has lost one of its major proxies at least for the moment — Hamas — and another, Hezbollah, is under stress,” he said.
Netanyahu “has prioritized restoring deterrence and regaining military superiority over anything like pleasing Washington and the international community,” he said.
US support for Israel
Biden has repeatedly voiced concern to Netanyahu over the plight of civilians in Gaza but has mostly held off on using the ultimate US leverage — withholding the billions of dollars in US military aid to Israel.
The Pentagon on Monday said that the United States would send additional troops to the Middle East, a move taken by Israel as a sign of US commitment to its ally if the conflict escalates further.
Also potentially emboldening Israel has been Washington’s muted responses to actions attributed to Israel including the assassination of the Hamas political chief as he visited Tehran in July for the inauguration of the new president, Masoud Pezeshkian.
Pezeshkian, visiting the United Nations, accused Israel of seeking a wider conflict and said Iran had shown restraint due to Western confidence a truce could be secured in Gaza.
“They kept telling us we are within reach of peace, perhaps in a week or so,” Pezeshkian, considered a reformist within the theocracy, told reporters in New York.
“But we never reached that elusive peace.”
