America has to intervene, like it or not

One thing, however, hasn’t changed: There is nobody else to play the American role.

No other power has the ability to move two aircraft carrier groups into nearby waters to warn off those who would expand the war. Russia and China have either lost some ability to shape events, or shied away from any attempt to do so. Britain and the European Union have a more immediate crisis in Ukraine to worry about. The United Nations, which played a role in de-escalating the 1973 crisis, is no longer a credible broker in the region.

That leaves the US as the indispensable player, whether it likes the role or not.

Isolationist America

President Biden’s trip to the region last week to show support for Israel and engage with Arab leaders about a long-term solution underlined the difficult path ahead. The Arab leaders jilted the president when an errant missile struck a hospital in Gaza — a tragedy Hamas blamed on Israel but that mounting evidence indicates was the result of a malfunctioning Palestinian weapon.

But many Americans may see their country’s central role in dealing with the unfolding drama as a curse as much as an opportunity. Three consecutive American presidents — Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Biden — have sought to decrease America’s involvement in the Middle East to better focus on the competition with China. An America that no longer is as dependent on oil from the Middle East has less reason to be involved, particularly considering that Arab leaders’ interest in the Palestinian problem also appears to have waned. Polls suggest isolationist sentiment in America is rising.

Yet the Middle East keeps drawing America back in. Its deep commitment to Israel is the main driving force but economic factors lurk in the background. Though the US is no longer as dependent on oil from the region, the global economy certainly is, and a conflict between Palestinians and Israel that expands into a region-wide conflict would imperil both oil supplies and global shipping routes.

In trying to head off such a nightmare, Biden and his team face significant obstacles. Whereas Egypt launched the 1973 war in an attempt — a successful one — to force the opening of peace negotiations with Israel, Hamas has little interest in coming to an accommodation. Its mission is to see Israel destroyed — a position that hardly invites diplomatic solutions of the kind American diplomats are used to pursuing. Hamas’s relationship with its sister Palestinian group in Lebanon, Hezbollah, makes diplomacy trickier and the risk of a regional war is rising.

Moreover, while the Biden administration has influence over Israel it hardly has control over Israeli decision-making. That means there could be tension soon over Israel’s tough tactics in Gaza, and perhaps more so when America tries to move beyond the initial effort to punish Hamas and into the trickier business of finding a stable solution to the aspirations of the Palestinian people.

There’s also the reverse risk: that Biden’s embrace of Israel in this fight has been so strong that he has lost his ability to be seen as anything approaching a fair arbiter.

Russian intervention

Beyond that, Russia may seek to undermine American effectiveness along the way. In recent years, President Putin had been trying to build a productive relationship with Israel and make himself a bigger player in the region. He and Binyamin Netanyahu worked together to reduce the threats to Israel coming from a hostile government and militant groups in Syria, where Russia has stationed troops.

But that spirit of co-operation began to evaporate with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. With his military effort in Ukraine faltering, Putin has sought out military gear from Iran, Israel’s mortal enemy and the main backer of Hamas. Indeed, Putin today is, if anything, dependent on Iran, given how important Iranian drones have become to Russian troops fighting in Ukraine. As a result, Israel has little reason to see Russia as a neutral arbiter. Ironically, then, while Putin initially envisioned the Ukraine invasion as a way to begin restoring Russia’s role as a big-time international player, it has had the opposite effect in this crisis by limiting his ability to manoeuvre.

Worse for America, Putin has an incentive to stoke the Israeli-Hamas conflict rather than help to settle it. Israel’s fight is distracting the US from the struggle in Ukraine and increasing Israel’s need for American military equipment, forcing Congress to decide whether it can afford to continue helping Ukraine when also spending millions of military aid dollars in Israel. A leadership tussle among Republicans that has paralysed the House of Representatives has added further complication.

China, meanwhile, has been trying to turn itself into a bigger player in the Middle East in recent years too — as part of its efforts to show that it’s a global power on a par with America. Chinese diplomats hosted talks between Iran and Saudi Arabia earlier this year, leading to a resumption of diplomatic relations between those two long-hostile nations.

Yet when the fight between Hamas and Israel broke out, China essentially ran for cover. Its foreign ministry issued bland statements calling for an end to violence — statements that infuriated Israel by failing to condemn Hamas’s invasion and the brutality of its fighters. It took President Xi 12 days to make a public statement.

Fear of Iran

Economic interests may explain the Chinese approach. Beijing remains deeply dependent on Gulf oil, and has worked hard to foster trading relationships with the region’s wealthy Arab states, all of which are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. All that appears to leave the Chinese interested in being a player — but not one willing to take the risks needed to play that role now.

So the work falls to the US. The risks include a particularly subtle one for Biden. Crises in the Middle East have a way of preoccupying a White House and distracting its attention. For President George HW Bush, the first Gulf War against Iraq became his principal preoccupation for a long period. Even though that conflict ended in a rousing success in early 1991, Bush found the domestic economy had stagnated along the way, leaving voters dissatisfied. He lost his bid for re-election 20 months later.

Internationally, the risks of American failure in managing this crisis also are high. If American influence is shown to be waning, the void might be filled by Iran, a state more implacably anti-western and anti-American than the old Arab hardliners ever were, and perhaps even by Iran’s new friend Putin, who has proven himself a bolder and more dangerous risk-taker than the aged Soviet leaders of 1973.

Still, Biden is probably engaged in the Gaza problem for the long haul. “When it comes to the day after this war ends, if Hamas has been defeated to the point where its military infrastructure has been destroyed and its leadership decapitated, it is only the US that can mobilise a response internationally to create an interim administration addressing civil, police and reconstruction needs,” says Dennis Ross, an experienced Middle East negotiator for several American administrations of both parties. “Again, no else can do it.”

It also may be, of course, that nobody else wants the job.

Gerald F Seib served as executive Washington editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and is a senior mentor at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies