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The United States has conducted two retaliatory airstrikes against Iraqi militias this week after ballistic missile attacks against America's Al Asad Air Base, the latest in a troubling tit-for-tat between the U.S. and Iran-backed militias in the region that was triggered by the Israel-Hamas conflict. CENTCOM appears to believe that the status quo of attack and reprisal with Iraqi militias is sustainable. There's an assumption that Washington, Iran, and Iraq's militias understand each other's red lines. However, this assumption comes with a lot of risks.The potential for one-upmanship between various Shi'a militias, each trying to prove they're more hostile toward Americans than the others, is a concerning possibility. A deadly attack on U.S. troops could prompt the Biden administration to respond more forcefully, especially in an election year. What is the administration's plan to manage escalation and prevent a larger regional war (with heavy U.S. involvement) if this were to occur? While the timing and scale of the war in Gaza may have been unpredictable, it was always evident that the presence of scattered U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria posed a risk of escalating the U.S. into greater conflict in such an unpredictable region. That's why I've long argued for rethinking America's military posture in Iraq, including in new research this year exploring how Washington could conduct a phased withdrawal of troops and successfully recalibrate our approach to the country and region.It is true that the presence of U.S. military advisors in Iraq helps maintain cohesion and a working relationship between competing factions of Iraq's military. U.S. troops also offer critical capabilities in the fight to contain ISIS. But it is time for Washington to consider whether these benefits are outweighed by the risk of malign actors using U.S. troops to provoke a wider conflict – either intentionally or inadvertently.While the risks of keeping U.S. troops in Iraq are apparent, the overall utility of their presence is unclear (particularly in deterring attacks on themselves). With each new day comes a fresh opportunity for crisis. It's past time Washington grappled with the true costs and benefits of our military presence.

U.S. forces launched a third strike against Iran-linked groups on Sunday, the latest in an increasingly destructive series of exchanges that have cast a new light on the continued U.S. troop presence in the Middle East. American aircraft struck a weapons storage facility and command-and-control center used by Iran-backed groups in Syria, according to officials. "Within the last two hours, the U.S. has taken precision defensive strikes against two sites in Syria," an official told ABC News. The two structures were located near the eastern Syrian cities of Mayadin and Abu Kamal, according to statements issued on Sunday by the Department of Defense and U.S. Central Command (CENTOM). "The President has no higher priority than the safety of U.S. personnel, and he directed today's action to make clear that the United States will defend itself, its personnel, and its interests," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement. Up to seven "Iranian proxy fighters" were killed at one of the two locations struck by U.S. warplanes, according to Jennifer Griffin, chief national security correspondent for Fox News, citing a senior defense official. This is the third such strike since October 26, reflecting a continued effort by the U.S. to retaliate against Iran-linked groups that the White House says are responsible for a spate of ongoing rocket and drone attacks against U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Syria. The U.S. sent forces including two carrier strike groups headlined by the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, squadrons consisting of F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft and A-10 close-air-support (CAS), and the USS Bataan Amphibious Ready Group to the region following the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and subsequent outbreak of war in Gaza. High-ranking officers including a Marine three-star general were reportedly sent to help advise Israeli leadership as it proceeds with its campaign and another 2,000 U.S. personnel were ordered to prepare to deploy last month. Iranian leaders have unsurprisingly taken a strong policy stance in favor of Hamas, though the full extent of their foreknowledge of and support for the October 7 attack remains unclear. Reports citing U.S. intelligence findings suggest that senior Iranian officials were surprised by the attack, undermining or at least heavily complicating claims of direct Iranian involvement. Nevertheless, Tehran has been accused of mobilizing its robust network of regional proxies to launch scores of attacks against American personnel and infrastructure. U.S. assets have been attacked at least 52 times by Iran-linked groups since October 17, according to