A
man watches as smoke billows over southern Lebanon following an Israeli
strike, amid ongoing cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and
Israeli forces, as seen from Tyre, Lebanon September 26, 2024.
REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
US diplomacy in Mideast falters as clock ticks down for Biden
WASHINGTON,
Sept 26 (Reuters) - U.S. efforts to secure a Gaza ceasefire remain
stalled after nearly a year of fighting. Iran-backed Houthi rebels
continue to attack Red Sea shipping. And now, despite intense U.S.-led
diplomacy, the Israel-Hezbollah conflict threatens to flare into an
all-out regional war.
With
the clock ticking on his administration, U.S. President Joe Biden faces
an arc of Middle East crises likely to defy solution before he leaves
office in January and which look all but certain to tarnish his foreign
policy legacy, analysts and foreign diplomats say.
Biden
has struggled over the past year to thread the needle of embracing
Israel’s right to self-defense against Palestinian Hamas militants in
Gaza and the Hezbollah group in Lebanon while trying to contain civilian
casualties and prevent a spiral into a broader Middle East conflict.
Time and again he has confronted the shortcomings of that strategy, the latest being Israel’s rejection on Thursday
of a U.S.-backed proposal for a 21-day truce across the Lebanon border
as it pressed ahead with strikes that have killed hundreds of Lebanese.
“What
we’re seeing are the limits of U.S. power and influence in the Middle
East,” said Jonathan Panikoff, the U.S. government's former deputy
national intelligence officer for the region.
Perhaps
the clearest example of that trend has been Biden’s reluctance to
exercise much U.S. leverage – as Israel’s top arms supplier and
diplomatic shield at the United Nations - to bend Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington’s will.
For
nearly a year the United States has sought unsuccessfully to help
broker a deal between Israel and Hamas to halt the fighting and free
hostages taken by the militants in their Oct. 7 cross-border rampage
that triggered the Gaza war.
No breakthrough is imminent, say people familiar with the matter.
U.S. officials are quick to pin blame for failed negotiations on Hamas but some also cite Netanyahu’s shifting demands.
During
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s nine trips to the region since
Oct. 7, the top U.S. diplomat several times found himself at odds with
senior Israeli leaders.
In
one instance last November, Blinken at a news conference urged Israel
to pause its military offensive in Gaza to allow aid to enter the
Palestinian enclave. Moments later, Netanyahu rejected the idea in a
televised statement, saying he had made clear to Blinken that Israel was
continuing with its operation "full force."
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.
U.S. CREDIBILITY AT STAKE
Biden
has been credited by fellow Western leaders with reinvigorating key
U.S. alliances, including with NATO and top Asian partners, after his
White House predecessor, Donald Trump, questioned the value of such
relationships.
That
was demonstrated in April when the Biden administration marshalled
support from regional and European partners to help defend Israel from
an Iranian drone and missile attack.
But
some foreign diplomats say Biden’s handling of the volatile Middle
East, especially his response to the Gaza war, has frayed U.S.
credibility abroad.
“President
Biden's original blunder was to say the U.S. will, no matter what,
stand for Israel,” one Western official said. “We have never recovered
from that.”
A
Middle East diplomat said U.S. diplomacy had “failed to impress
adversaries" and noted that Biden sent military assets to the region
after Oct. 7 as a warning to Iran and its proxy groups but that it did
not seem to deter them completely.
Yemen’s
Iran-backed Houthi rebels have kept up a steady barrage of missile
attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea despite Biden and other
Western leaders providing warships for beefed-up protection.
"He
could have been quicker to respond and more severe to these attacks by
proxy forces," said Michael 'Mick' Mulroy, a former deputy assistant
secretary of defense for the Middle East under the Trump administration.
U.S.
officials have repeatedly pushed back on such criticism, saying their
diplomacy has made a difference for the better and that the U.S.
military deployment to the region had helped so far to avert a spillover
from Gaza into a regional war.
"Diplomacy
is not a matter of snapping our fingers and – voila," U.S. Ambassador
to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the Security Council earlier
this month. "It takes hard work. It takes effort and, unfortunately, it
takes time. It has not failed."
Even
so, since Oct. 7, Biden has seen his hopes dashed for what was once
touted as a potential signature foreign policy achievement –
normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia coupled with
U.S. security guarantees for Riyadh.
At
the United Nations, where the Security Council in June backed Biden’s
plan for a Gaza ceasefire-hostage deal, there are signs that patience
with U.S. Middle East diplomacy has waned.
Jordan's
Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said on Thursday that efforts to stop the
violence in the Middle East constituted "a year of failure" and that if
the Israeli government was not held to account it was not going to
listen to international law, "and it's not even listening to its
friends, including the U.S."
Panikoff,
the former intelligence official now at the Atlantic Council think-tank
in Washington, described the crux of the Biden administration’s Gaza
dilemma as: “Plan A hasn’t worked for months. So where’s Plan B?”
With
Israel threatening a ground offensive in Lebanon and vowing to keep
pressure on Iran-backed Hezbollah until thousands of Israeli evacuees
can return to their homes in the north, the crisis there could also
deepen.
The
trajectory of the Lebanon conflict could have further implications not
only for Biden’s legacy but by extension the presidential campaign of
Vice President Kamala Harris. Some Democratic progressive voters are
already angry over unflinching U.S. support for Israel.
It remains to be seen whether Netanyahu will heed Biden’s entreaties to avoid further escalation in Lebanon.
As
a lame duck president in his final four months in office, analysts say
Biden cannot be faulted for keeping up his efforts to ease Middle East
turmoil - but they expect his successor to inherit the current crises.
Reporting by Matt Spetalnick John Irish and Humeyra Pamuk; Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols, Phil Stewart and Simon Lewis; Writing by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Don Durfee and Daniel Wallis