US pairs military action with diplomacy in effort to reshape Middle East
Biden administration seeks to roll back Iranian influence by resolving Gaza conflict, pushing Israel-Saudi normalisation and establishing a Palestinian state.
The US is facing monumental challenges as it deepens its diplomatic and military involvement in the Middle East to try to bring an end to the brutal war in Gaza and roll back Iranian influence.
As Secretary of State Antony Blinken heads on his fifth visit to the Middle East since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the US goal is to secure a sustained pause in the fighting and the release of around 130 hostages still in Gaza, a crucial step for advancing its more ambitious objectives.
On the military front, the US has sought to buy time for its diplomacy by keeping Iran’s proxies at bay, a mission that led Friday to the Biden administration’s strongest response to date against Tehran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria that was followed with strikes against the Houthis in Yemen the next day.
The administration’s effort faces formidable obstacles, not least the demanding compromises it would require on all sides.
What is clear is that the Middle East, which the White House hoped could be subordinated to higher priorities involving China and Ukraine, has now emerged as the most urgent challenge for American foreign policy.
“The Gaza war, like any war, creates opportunities for changing approaches to a longstanding conflict,” said Martin Indyk, a former US special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and ambassador to Israel. The Biden administration now recognises “that it cannot achieve its strategic objectives in the Middle East without developing a more sustainable approach to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.
Just last spring, the Biden administration was on a substantially different path. Its strategy had been to encourage an Israeli-Saudi rapprochement on the assumption that Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza had limited leverage and would eventually accept the self-governing arrangements that might be offered.
Anticipating no major military challenges, the administration also shrunk the US defence footprint in the region
“Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan wrote in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine. That article was submitted for publication shortly before Hamas’s October attack on Israel and was later amended online.
With the Gaza casualty toll roiling the region, the US strategy now calls for addressing the Middle East peace conundrum by giving priority to the Palestinian issue, experts on the region say. Advancing the Palestinians’ prospects for a state of their own has become a prerequisite for pursuing Israeli-Saudi normalisation and with it the hope of fostering a broad anti-Iran alignment in the region.
“War brings opportunity,” said Frank McKenzie, the retired Marine Corps general who led the US Central Command, which oversees US forces in the Middle East. “And there is opportunity here, if we are able to grab it.” With US election-year politics in high gear, progress toward a Palestinian state and an end to the fighting in Gaza could enable the White House to respond to critics on the Democratic left who have complained that the Biden administration has been too sympathetic to Israel by not threatening to reduce military support. But a collapse of the diplomatic effort could hurt Biden’s prospects, including in Michigan, which has a large Arab-American population.
The challenges for a diplomatic breakthrough include securing the co-operation of Israel, whose prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared his opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The administration must also maintain Saudi support, which will likely require completing a US-Saudi defence treaty and securing its ratification in the Senate.
The Palestinian Authority will need to be reformed so it can help govern the West Bank and Gaza with support among the Palestinian public. Even if that happens, deep-seated fears on all sides will need to be surmounted given that many Israelis remain wary of empowering a Palestinian state after the Hamas attack on Israel.
“You need to reconcile what is an Israeli fear that a Palestinian state would inevitably be dominated by Hamas or a Hamas-like group, with the Saudi, Emirati and broader Arab need to see that a Palestinian state actually gets realised,” said Dennis Ross, a former senior US official on the Middle East.
“The pieces are all there for a bigger strategic move,” said Ross, who is now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Washington think tank. “The greatest challenge is how do you put that together.” Blinken’s trip to the region is focused on laying the groundwork for that move by securing an agreement to free the hostages, which would provide breathing space for the more ambitious diplomacy.
Sullivan said Sunday that the Biden administration was pressing hard for a deal that leads to the release of the hostages, which includes Americans, as well as a pause in the fighting that would facilitate the delivery of aid to Gaza.
“It’s a paramount priority for us,” Sullivan said of a potential hostage deal on CBS’s Face the Nation.
“The Israeli government can answer whether it’s a paramount priority for them.”
All this is being done as the US and its allies have been carrying out military strikes against Iran’s proxy forces aimed at preventing them from attacking American troops, blocking international commerce in the Red Sea and disrupting the US diplomatic effort.
On Friday, the US struck more than 85 targets in far western Iraq and eastern Syria as it sought to destroy stores of missiles, rockets and drones that have been used to attack US troops.
Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said that the Friday strike was the largest military action the US has launched against Iranian proxies in Syria and Iraq since the Iraq war.
“From the perspective of these proxies and Iran itself, they are engaged in a long-term attritional struggle against the US,” Lister said. “For now at least, this looks more like a hiccup along the road for them.” The administration’s calculation is that its combination of diplomacy and hard power might provide Washington with leverage in a region that has often proved stubbornly resistant to US initiatives.
“Can it work?” said Indyk. “Quite a challenge but I give Biden and his advisers full credit for attempting to seize the opportunity and create a paradigm shift of strategic consequence. It’s just going to need a lot of co-operation from a bunch of uncooperative players.”
The Wall Street Journal
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