officials. A total of fifty-six service members have been injured according to numbers provided by the Pentagon, with over two dozen suffering traumatic brain injuries. Washington has responded to these attacks with a mix of warnings by top officials, which have gone wholly unheeded, and retaliatory strikes. The Sunday strikes came shortly on the heels of airstrikes conducted by two F-15 fighter jets against Iran-linked facilities in Syria earlier last week. These two latest rounds of U.S. strikes come just two weeks after a similar spate of operations targeting facilities in eastern Syria that officials say were "used by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and affiliated groups." The strikes on October 26, which the Pentagon said were not related to "the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas," were partly intended to deter Iran from coordinating further attacks on U.S. personnel. Yet attacks on American troops have not only continued but intensified in recent weeks, with Iran-backed militants reportedly assaulting U.S. bases with drones carrying even larger payloads.Growing risks to American service members and concerns that these continued exchanges could trigger a direct military confrontation between the U.S. and Iran have spurred new perspectives on the costs and benefits of the continued military presence in the Middle East. The 2,500 and 900 troops in Iraq and Syria, respectively, are ostensibly there to prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State, but the rationale behind this presence has come under scrutiny. "If a U.S. ground presence in Iraq and Syria were absolutely necessary to achieve a core U.S. security interest, then perhaps these risks would be tolerable. But this is hardly the case," Defense Priorities (DEFP) fellow Daniel DePetris wrote in a release on November 9. "ISIS lost its territorial caliphate more than four years ago and is now relegated to a low-grade, rural insurgency that local actors can contain. The U.S. military presence is not only unnecessary, but also a dangerous tripwire for a wider war." The continued deployments put service members at constant risk, especially in the context of heightened regional tensions stemming from the Israel-Hamas war, and serve neither clear nor achievable policy aims, argued Justin Logan, the Cato Institute's director of defense and foreign policy studies."Attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria will no doubt continue—the solution is to remove U.S. forces which remain as targets only because they're within range of these local militias," said a DEFP explainer published earlier this month, suggesting that U.S. troops in stationed within striking distance of local militants be redeployed to better-defended positions in the Middle-East. American troops have reportedly been attacked a staggering four times within less than a day of Sunday's airstrike, sending the clearest signal yet that retaliatory strikes have not had their intended deterring effect. As the Gaza crisis roils on, the dangers confronting U.S. troops — and, with them, calls to reconsider the tools and goals of American power projection in the Middle East—will likely intensify.

The United States faces two preeminent threats flowing from Hamas's attack on Israel and Israel's response. The first is the lethal threat to Israel that would be posed by a combination of assaults by Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran (especially if helped by Russia), and a renewed Intifada. The second is the danger that such a regional conflagration would drag the United States and Russia reluctantly into the fighting on opposing sides, with China giving aid to Russia. Preventing both contingencies is critical both to America's own security and to our commitments to Israel. And our ability to do so depends to a significant degree on help from China and Russia in restraining their partners in the region in return for Israeli restraint in Gaza. The most likely path toward these twin dangers would be a full-scale Israeli ground invasion of Gaza, for which Hamas is almost certainly prepared and which it may well have intended to provoke. Such an invasion would inevitably involve prolonged urban combat and massive civilian casualties. This would lead to widespread outrage in the region that could compel a military response from Hezbollah, which in turn would create enormous pressures on Iran to support its Lebanese partner. A northern front between Israel and an Iran-backed Hezbollah could also quite possibly expand into Syria, which in turn could drag Russia and even Turkey directly into the fighting. None of these actors is seeking direct combat with Israel — the Hamas attacks reportedly took Iran by surprise, Russia already is completely consumed by its war in Ukraine, and Turkey would lose the leverage it enjoys through tacking between the United States, Europe, Russia, and regional players to its south. Nonetheless, circumstances could compel these states to face choices they would