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The fallout from Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks in Israel has rattled the US-led Middle East order.
Iran has carefully exploited the crisis, helping proxy militias stage unrelenting missile attacks on international commercial shipping and harass US and coalition forces.
The effect so far has been to bog down down the US Navy in the southern Red Sea (while the region’s real powder keg lies on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, between Israel and Hezbollah) and to foment a new diplomatic row that could threaten to dislodge the US military’s footprint in Iraq.
But as Iran demonstrated this week, things could get much worse.
Over the past week, the IRGC launched ballistic missiles into neighboring Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria and Pakistan — a nuclear-armed state — supposedly in response to two recent terror attacks carried out by the Islamic State group and Jaish ul-Adl in southeastern Iran.
It may have been an overstep, but the brazen act displayed just what the IRGC can do in response to perceived threats on Iran's territory from outside actors — militant groups or otherwise.
The Pentagon brushed off the strikes as “not precise,” but with some 30,000 American troops within range of Iran’s arsenal, senior officials admit they are watching closely.
Meanwhile, with the Iran nuclear deal in the dustbin as the Iranian government approaches weapons-grade uranium enrichment, White House officials have scrambled to cobble together the pieces of their pre-Oct. 7 approach into a more holistic regional strategy.
Middle East 2.0
Anchored by Saudi Arabia’s apparent willingness to continue on a path toward normalizing ties with Israel despite the devastation it has wrought in Gaza, the Biden administration is doubling down on a strategy that has paid dividends to the US for decades: entice Middle Eastern states into agreements that reduce the likelihood of war with Israel (regardless of whether those countries’ populations approve).
And for the first time, top administration officials this week publicly linked Palestinian statehood with Saudi-Israel normalization in comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
“I know it is hard to imagine right now, but this is the only path the provides peace and security to all. It can be done. The pieces are there to put together,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Tuesday.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it similarly:
“If you take a regional approach, and if you pursue integration — with security, with a Palestinian state — all of a sudden you have a region that's come together in ways that answer the most profound questions that Israel has been trying to answer for years,” Blinken said at Davos.
“And what has heretofore been [Israel’s] single biggest concern in terms of security, Iran, is suddenly isolated, along with its proxies, and will have to make decisions about what it wants its future to be,” Blinken continued.
“If we can change the larger direction of a region like the Middle East, a lot of these other problems will be minimized if not totally eliminated,” he continued.
“The excuses — the rationales the various troublemakers have for making trouble — they go away. So that's also part of an effective way of dealing with the challenge on Iran.”
State of denial
Since Oct. 7, the emerging consensus in Washington seems to be that Palestinian statehood — if even achievable — is a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition for containing Iran and its proxies.
The thinking appears to go like this: A trilateral pact, entailing US defense and nuclear energy guarantees for Saudi Arabia and “irreversible steps” by Israel toward a Palestinian state, can bring Israel and Saudi together in a collaborative defense against Iran, thus ameliorating the need for the Pentagon to surge aircraft carriers into the region while the US military focuses on China in the coming decades.
Moreover, enmity with Israel is the common thread that unites the various Sunni and Shia factions that Iran arms and funds from Gaza to Lebanon, Iraq and Syria to Yemen. Undermining the raison d'etre of the self-styled "axis of resistance" can't hurt, former US officials told Security Briefing.
But the obstacles to Palestinian statehood are legion, among them Israel’s current government.
“We could not get Netanyahu to engage on the issue of a two-state solution or how that would be managed,” Sen. Angus King told journalists after visiting Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel as part of a Senate Intelligence Committee delegation last week.
On Thursday, Netanyahu publicly rebuffed Blinken’s proposals, saying, "In any future settlement, Israel must control all the territory west of the Jordan River." Yet the Israeli leader keeps talking about normalization with Saudi Arabia, perhaps aiming to hold out until Biden’s team loses interest in the Palestinian issue amid the upcoming election season in the US.
Moreover, it’s not clear what the US and its Arab allies mean by “irreversible steps" towards a Palestinian "state."
With or without Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition, it’s unlikely any Israeli government can readily reverse the presence of some 500,000 settlers in the West Bank, especially following the greatest national trauma Israel has ever faced.
"The ‘two-state solution’ as interpreted by US administrations since George H. W. Bush and Israeli governments since [former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin … did not involve two equal, sovereign independent states,” Prof. Rashid Khalidi, a leading historian on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, told me last month.
“Rather they always only meant a ‘one-state, one-Bantustan’ solution, whereby the Palestinian ‘state’ would not have controlled its borders nor its security and would therefore have been neither sovereign nor independent. I see no reason to assume Biden means anything else,” said Khalidi, who advised the Palestinian delegation at the 1991 Madrid conference and is now a professor at Columbia University.
Even if Israel can eliminate Hamas’ leadership, it seems unlikely a rump state for the Palestinians led by Israel-approved leaders will satiate the belligerence of Iran-backed factions.
At least as long as Palestinians remain oppressed, the IRGC will have access to a wellspring of anger from which to sow instability to disrupt US hegemony, former US officials say. Yet Tehran's strategic goal to eject US military forces from the Middle East is likely to remain unchanged.
“If you want to take on Iran, you need a bipartisan policy … that respects the legitimate security concerns of people in the region, and it must involve the Europeans,” said Norman Rule, former Iran director at the CIA, during a webinar at the Hayden Center on Thursday.
“We have kicked the can down the road,” Roule said, adding, “We do need a policy solution on this, and I’m not convinced it’s coming.”
