What Israel’s ground operation into Lebanon drives home about America
CNN
—
Israel’s expected ground incursion into Lebanon will drive
home a new strategic reality of a year of war — the once-mighty US is
powerless to rein in its ally or to influence other major belligerents
in a fast-worsening regional crisis.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government on Monday
launched the next stage of its onslaught against Hezbollah with what the
Israel Defense Forces called a “limited ground operation” into Lebanon —
despite weeks of requests from Washington for restraint and familiar
(and spurned) calls for de-escalation.
This came just hours after President Joe Biden
said “we should have a ceasefire now,” when asked what he knew
about Israeli special forces’ previous raids into southern Lebanon. “I’m
comfortable with them stopping,” the president said.
His comments only underscored the chasm between the US and
Israeli governments on a day when Netanyahu told Iranians in a
broadcast, “There is nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach.”
The disconnect is widening as it coincides with the endgame
of a cliffhanger US election. Biden’s room for maneuver is limited if he
is to avoid exacerbating the domestic political impact of war in the
Middle East — a factor Netanyahu, a consummate operator in US politics,
surely understands. The Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala
Harris, has largely stuck to the administration line — despite earlier
comments that suggested she might take a slightly harder rhetorical
stance toward Netanyahu while emphasizing the plight of Palestinian
civilians.
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The pattern of American impotency and Israeli defiance has
played repeatedly since the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel that
killed about 1,200 people, which prompted the Israeli pounding of Gaza
and the more recent attempt to destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Netanyahu often acts first and consults the US later, even
when his actions are certain to buckle American diplomatic efforts and
compound fears the US will get dragged into a disastrous regional war.
The US was not informed in advance, for example, about the Israeli
airstrike Friday that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah even though its global shockwaves were bound to be severe.
This Israeli approach has often made the Biden
administration appear a spectator rather than an active player in
events, as should befit a superpower. Months of grueling shuttle
diplomacy by Secretary of State Antony Blinken have mostly drawn a
blank. And the US has incessantly pushed for a Gaza ceasefire that
neither Netanyahu nor Hamas seems to want.
This is not just a diplomatic embarrassment. Any time an
American president is publicly spurned, there is a cost to their
personal prestige and perceptions of US global power. And the likelihood
is growing that Biden, who came to office professing to be a foreign
policy expert, will leave the White House in a few months with a raging
Middle East war set to stain his legacy.
But the Israeli leader’s bet that, for all its reservations,
the Biden administration will remain the guarantor of the Jewish
state’s security has paid off. For instance, the US and its allies
helped repel a massive Iranian missile and drone attack against Israel
in April. The strikes followed an Israeli strike that the US didn’t know
about in advance on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus that
killed eight senior Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers.
And so far, Biden, who has long prided himself on being one
of the most pro-Israeli politicians in US history, has been loath to use
the leverage he does have — for instance, permanently cutting off US
military supplies for Israel, a step that would have huge political
reverberations ahead of the election and leave him accused of deserting
an ally fighting terror.
Netanyahu often seems to be taking conscious advantage of
Biden’s instincts, reasoning he’ll swallow any level of provocation.
A deep symbolic irony encapsulates the duality of the US position in the conflict: a CNN analysis
found that American-manufactured 2,000-pound bombs were likely used in
the attack on Nasrallah, which threatens to ignite the regional
conflagration that would be so ruinous to US interests and diplomatic
goals.
But the months of Israeli disregard for the administration’s
political and strategic concerns have come at a stiff cost. Relations
between Biden and Netanyahu are very tense. And growing antagonism often
bursts into the open — most recently when US officials were furious the
Israeli leader dissed an Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire proposal by a
groups of nations led by the US. Washington demanded the Israelis put
out a statement to remedy the diplomatic embarrassment, CNN’s MJ Lee,
Kylie Atwood and Jennifer Hansler reported last week.
Ret. Col. Cedric Leighton, a CNN military analyst, said on
“CNN This Morning” that conversations between Israeli and US officials
ahead of the expected Israeli move into southern Lebanon were “pretty
tense … especially at the upper levels.” He added: “The key thing to
keep in mind is that Israel has basically deliberately kept the US
uninformed when it came to the details of their operations.”
On the one side, Leighton said, “The US is trying to
restrain the Israelis; they’re trying to limit the scope of military
action that the Israelis are conducting. The Israelis are looking at
this from a military standpoint right now, and they’re seeing the
capability and the possibility of going and basically eliminating
Hezbollah as a threat to northern Israel and potentially as a threat at
all.”
The last year’s events have forced the United States and
Israel into a situation in which the critical national interests of each
state as perceived by its elected leaders are in direct conflict.
The Netanyahu government interpreted the October 7 attacks
as a graphic manifestation of an existential threat to the state of
Israel and Jews in the Middle East. With that mindset, even intense ill
feeling with the White House can be tolerated. And the sense that Israel
is waging a battle for its survival makes it easier for leaders to
justify to themselves the massive Palestinian civilian casualties from
Israeli actions against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, even if
the rest of the world sees the carnage as heinously disproportionate.