rather avoid. Between China and Russia, Beijing's help will be easier to enlist. China has the most to lose from a wider conflict in the region, which could threaten access to the region's oil supplies, drive up energy prices, and undermine the global commerce on which China's economy depends. It also has much to gain from working with the United States to contain the crisis and stabilize the region, which would bolster Beijing's prestige on the world stage and potentially mitigate America's reflexive fears that China intends to destabilize the international order. For these reasons, Washington will be reluctant to bless a prominent role for China in the region; but China is already playing such a role regardless of U.S. wishes, as its facilitation of Saudi-Iranian rapprochement has demonstrated. Successful cooperation with China in the Middle East would mark a return to previous U.S. statements that Washington hopes that Beijing will become a "responsible stakeholder" and not an enemy on the world stage.Russia is the more important, but also the more difficult nut to crack. More important, because Russia has good relations with both Israel and Iran and has fought beside Hezbollah in Syria; more difficult, because of the immense distrust and hostility that was building up between Washington and Moscow long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine plunged relations into the abyss. Given deep U.S.-Russian enmity over the war in Ukraine, there are obviously strong temptations for Russia to cause trouble for America and exploit international anger over Israeli retaliation in Gaza to bolster its ties to Iran, Arab states, and the wider Global South at U.S. expense. Fortunately, Moscow also has reasons to worry about a deepening conflict in the region. Russia has since the end of the Cold War sought to maintain good relations with Israel, an important economic partner and the adoptive home of more than a million Russian emigres. It has not reacted when Israel has attacked Hezbollah forces or Syrian targets over the past several years, despite Russia's key role as a partner of Hezbollah and the Baath state in Syria. A war between Israel and Iran would end Iranian supplies to Russia of drones that have come to play an important role in the Russian campaign in Ukraine. Above all, Russia has long been concerned about the dangers of Sunni Islamic terrorism, the source of numerous attacks inside Russia, which is likely to flow from the burgeoning conflict in Gaza. In the wake of 9/11, there was a very strong sense in Moscow of common interests with the U.S. in the fight against terrorism. This perception of common threat meant that Western policy in Libya and Syria was greeted in Russia not just with fury but also with bewilderment. Faced with the obvious danger of Islamist extremism and the dreadful example of the war in Iraq, Russian analysts could not understand how the West could embark on policies that were likely to destroy the Libyan and Syrian states (and did, in the case of Libya) and create great opportunities for the spread of jihadi forces. A restoration of at least limited cooperation with Russia in counter-terrorism is both one path to an eventual wider settlement and urgently necessary for its own sake; because the present conflict is certain to increase the terrorist threat to the West. In Europe, terrorist attacks have already begun. The U.S. also needs to renew talks with Russia on the future of Syria, since the U.S. strategy of overthrowing the Baath regime has long since collapsed.Channeling these conflicting impulses into Russian cooperation in containing the dangers of escalation over Gaza will be no easy task. It will require opening a high-level channel of communication between senior Biden administration officials and the Kremlin to discuss the crisis, coupled with an implicit signal that Washington is willing to address some concrete Russian concerns about the U.S. military's role in Syria and about the need for rekindling Israel-Palestine diplomacy. Our chances of gaining Russian cooperation would improve if the United States and China begin serious talks about managing the Gaza crisis, as Putin will not want to cede the international stage to Beijing. Neither Russia nor China have enough coercive leverage to prevent Hezbollah from opening a northern front with Israel — and precipitating a cascade of further escalation — should the Israeli Defense Forces mount a full-scale invasion of Gaza. But they probably have sufficient clout to ensure Hamas's backers stay out of the fray in return for some measure of Israeli restraint, particularly if the United States is willing to back renewed Israel-Palestinian negotiations, open talks with Moscow about Syria, and share the international stage in managing the crisis. By contrast, stiff-arming Chinese and Russian involvement would only incentivize their opposition to U.S. policies. And if there's one thing Washington does not need in this crisis, it is yet more parties intent on exploiting instability.

