RICHARD HAASS
Welcome to Home & Away. I can’t quite bring myself to write about juror selection at the first of what could be four criminal trials of Donald Trump. Nor is it a good use of my time or yours to focus on whether the Speaker of the House of Representatives will find a way to legislate aid for Ukraine as well as Israel and Taiwan, although there is at long last reason for optimism. I will even demonstrate rare discipline and not comment on Scottie Scheffler’s dominance at last week’s Masters. What I will do instead is devote this week’s newsletter to unfolding events in the Middle East.
Where are We and How Did We Get Here?
Full disclosure: I had already wrapped up this week’s newsletter when reports came in last night of Israel’s attack on Iran. The completed draft (much of which was drawn from a piece I wrote earlier this week for the Financial Times) was built around the questions of whether Israel would and should respond to Iran’s April 13 attack. As you will recall, Iran launched a barrage of more than three hundred drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles at Israel from sites in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen in retaliation for an Israeli attack that killed senior Quds Force officers at an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria.
The draft newsletter concluded Israel would likely respond in a limited way given the political incentives, psychological pressures, and strategic grounds for acting. Turning the other cheek is an idea missing from the Old Testament. I thought we would see retaliatory strikes on sites associated with the capabilities involved in Iran’s attack.
In fact, the Israeli action appears to be even more limited than I was about to predict. Still, it sent a clear and necessary message: We can reach your military facilities and your nuclear program (some of which is located around Isfahan, the home of separate military bases that Israel hit) any time we want to. The goal was to restore deterrence and discourage any further Iranian attack on the Israeli homeland.
But the Israeli action was also calibrated to make it easy for Iran not to respond. Israel’s government is not trumpeting what took place.
What explains all this from a country not recently associated with restraint? Israel’s government clearly judged that it has more than enough to contend with militarily and politically in Gaza, with Hezbollah in the North, and in the West Bank without adding a full-fledged war with Iran to the mix. Plus, Israel’s economy is already reeling from the effects of the six-month war.
It may also be that the Israelis came to see Iran’s attack in a different light. As a recent New York Times analysis suggests, Iran’s attack seems less an unprovoked violation of the informal rules of the road shaping the Israel-Iran struggle than it does a reaction to what it perceived to be an Israeli violation of those same rules by its killing of Quds Force leaders in Syria.
What made it much less difficult for Israel to show restraint was the fact that Israel, with assistance from the United States, Britain, France, and Jordan, succeeded in intercepting almost all of the drones and missiles launched by Iran. The damage caused was minimal, with only one serious casualty. All this left Israel with considerable room for choice, something it would not have had if the Iranian attack killed a significant number of Israelis or destroyed valuable military targets.
One last consideration. Israelis seem to have come to the conclusion that short of a change in regime in Tehran, something beyond Israel’s or the West’s ability to bring about, there is no way to solve or fix the strategic challenge that country poses. At best the Iranian threat is something to be managed. For now at least the Israeli government seems to have decided the least bad way to do this meant eschewing a large-scale attack.
Interestingly, it is clear that Iran also wants things to calm down. Its UN Mission announced soon after its April 13 retaliatory attack that “the matter can be deemed concluded.” And over the last 12 hours it has downplayed Israel’s response.
The United States also telegraphed that it sought to calm things down and urged Israel to show restraint. The last thing the Biden administration needs is a wider war in the Middle East when it is already experiencing difficulties contending with a worsening battlefield situation in Europe and a potential one in the Indo-Pacific. This is especially so given that Iran has the ability to effectively close the Straits of Hormuz to shipping, something that would trigger a spike in oil prices and add to the inflationary pressures Biden faces at home.
Some Rare Good News
All this suggest the high likelihood that a serious conflict between Israel and Iran is not imminent. This outcome wasn’t inevitable. While Iran’s attack failed, it nevertheless crossed a line. It was the first strike on Israel that came from Iran itself, conducted by its military and launched from Iranian territory. Heretofore, Iran’s war against Israel had been conducted in the shadows, mostly through proxy forces such as Hezbollah or Hamas operating outside of Iran, albeit with Iranian backing.
Israel could have responded differently, by carrying out a large reprisal, including against known Iranian nuclear sites. It is good that this “go big” option was rejected. Attacking known nuclear sites in Iran would have been widely seen as a major escalation, putting Israel back on the defensive. It would have set back Iran’s nuclear program, but only temporarily. Indeed, it would likely have led Iran to redouble its efforts to build a nuclear program in a manner Israel could not reach, a development that in turn could lead several other countries in the region to acquire nuclear weapons. It may be hard to imagine, but such a Middle East promises to be far more unstable than the current one.
One final thought. What just happened or more accurately didn’t happen in the Middle East is a rare piece of good news. To this point, Israel and Iran have demonstrated a surprising but welcome willingness and ability to manage their deep differences and avoid war. Informal, implicit rules of the road have evolved between the two antagonists, buttressed by signaling and messaging. It is in important ways reminiscent of how the United States and the Soviet Union managed to keep the Cold War cold. When formal explicit agreements are impossible to come by, diplomatic choreography becomes essential.
The Other Day After
Israel’s government still has to decide what it wants to do vis-à-vis Gaza. Iran’s attack and Israel’s response have not altered any of the fundamentals. Israel still needs to decide if it will launch a military assault on Rafah, something that would further weaken Hamas but also cause more civilian casualties and put Israel back on the political defensive in the United States and around the world.
Even more fundamentally, and with or without a Rafah offensive, Israel must decide what comes next. Right now, Israel is going down a path that would result in an open-ended occupation of Gaza, one that would breed lawlessness along with a gradual increase in resistance to its presence from Hamas or some offshoot. Israel likewise has no strategy for dealing with Palestinian nationalism in the occupied West Bank. What it is doing is allowing settlements to grow in scale and in number, something that reduces what limited opportunity exists for diplomacy. The day is fast arriving when Israel will need to choose between settlements and a settlement.
I know I have said it before, but it bears repeating that Israel needs a Palestinian state as a favor to itself if it wishes to remain a prosperous, secure, Jewish, and democratic country. I am not suggesting that diplomacy focus on creating a Palestinian state any time soon, but what has to happen if there is ever going to be one is the building of a new Palestinian leadership that is both able to exercise control over its territory and is willing to coexist peacefully with Israel, restraint on settlements as just discussed, and the articulation of the principles that would inform a peace process. If Israel remains under a government that refuses to adopt such policies, then it falls on the United States to work to create the preconditions in which at least the possibility of peace is protected.
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