By destroying Gaza, Netanyahu is rebuilding a lost strategic art

Yemeni men protest in solidarity with the Palestinian people in the Houthi-controlled Yemeni capital Sanaa in January. Picture: AFP

The utility of extended deterrence as a key component of US security policy is under pressure on several fronts, but none more tellingly than in the Middle East.

In the Red Sea, for example, even as Washington and its allies attack Houthi missile and drone launching sites in Yemen, and interdict most of the ordnance launched by them, attacks against shipping continue.

US President Joe Biden has admitted that military action against Houthi targets has not stopped the attacks but that the military response from Washington will continue.

In years gone by the idea that Washington would be unable to stop a Yemeni sub-state actor from affecting an important element of global maritime trade would have been ludicrous.

But the world is not as it once was. With the relative certainties of the Cold War, deterrence presented a binary choice between the two nuclear superpowers – avoid direct conflict or risk a nuclear conflagration.

Proxy wars were still fought and won in Africa, while more conventional wars of unilateral intervention were fought and lost by both sides in Vietnam and Afghanistan respectively.

But the end of the Cold War has led to the atomisation of threats – many of these threat groups possess weapons and backing from powerful regional states that in some cases make them as capable as state-based actors.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Middle East, where improved military capabilities are combined with an ideological zealotry that makes normal cost-benefit calculations underpinning deterrence redundant. This makes it very difficult for Washington to achieve the type of deterrence on which long-term regional stability is often based.

People inspect damage following Israeli airstrikes in Khan Yunis, Gaza. Picture: Getty

The power differential in years past meant US intervention often (but not always) produced favourable outcomes with limited effort.

American intervention in 1958, for example, stabilised Lebanon in a short time at little cost, yet a quarter of a century later its intervention there amid a civil war and an Israeli invasion led to the death of 240 US marines in an attack on their barracks by an Iranian-backed suicide bomber. Washington withdrew its troops, having achieved nothing.

The rise of more capable ideologically motivated individuals and groups isn’t the only reason Washington’s ability to deter threat actors is not what it used to be.

If American intervention in the 1990 Gulf War that expelled Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait showed the benefits of US conventional military power, its ill-fated decision to invade Iraq in 2003 showed its limitations against a determined local force whose capacity to absorb losses surpassed that of Washington.

But more recent concerns over Washington’s political commitment to the judicious use of force in the region also has proved damaging to America’s ability to deter.

A key political component of deterrence is credibility – your opponents must believe that promises will be kept.

In a tough environment such as the Middle East where political leaders rarely change, outsiders are judged largely on their firmness and their commitment in the first instance, and their capabilities in the second.

The failure by Donald Trump as US president to respond to the 2019 drone and missile attack on the Abqaiq and Khurais oil facilities in Saudi Arabia was damaging to the view of Washington’s ability to deter attacks against its closest regional partners.

Riyadh expected a robust intervention against Iran, which it held responsible for the attacks, yet none was forthcoming. Saudi concerns over Washington’s reliability as a security partner increased as a result.

The US is not alone in facing this deterrence dilemma. Deterrence in the Middle East is a bit like one’s reputation – hard-won but easily lost, as Israel found out on October 7 last year.

Israel’s undeclared nuclear capability had been established to put an end to fears about its survival as a nation.

After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, attacks against Israel were limited and confined largely to Palestinian groups or from groups such as Hezbollah operating from Lebanon.

Reprisals normally were calibrated to reflect the nature of the attack and, with the exception of the 20-year occupation of southern Lebanon and the 2006 war in Lebanon, Israel’s technical superiority and relationship with the US were sufficient to ensure victory and hence deter its enemies.

Hamas’s attack on October 7 was dangerous for Israel because it punctured its sense of security and gave hope to its enemies that continued resistance was not futile. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza are designed as a demonstration to others in the region about the cost that will be extracted on those who plan similar actions in the future, rebuilding deterrence by destroying Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Picture: AFP

Of the regional players, though, it is Iran that has best learnt the art of deterrence. From its own history and from Israel it has learnt the value of nuclear ambiguity as a way to protect the integrity of the nation-state from its enemies. And it is an advantage-seeker of the first order, establishing strategic reach by building proxy relationships with coreligionists or groups that share common foes or lack friends.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon prompted the creation of Hezbollah, the US invasion of Iraq opened the door for Iranian influence on an unprecedented scale in its Arab neighbour, while the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen forced the Houthi Movement into Iranian arms.

Yemen's Houthis rebels seizing a cargo ship in the southern Red Sea last year.

Tehran invested in Syrian authoritarian leader Bashar al-Assad’s regime when all seemed lost for Damascus and it has long supported Hamas. Iranian support for the Alawi-led Assad regime, the Zaydi-dominated Houthi Movement, Sunni Hamas or the Shia Hezbollah and various Iraqi proxies shows that strategic utility counts for much more than ideological affinity in Tehran’s eyes.

Weak in conventional arms apart from its rocket forces, Iranian deterrence is predicated on having its proxies bear the lion’s share of the cost while Tehran accrues the benefit.

But Iran is facing its own deterrence challenge as Israel increasingly is targeting senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps officers outside Iran. Its strike on the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus on April 1 demonstrated Israel’s belief that in this deadly escalatory game, Iran will not seek to raise the stakes for fear of inviting more devastating attacks. Even Tehran’s deterrence effect has its limits.

Despite past missteps, however, it isn’t true that the US lacks the ability to achieve deterrence in the Middle East; just that it is a far more difficult proposition than it ever has been in the past.

A US carrier battle group, for instance, still has a regional deterrent effect in the way that Russia cannot, and China will not, exercise. And the way in which the US facilitated Iraqi forces against Islamic State in their country, and supported Syrian Kurdish forces in battling Islamic State in eastern Syria, was a remarkable demonstration of how to run a well-conducted, complex counterinsurgency campaign in a foreign country.

But the days of the US, or anybody else for that matter, deterring significant threat actors in the region simply as a result of their military presence and public political statements are gone. Nowadays it takes a much greater effort to achieve a lesser degree of deterrence than in the past. Degrading capabilities through military action is taking precedence over deterrence in the rather optimistic hope that the former will lead to the latter.

Some regional states are well aware of this and are already making plans for a less omnipotent, but still present, US. That is as it should be, but none has a deterrent capability to match that of Washington’s.

As maligned as it may be, Washington’s ability to degrade enemy capabilities, and to deter threat actors, is still significant – even if it is not the same as it was in the past.

Then again, the Middle East is a region where the perfect is often the enemy of the good, and this applies to deterrence as much as it does to many other security issues.

Rodger Shanahan is a Middle East analyst and former army officer.