The events in Niger over the past few months have been alarming to watch. What began as a military coup now risks spiraling into a wider war in West Africa, with a group of juntas lining up to fight against a regional force threatening to invade and restore democratic rule in Niamey.The junta have explicitly justified their coup as a response to the "continuous deterioration of the security situation" plaguing Niger and complained that it and other countries in the Sahel "have been dealing for over 10 years with the negative socioeconomic, security, political and humanitarian consequences of NATO's hazardous adventure in Libya." Even ordinary Nigeriens backing the junta have done the same. The episode thus reminds us of an iron rule of foreign interference: Even military interventions considered successful at the time have unintended effects that cascade long after the missions formally end.The 2011 Libyan adventure saw the U.S., French and British governments launch an initially limited humanitarian intervention to protect civilians that quickly morphed into a regime change operation, unleashing a torrent of violence and extremism across the region.There was little dissent at the time. As Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's forces battled anti-government rebels, politicians, the press and anti-Gaddafi Libyans painted an overly simplistic picture of unarmed protesters and other civilians facing imminent if not already unfolding genocide. Only years later would a UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee report publicly determine, echoing the conclusions of other post-mortems, that charges of an impending civilian massacre were "not supported by the available evidence" and that "the threat to civilians was overstated and that the rebels included a significant Islamist element" that carried out numerous atrocities of its own.Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and John Kerry (D-Mass.) all called for a no-fly zone. "I love the military ... but they always seem to find reasons why you can't do something rather than why you can," complained McCain. The American Enterprise Institute's Danielle Pletka said it would be "an important humanitarian step." The now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) think tank gathered a who's who of neoconservatives to repeatedly urge the same. In a letter to then-President Barack Obama, they quoted back Obama's Nobel Peace Prize speech in which he argued that "inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later."Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reportedly instrumental in persuading Obama to act, was herself swayed by similar arguments. Friend and unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal assured her that, once Gaddafi fell, "limited but targeted military support from the West combined with an identifiable rebellion" could become a new model for toppling Middle Eastern dictators. Pointing to the similar, deteriorating situation in Syria, Blumenthal claimed that "the most important event that could alter the Syrian equation would be the fall of Gaddafi, providing an example of a successful rebellion." (Despite Gaddafi's ouster, the Syrian civil war continues to this day, and its leader Bashar al-Assad is still in power).Likewise, columnist Anne-Marie Slaughter urged Clinton to think of Kosovo and Rwanda, where "even a small deployment could have stopped the killing," and insisted U.S. intervention would "change the image of the United States overnight." In one email, she dismissed counter-arguments:"People will say that we will then get enmeshed in a civil war, that we cannot go into another Muslim country, that Gaddafi is well armed, there will be a million reasons NOT to act. But all our talk about global responsibility and leadership, not to mention respect for universal values, is completely empty if we stand by and watch this happen with no response but sanctions."Despite grave and often-stated reservations, Obama and NATO got UN authorization for a no-fly zone. Clinton was privately showered with email congratulations, not just from Blumenthal and Slaughter ("bravo!"; "No-fly! Brava! You did it!"), but even from then-Bloomberg View Executive Editor James Rubin ("your efforts ... will be long remembered"). Pro-war voices like Pletka and Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz immediately began moving the goalposts by discussing Gaddafi's ouster, suggesting escalation to prevent a U.S. "defeat," and criticizing those saying Libya wasn't a vital U.S. interest.NATO's undefined war aims quickly shifted, and officials spoke out of both sides of their mouths. Some insisted the goal wasn't regime change, while others said Gaddafi "needs to go." It took less than three weeks for FPI Executive Director Jamie Fly, the organizer of the neocons' letter to Obama, to go from insisting it would be a "limited intervention" that wouldn't involve regime change, to professing "I don't see how we can get ourselves out of this without Gaddafi going."After only a month, Obama and NATO allies publicly pronounced they would stay the course until Gaddafi was gone, rejecting the negotiated exit put forward by the African Union. "There is no mission creep," NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted two months later. Four months after that, Gaddafi was