The Middle East resembles nothing so much as an earthquake zone with multiple fault lines. This week, fighting increased sharply along one of those lines, Israel’s border with Lebanon, and more specifically, between Israel and Hezbollah. This in turn triggered activity along another fault line, as Iran, Hezbollah’s backer, retaliated by firing ballistic missiles at Israel, which has vowed to respond severely.
Less clear is what will come next, either along these particular fault lines or elsewhere in the region.
What made escalation all but inevitable were rocket strikes by Hezbollah against Israel in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7 last year. Israel evacuated about 60,000 citizens from the northern border to shield them from the risk of attacks similar to Hamas’, but the mounting exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and Israel made it impossible for them to return safely.
Illustration: Tania Chou
However, what enabled the emergence of this new front is that the situation in Gaza had reached something of a new equilibrium.
Over the past year, Israel has sharply degraded the military threat posed by Hamas. Between 10,000 and 20,000 of its fighters have been killed, with many of its leaders either assassinated or forced into indefinite hiding in Gaza’s labyrinth of tunnels. Israel determined that it could safely shift its focus to its northern border and Hezbollah.
What Israel has accomplished thus far against Hezbollah is impressive. First by detonating explosives implanted in pagers and walkie-talkies, then by targeted aerial bombardment, Israel decimated Hezbollah’s senior leadership, including Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s leader for more than three decades, and killed a significant number of Hezbollah fighters.
After Israel’s costly intelligence failures in the lead-up to the incursion in October last year, the attacks against Hezbollah have revived the Israeli security establishment’s prestige by demonstrating its continued ability to gain precise intelligence about enemy groups and exploit that intelligence in a decisive fashion. The belief that Israel and Hezbollah had reached a stalemate, with Israel sufficiently deterred from forceful action by Hezbollah’s ability to unleash a missile barrage against it, has been debunked.
Israel followed its covert operations and air attacks with a ground incursion into Lebanon of unknown extent and duration.
Also unclear is the purpose. Eliminating Hezbollah is impossible and occupation of large swaths of Lebanon would be ill-advised given Israel’s poor history with such undertakings.
Israeli policy seems designed more to discourage Hezbollah from further attacks, but this, too, might not be possible. Although Israel has seriously weakened the organization, it still maintains a sizeable fighting force, making it a dangerous foe, especially in any war fought mostly on its home turf.
At the same time, as Hezbollah installs new leaders, it must decide whether and how to respond to Israel. The more it retaliates, the more it will invite strong Israeli military action.
In short, it is far from clear where all this is leading.
One can sympathize with what Israel has done in Lebanon while criticizing what it has done, and failed to do, in Gaza. Hamas, like Hezbollah, is an Iran-backed terrorist organization that seeks Israel’s destruction, but that is where the similarities end. Hamas is a national liberation movement that has support from elements of the native Palestinian population. Hezbollah, by contrast, is purely an instrument of Iranian foreign policy, with little attachment to the aspirations of the Lebanese or Palestinian people.
Moreover, no country would countenance living with a threat that required tens of thousands of its citizens to vacate their homes. And the Lebanese government forfeits some of the normal advantages of sovereignty by failing to fulfill the obligation of ensuring that its territory is not used by terrorists to attack another country.
For its part, Iran has reacted to these attacks on what was perceived to be its strongest proxy by taking what could be the fateful step of attacking Israel directly.
I am frankly surprised that Iran did this, although its leaders might have felt compelled to do so lest they appear weak. Or they might have thought they could thread the needle by acting against Israel without provoking a meaningful military response.
However, Iran has now provided Israel with a justification to retaliate, for example by attacking nuclear sites and military targets, or even energy-related facilities central to its economy. Israel proved it could do so in April, in the aftermath of an unsuccessful Iranian drone and missile attack.
Striking Iran directly is something many Israelis would welcome, as they have grown weary of dealing with its many proxies. After years of indirect conflict, there is significant domestic support for “going to the source,” with the hope that doing so would persuade Iran to curtail its support for its proxies. Some even appear to believe such attacks could trigger events that would bring about the downfall of the Iranian regime.
Earlier this week, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said: “When Iran is finally free — and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think — everything will be different.”
Regime change cannot be ruled out, although it is far from likely, much less assured. It is also far from clear what sort of government might replace the current one. The current regime is more likely than not to weather whatever comes its way, find ways to attack Israeli and Western targets around the world, and, most consequentially, accelerate its efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
We might well be nearing a turning point in the Middle East. What we do not know is where that turn could take us.
Richard Haass, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a senior counselor at Centerview Partners.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS