US President Joe Biden’s Middle East policy hangs in the balance. Negotiations for a ceasefire in Gaza have reached a critical stage. Attacks by the Houthis in Yemen are snarling maritime traffic and straining the US Navy. Biden’s support for Israel remains strong, but after months of building tension, his relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is publicly devolving. As November approaches, a war that has had tragic humanitarian consequences is hurting the president’s standing with his progressive backers at home.
However, things can always get more complex — and uglier — in the Middle East, and they probably will. The war in Gaza could simply be the prologue to two additional crises, which could prove more disruptive still.
The first involves the risk of war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group. When those combatants clashed in 2006, southern Lebanon was devastated. Since then, Israeli officials have watched with alarm as Hezbollah — a first-class paramilitary force, akin to Hamas on steroids — has accumulated more advanced weaponry, reportedly including about 150,000 rockets.
Netanyahu’s government nearly struck Hezbollah pre-emptively after the attacks on Israel on Oct. 7 last year, for fear the group would exploit Israeli preoccupation with Hamas. The Israelis desisted, in part because Biden dispatched a powerful naval task force to show Israel — and everyone else — that the US had its back.
However, the deeper problem has not been solved.
Few Israeli citizens want to take the risk that Hezbollah could do to them what Hamas did to their compatriots in the south. Many communities in northern Israel have become ghost towns; tens of thousands of residents are living elsewhere or have simply moved away. Israel is facing a de facto reduction in its national territory, something no government, under Netanyahu or any plausible successor, can accept.
The result has been a violent back-and-forth, below outright war but inching closer to it. Hezbollah is using antitank rockets and other weapons to target Israeli soldiers and civilians. Israel is responding with strikes against Hezbollah’s military infrastructure, some of its key commanders and its Iranian backers. The most dramatic was the airstrike on April 1 that killed high-ranking Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps officials at Tehran’s consulate in Damascus — and brought ominous, if vague, threats of retaliation by Iran.
An all-out war between Hezbollah and Israel would be an order of magnitude more destructive than the conflict in Gaza. Because Hezbollah is Iran’s most critical ally, it could draw in Tehran, as well. Iran and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah have good reasons to avoid such a conflict, not least of which is the pounding the organization took in 2006. However, Nasrallah might not want to pull his fighters back to the Litani River in southern Lebanon, as Israel demands.
Count on this much: A crisis on Israel’s northern border is coming, probably once the heaviest fighting in Gaza is over and the Israeli government can turn its attention to other threats. Whether that conflict is settled by diplomatic compromise, of the sort Biden’s team aims to broker, or by force, as Israeli officials threaten, is not yet clear.
The second crisis also involves Iran, as does so much of the Middle East’s trouble. Iran, like Hezbollah, would prefer to avoid a full-scale face-off with Israel and the US, but that is partly because the “status quo” offers many advantages.
Chaos in the Middle East is impeding, if only temporarily, rapprochement between Iran’s key enemies: Israel and Saudi Arabia. It allows the Houthis, which Tehran armed and empowered, to bait and bleed the US. It also creates a smokescreen behind which Iran can push toward a nuclear bomb.
Some recent bobbing and weaving notwithstanding, Iran’s nuclear program is now so mature that Tehran could have enough highly enriched uranium for perhaps three nuclear weapons in as little as two weeks. Making a usable nuclear weapon would take longer, perhaps a year, and there is no hard evidence that Iran is taking the necessary steps.
However, concerns on this point are growing — last month the Guardian reported that “in recent months senior Iranian figures have questioned Tehran’s commitment to a solely civilian nuclear program.”
US Central Command head General Michael Kurilla says an Iranian bomb would “change the Middle East… forever.” It would give Tehran a nuclear shield behind which it could support proxies and coerce enemies. It would terrify leaders in Jerusalem, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and elsewhere. It would reshape regional power dynamics even if Tehran never fired a nuclear-tipped missile.
The US and Israel might soon have to decide whether to let Iran keep creeping toward the nuclear finish line or to stop it short using harsher measures, from stronger sanctions to military strikes.
The Biden administration has mostly gone quiet about the Iranian nuclear issue. Perhaps it is trying, behind the scenes, to negotiate some standstill arrangement. Or perhaps it has no good answers to a devilishly difficult challenge and is trying to focus on one problem at a time.
Whatever the case, it is wishful thinking to expect that an end of the war in Gaza would lead to any sustained regional decompression. More likely, it would usher in the dangerous next phases of a deep, protracted crisis of Middle Eastern security.
Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the Henry Kissinger distinguished professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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