dead — captured, tortured and killed thanks in large part to a NATO airstrike on the convoy he was traveling in.The episode was considered a triumph. "We came, we saw, he died," Clinton joked to a reporter upon hearing the news. Analysts talked about the credit owed to Obama for the "success." "As Operation Unified Protector comes to a close, the alliance and its partners can look back at an extraordinary job, well done," wrote then-U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO Ivo Daalder and then-Supreme Allied Commander in Europe James Stavridis in October 2011. "Most of all, they can see in the gratitude of the Libyan people that the use of limited force — precisely applied — can affect real, positive political change." That same month, Clinton traveled to Tripoli and declared "Libya's victory" as she flashed a peace sign."It was the right thing to do," Obama told the UN, presenting the operation as a model that the United States was "proud to play a decisive role" in. Soon discussion moved to exporting this model elsewhere, like Syria. Hailing the UN for having "at last lived up to its duty to prevent mass atrocities," then-Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth called to "extend the human rights principles embraced for Libya to other people in need," citing other parts of the Middle East, the Ivory Coast, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.Others disagreed. "Libya has given [the mandate of 'responsibility to protect'] a bad name," complained Indian UN Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri, echoing the sentiments of other diplomats angry that a UN mandate for protecting civilians had been stretched to regime change.It soon became clear why. Gaddafi's toppling not only led hundreds of Tuareg mercenaries under his employ to return to nearby Mali but also caused an exodus of weapons from the country, leading Tuareg separatists to team up with jihadist groups and launch an armed rebellion in the country. Soon, that violence triggered its own coup and a separate French military intervention in Mali, which quickly became a sprawling Sahel-wide mission that only ended nine years later with the situation, by some accounts, worse than it started. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the majority of the more than 400,000 refugees in the Central Sahel were there because of the violence in Mali.Mali was far from alone. Thanks to its plentiful and unsecured weapons depots, Libya became what UK intelligence labeled the "Tesco" of illegal arms trafficking, referring to the British supermarket chain. Gaddafi's ouster "opened the floodgates for widespread extremist mayhem" across the Sahel region, retired Senior Foreign Service officer Mark Wentling wrote in 2020, with Libyan arms traced to criminals and terrorists in Niger, Tunisia, Syria, Algeria and Gaza, including not just firearms but also heavy weaponry like antiaircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles. By last year, extremism and violence was rife throughout the region, thousands of civilians had been killed and 2.5 million people had been displaced.Things are scarcely better in "liberated" Libya today. The resulting power vacuum produced exactly what Iraq War critics predicted: a protracted (and forever close-to-reigniting) civil war involving rival governments, neighboring states using them as proxies, hundreds of militias and violent jihadists. Those included the Islamic State, one of several extremist groups that made real Clinton's pre-intervention fear of Libya "becoming a giant Somalia." By the 2020 ceasefire, hundreds of civilians had been killed in Libya, nearly 900,000 needed humanitarian assistance, half of them women and children, and the country had become a lucrative hotspot for slave trading.Today, Libyans are unambiguously worse off than before NATO intervention. Ranked 53rd in the world and first in Africa by the 2010 UN Human Development Index, the country had dropped fifty places by 2019. Everything from GDP per capita and the number of fully functioning health care facilities to access to clean water and electricity sharply declined. Far from improving U.S. standing in the Middle East, most of the Arab world opposed the NATO operation by early 2012.Only five years later, Clinton, once eager to claim credit, distanced herself from the decision to intervene. "It didn't work," Obama admitted bluntly as he prepared to leave office, publicly deeming the country "a mess" and, privately, "a shit show." The New York Times collected the damning verdicts of those involved: "We made it worse"; "Gaddafi is laughing at all of us from his grave"; "by God, if we can't succeed here, it should really make one think about embarking on these kind of efforts."Libya offers numerous cautionary tales about well-meaning U.S. military interventions, from the way they rapidly escalate beyond their initial goals and limited nature, to their penchant for unforeseen knock-on effects that are hard to control and snowball disastrously. As Obama's "success" in the country now threatens to spark a regional war in Niger that could even drag the United States into the fighting, it should remind us that the consequences of military action and rejection of negotiated solutions last much longer than, and look very different years after, the initial period of triumphalism.

