America is making the Middle East much more unstable.
Hezbollah's worsening attacks on northern Israel show U.S. defense credibility has reached a nadir. Frankly, it is pathetic. Israel bears some responsibility, too.
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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
America’s feeble deterrence has contributed to bringing Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon to the brink of full-scale war.
To prevent such an outbreak, the U.S. needs to get its sheriff’s swagger back — and fast.
It is fine for the U.S. to think that Israel has the right to defend itself but that it should avoid actions that would cause a full-scale war. Saying it, however, is stupid.
The U.S. should be saying that it backs Israel fully and will help it destroy Hezbollah if it keeps attacking Israel and does not retreat from the border. It should make no mention of being worried about a wider conflict. To Hezbollah, and its Iranian paymasters, this worry smells like fear. It encourages them to keep pushing their luck.
There was a moment when the U.S. could have restrained Hezbollah but, true to form, President Joe Biden blinked, and this crisis has percolated since then. After the October 7th attacks, Biden sent two aircraft carrier groups to the Middle East to deter Israel’s enemies from joining Hamas’ attack on Israel. This powerful show of force worked somewhat, but it could have achieved much more.
It sent a clear message to other countries and regional militia not to join Hamas’ ground attack on Israel. To this extent, it worked. However, it did not stop Hamas from beginning on October 8th what has been nine months of rocket fire at Israel, calibrated so as not to trigger a major war.
What would have happened if America had unleashed a few bombing waves from those carriers on Hezbollah to make them stop their attacks on Israel back then?
Counterfactual histories can never be known, but there is a high chance the U.S. could have put Hezbollah back in its box. That was the moment. That was America’s chance to make Iran and its proxies the ones scared of a bigger conflict. The Iranians would have helped rein Hezbollah in more, too, for fear of the U.S. destroying its most powerful proxy militia and a key pillar of its defense strategy.
This failure has normalized Hezbollah attacks on Israel. Consequently, Hezbollah fires about 20 rocket and missile attacks per day on northern Israel, setting swathes of forests ablaze and displacing about 80,000 Israelis. Hezbollah’s disgusting murder of 12 children on a football field in the Golan Heights last than two weeks ago has been the latest outrage. Jerusalem has lost control of the north.
This should never have been tolerated.
President Joe Biden does not understand that strength is the only political currency in the Middle East. The U.S. might think its approach is reasonable — and maybe it is — but theocrats and dictators will do whatever they can get away with and take whatever they can. They become reasonable only when the alternative is defeat and destruction.
Instead, America got weak knees and let Israel and Hezbollah engage in months of strikes on each other. The U.S. has worsened the situation by trying to talk both sides down. It has told Hezbollah that it cannot constrain Israel, and it has told Israel, that while U.S. support is ironclad, it would not be able to repeat the kind of defense it helped arrange against the Iranian missile attack in April because Hezbollah has about than 130,000 missiles and is much closer to Israel.
The U.S. may be making a technical military point here, not a political one, about the reality of defending Israel against Hezbollah, but what do tribal Middle Eastern leaders hear when Biden says this? They hear the U.S. fears a war, and it emboldens them to agitate even further.
This foreign policy debacle has been more than a decade in the making. America’s deterrence credentials have been in the trash since President Barack Obama did nothing in 2012 when Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad crossed Obama’s “red line” and used chemical weapons on his own people in the country’s civil war.
Biden, who was vice president in Obama’s Administration, has continued this failed approach by appeasing Iran by allowing billions of dollars in oil revenues to flow to it for minor concessions. Iran is now on the cusp of having nuclear weapons and has proxy armies in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Syria, and the Palestinian Territories.
Biden’s latest weakness is his constant pressuring of Israel to reach a ceasefire deal with Hamas in Gaza. Every time the U.S. increases pressure on Israel about this, Hezbollah increases its attacks. This has created the perverse situation in which Israel’s ally, the United States, and its enemy, Hezbollah, are pressuring it for a ceasefire.
Silly old me. I thought Israel’s allies were meant to take some of the pressure off the Jewish state.
America’s appeasement policy towards Iran, under Biden and Obama, has been an abject failure. The region is now paying the price and so is U.S. credibility. The U.S. and its European allies cannot even deter Yemen’s Houthis — another crazed Iranian Islamist proxy — from firing drones at ships in the Red Sea, and even at Israel directly. Given the Houthis cannot even control half of Yemen, this is feeble.