The United States might warn against the threat of a
regional war, but Israel believes it’s been embroiled in such a conflict
for years against proxy groups taking direction or inspiration from its
enemies in Iran’s clerical leadership.
But events look different through Washington’s wider
strategic and historic lens amid worries that Israel’s short-term
victories are not sustainable and may simply be laying the predicate for
decades more insecurity and warfare.
America’s national interests do not just lie in the
preservation of Israel. The White House is desperate to avoid being
sucked into another bitter conflict in the Middle East, given the two
decades it took to extract American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Outposts of US soldiers still in the region, including in Syria and
Iraq, also remain highly vulnerable to attacks by Iranian proxies as the
deaths of three US service personnel in a drone attack on Jordan in
January showed.
The global and political implications of the year of rage in
the region are also huge. For instance, months of attacks on commercial
shipping in the Red Sea have seen US and allied naval forces often
under fire and intercepting missiles from Iran-backed Houthi rebels.
Cascading economic impacts from slowed supply chains, as shipping lines
send cargo on a longer route around Africa, are also considerable. The
clashes are unlikely to end while Israel blasts Gaza and Lebanon.
There are also contrasting military perceptions between Israel and the US.
Israel has wiped out many of its most dangerous enemies in
stunning intelligence and military actions. In addition to the
elimination of Nasrallah, who built Hezbollah into a grave threat to
Israel in 30 years, Hamas has also accused Israel of killing Ismail
Haniyeh, one of its top leaders, in Tehran. Israel has neither confirmed
nor denied its involvement. It has also killed other senior members of
the two groups in strikes in Syria, Lebanon, Iran and in Gaza.
Israeli-detonated attacks on pagers and walkie-talkies injured or killed
thousands of Hezbollah operatives.
So why would Netanyahu not press ahead with the greatest Israeli strategic success in decades whatever Biden says?
But Washington has much wider concerns. They include the
horrendous civilian casualties and humanitarian disasters in Gaza and
Lebanon, a state that has enjoyed a few decades of comparative stability
after a murderous civil war, which raged between 1975 and 1990, and
caused considerable US bloodshed. The deaths of thousands of civilians
is not just a tragedy in itself, it creates severe pressure on the US
from its allies and tarnishes America’s image by association.
The longer the war goes on, the greater the threat that
conflicts intensifying across the region could all join into one
perilous multi-front war and that a direct conflict could break out
between the US and its arch enemy Iran. A regional war would have
disastrous economic consequences and could further deflect from the US
goal of mobilizing for its new superpower showdown with China.
There are also intractable political factors pulling the governments apart.
For most of Israel’s existence, it would have been
politically and strategically ruinous for a prime minister to show such
contempt for a US president.
But Netanyahu’s own march to the far right and the reliance
of his coalition on ultra-orthodox parties means that his priority is
appeasing the most extreme domestic elements to stay in power.
The weakness of centrist and left-wing parties in Israel
means a dearth of alternative leaders like late prime ministers Yitzhak
Rabin or Shimon Peres, who were ideologically and temperamentally in
tune with US presidents. The rise of incendiary and radical leaders like
Nasrallah and Hamas officials also means there are no partners on the
other side open to traditional US peacemaking.
Even legendary US secretary of state and peace-shuttler
James Baker would have struggled with this regional cast of characters.
American calls for a two-state solution to the
Israel-Palestinian conflict may ultimately reflect the only possible
route to an ending of a generationslong confrontation — but they also
seem utterly divorced from the realities of the blood-soaked Middle East
in 2024.
And many observers in Washington have long suspected that
Netanyahu has a strong personal interest in perpetually waging war to
redeem his own failure to stop the October 7 attacks and to keep
postponing his legal reckoning as he faces serious criminal charges.
America’s own venomous political reality is also eroding US
power in the Middle East. Support for Israel was once an unshakable
principle that united Republicans and Democrats. But Netanyahu’s
meddling in US politics for years — over the Iranian nuclear issue, for
instance — has alienated many Democrats and their party’s move to the
left has further tempered backing for Israel.
Ex-President Donald Trump indulged and encouraged the most
radical of Netanyahu’s policies — further politicizing the US-Israel
relationship. And pro-Trump Republicans are goading him to go further —
at least partly to weaken Biden and his chosen successor, Harris.
Biden and Harris are in a dicey political spot a month
before the election. Biden’s failure to rein in Israel in Gaza and now
Lebanon – and the consequential human carnage – has split the Democratic
Party and threatens to drive down turnout among progressives and Arab
American voters, especially in swing states like Michigan. But any move
to punish Israel could damage Harris among moderate and swing state
voters, who are being barraged with negative Trump ads claiming she and
Biden are weak and leading the United States into World War III.
This is just one of many reasons why Netanyahu is
incentivized to expand his war no matter how powerless it makes America
look.
This story has been updated with additional developments.