Hamas's attack on Israel last week was what any reasonable person would consider an atrocity deserving of moral outrage. Hundreds of innocent civilians were killed, and dozens more were taken into captivity. It thus is understandable that such an event would elicit intense emotion and a thirst for revenge.Being understandable is not the same as being wise or effective, for Israel itself or for regional peace and security.Israel has now embarked on a violent offensive against the Gaza Strip and its residents. However, as much as that offensive may be defended as intended to establish deterrence or to destroy a hostile military force, it is in large part an act of raw revenge. It is a national catharsis amid an atmosphere of intense grief and anger.The casualty count from the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip is rising too fast to venture an up-to-date figure, but Palestinian health authorities reported that as of Monday, 2,800 Palestinians had been killed and 10,000 wounded, with more than half of the dead being women and children. In addition, Israel — which already had maintained a blockade of Gaza — cut off all movement of food, fuel, water, and electricity to the territory. This is quickly generating a humanitarian disaster of a proportion commensurate with the Strip's population of more than two million, with specific consequences ranging from hospitals lacking the supplies and electric power needed to treat the wounded to families running short of food.On top of all this, Israel, through a pre-invasion warning leaflet, has told the more than one million residents of Gaza City and the rest of the northern half of the Strip to head south. Given the lack of food, water, and housing wherever those people could go, such a movement, as U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres has stated, ranges between the "extremely dangerous" and the "impossible." Evacuation does not even buy safety, as indicated by lethal Israeli attacks on convoys that were using what Israel had designated as a "safe route."The scale of physical human suffering in the Gaza Strip already exceeds what Hamas inflicted on Israel last week. And Israel is just getting started as the Israeli aerial assault is likely to transition to a ground offensive.Given the extensive and careful planning that clearly went into the recent Hamas attack, it can be assumed that Hamas's planning did not end there. The group surely anticipated a strong Israeli reprisal, has done all it can to prepare for that reprisal, and has calculated that when the whole episode is over it will have served Hamas's interests more than Israel's. Drawing Israel into an extremely difficult urban warfare campaign on Hamas's own turf may have been one of the group's objectives.The hostages Hamas seized in southern Israel (as many as 150) vastly complicates any Israeli military operation. Hamas claims that Israeli airstrikes already have killed 13 of the hostages — an unconfirmed but plausible claim given the destruction from the airstrikes. The remaining hostages will be in grave danger from a ground assault, regardless of whether Hamas positions them to function as human shields.Animosity across the region and much of the rest of the world will be substantial and will work against Israeli interests and Israeli security. Arab governments will be less inclined than before to expand relations with Israel.In the occupied West Bank — where even before October 7, anger over Israeli policies and actions made the chance of a new popular uprising or intifada significant — heightened anger over more Israeli killing of Palestinian brethren in Gaza increases that chance. There already are signs of the current violence in Gaza spilling over into the West Bank, with at least 46 Palestinians killed and 700 injured in clashes with Israeli security forces and settlers since the Hamas attack.In Gaza itself, an expansion of Israeli-inflicted bloodshed among the Palestinian residents will feed expanded anger against Israel among the remaining residents, with all the potential for new violence that such anger always has entailed. Destruction of Hamas's military capability, even if that could be completely achieved, does not remove the problem. Hamas was never the whole story of violent Palestinian reaction to Israeli policies. Much of the recent rocket fire from Gaza has been carried out by the Palestine Islamic Jihad, a smaller and more radical Gaza-based group. The anger and the violence will find other channels — perhaps through groups and cells not yet formed — even if neither Hamas nor the PIJ were still functional.The Israeli objective in a new ground invasion of Gaza may go beyond "mowing the lawn," to use the Israelis' term for their periodic surges in military attacks against Palestinians, and extend to destroying the ability of Hamas to function any more as Gaza's de facto government. But even if that objective is achieved, then a big unanswered question is, who does govern the Gaza Strip? The Palestinian Authority is widely discredited among Palestinians and seems unable to rise above its residual role as a security auxiliary to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Direct Israeli rule of Gaza would be a prescription for even more resentment over occupation and more potential for violent Israeli-Palestinian clashes.U.S. policy on the crisis shows signs of having been swept up in some of the same emotions and rage as most Israelis have. In this respect, the policy is tracking with a broader mood that the Hamas attack has generated in the American body politic, in which the safest public posture is expression of unflinching support for Israel. It is