To be fair to Biden, he does have a strategic vision, and it is a good one. The future is a Sunni Arab-Jewish alliance, under a U.S. defense umbrella, to thwart Iran and its proxies.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even outlined this in his recent speech to the U.S. Congress, which seemed tailored for more Saudi Arabian ears than American ones. The normalization of ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel appears only a matter of time, following the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco normalizing ties in the Abraham Accords.
The potential of this Sunni-Jewish alliance was on display in April when six countries banded together to shoot down 300 Iranian missiles and drones fired at Israel. The real significance is that this proposed alliance sets up a different view of the Middle East.
It posits that the region is no longer a battleground between Muslim Arabs and Jews, but one between moderation and modernity and an extreme Islamist death-cult ideology. The Palestinians are yet to figure out which side of this they are going to be on.
Biden’s mistake has been his acceptance of all manner of outrages by Iran and its proxies in the desperate hope of getting a grand deal — a Gaza ceasefire, Israel-Saudi normalization, U.S.-Saudi defense pact, and a path to Palestinian statehood — done before the region blows up fully.
He should have been doing the opposite, being uncompromising so that negotiations do not take place against a background of chaos. Iran benefits from this chaos; it is why it creates it.
Israel bears some responsibility, too. It should never have allowed Hamas to entrench itself in Gaza so deeply, and it should never had allowed Hezbollah to build a large, mechanized army on its border.
Seduced by the effectiveness of its Iron Dome missile defense system, Israel let rocket attacks on it become acceptable just because it could shoot most of them down. There has been no policy of credible deterrence and, as October 7th showed, no one was deterred.
Israel needs to reestablish effective deterrence, which it appears finally to be doing with the reported killing of vile Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah’s most senior military officer, Faud Shukr, in Lebanon. Israel is showing its enemy’s leaders that it knows where they are, and that it can hit them anywhere, even in the Islamic Republic.
U.S. deterrence credibility is under a cloud for other reasons, too. The U.S. presidential election is fewer than 100 days away, admittedly an eternity in this bizarre and action-packed campaign, and neither candidate gives much confidence.
Democratic presidential candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris would, at best, continue the Democrats entrenched foreign policy weakness. At worst, as the party’s most Left-wing candidate ever, she could make it even weaker, especially with regard to Israel.
The Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump, brings other problems. He might well be better for Israel in the immediate term, and hopefully take a tougher line. However, his isolationist instincts are worrying, as are those of his vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance, which must be factored in, given that Trump is 78 years old.
Isolationism brings problems. It would involve the U.S. choosing what parts of the world in which to get involved. Such a calculus will always be fickle. Today, the U.S. supports Israel strongly, tomorrow it might be only a little. This keeps all U.S. allies awake at night. Isolationism will also reduce American global power. Once that kind of rot sets in, the U.S. will wield less influence even when it does choose to intervene or help its allies.
This is why Israel must be responsible for its own defense and security, even as it maintains strong alliances and builds new ones. Israel must increase its defense self-sufficiency, diversify its military supply sources, and reduce its reliance on the U.S.
The Americans, for their part, need to regain a backbone.
A lot of ink is spent telling Israel what it "should" do and not much on the "how." I keep hearing that her enemies are moving equipment and forces in preparation for attack and Joe Biden said yesterday that this is the last time that America will come to Israel's defense. Oh, really? It all reminds me of the old Yogi Berra quip; "It's deja vu all over again." Can anyone say, "May, 1967?" Here is the scenario of the "how". Israel is already at war with all of the bad actors in the region. Is it required that they accept more punishment before it is OK to get serious? While the enemy is preparing and perhaps not yet quite ready (i.e., forward weapons placement, radar installation, rocket launchers), a full scale attack on weapons convoys, critical installations, and critical personnel is more than justified. If a wider war will happen anyway, may as well take advantage while you can. I hate to say it, but Israel is on its own until smarter heads prevail.
You write your piece without mentioning Europe, which is less than 200 Miles from The Middle East at the nearest point. Now, if Muslims in Europe are further Radicalised, and emboldened to Islamist Terrorism by a Nuclear Iran, then this threatens Europe too, as well as Israel and The USA. Full surveillance of these Islamists, now active in Europe, happens for this reason. Israel is vital for the security of Europe too.