even more hazardous to one's political health than it usually is to say anything that places the crisis within the context of longstanding Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. Related to this, the Biden policy of essentially going all in with Israel likely has domestic political calculations behind it.The administration's pronouncements have often reduced the crisis to an easy-to-emote-over tale of good versus evil, which ignores likely motivations for what was a carefully calculated attack undertaken in response to Israeli policies and actions.Continuing this theme, administration officials have likened what Hamas did to the Islamic State or ISIS. The brutal tactics that Hamas used during its incursion into southern Israel can indeed be compared to some notorious actions by ISIS, but beyond that the comparison is meaningless. ISIS is not part of any longstanding situation comparable to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. ISIS is an international terrorist group whose ideology and ambitions know no international boundaries.Hamas is a nationalist group seeking political power in a Palestinian state and has no interest in international terrorism beyond that theater. ISIS has never spoken about observing an open-ended truce to live peacefully next to a state that is currently its adversary. Hamas has. ISIS has never competed in, much less won, a free and fair election. Hamas has. Why and how the tactics and objectives of Hamas have evolved into what it displayed this month have to do with peaceful avenues of competition being closed. To reduce the entire conflict into a matter of one set of outrageous tactics is to miss all the other dimensions of that conflict.Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has been calling for de-escalation. Russia and China have called for an immediate cease-fire, and Russia is proposing a U.N. Security Council resolution to that effect.The Biden administration is moving in the opposite direction. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on social media endorsed Turkish efforts to secure a cease-fire, but later deleted the post. While President Biden said on Sunday that Israeli occupation of Gaza would be a "big mistake," current administration policy is to otherwise endorse the escalation of the violence that Israel currently is conducting in the Gaza Strip.The administration should think carefully about how U.S. interests differ from Israeli interests and objectives. Israel violently exacting revenge in this case is not a U.S. interest. Given that the foremost responsibility of a government is ensuring the safety and security of its own citizens, one of the important U.S. interests at stake concerns how some of those citizens may have become hostages in the Gaza Strip and will be greatly endangered by escalated Israeli military attacks.In addition to Americans among the hostages Hamas seized, an estimated 500 to 600 other U.S. citizens — mostly Palestinian Americans — are in the Gaza Strip. They are hostages, too — trapped there after the Israeli shutdown of all movement in and out of the territory, and in serious danger of becoming casualties of Israeli air or ground operations. One of those Americans, a woman whose home is Salt Lake City and currently is stuck in Gaza with her family, said, "I feel like I've been abandoned by my country. We're American citizens and we're not being treated as American citizens."Another U.S. interest is preventing the current warfare to spread regionally. The more that the fighting involving Israelis and Gazans escalates, the greater is the danger of such spread, even though other actors in the region are not seeking a wider war. Those in the U.S. who habitually try to stir up conflict with Iran are using the current crisis to do more stirring. This is despite the fact that no evidence has emerged of any direct Iranian role in the Hamas attack — as attested to most convincingly by official Israeli spokespeople, given that the Israeli government usually is eager to implicate Iran in anything condemnable. Press reports citing sources within the U.S. government indicate that Iranian government officials were surprised by Hamas's action.The Biden administration nonetheless has foolishly picked this moment to draw Iran into the Gaza crisis in a way by reneging at least temporarily on its commitment, under a recent prisoner swap deal that freed five imprisoned Americans, to permit some frozen Iranian assets to be used for humanitarian purposes inside Iran. Accusations by opponents of the administration that this money had some connection, however indirect, with Hamas military operations are patently false, given that none of the money involved had yet been expensed. The administration's move will further damage U.S. credibility regarding a willingness to make good on commitments, thereby making it more difficult for the U.S. to reach beneficial agreements with any other government, not just Iran.The administration evidently wanted to make a critical statement about the longstanding and well-known supply relationship between Iran and Hamas. If a patron that has supplied arms or money to a client is to be punished — to the extent even of previous agreements being reneged upon — this raises a question about yet another U.S. interest at stake in the current crisis: avoiding opprobrium and repercussions stemming from some other state's actions.If Iran is to be condemned for any actions by Hamas, even actions Iran did not instigate or control, then what is the attitude to be taken toward the United States regarding destructive and anger-inducing actions in Gaza by its client Israel, the recipient of voluminous U.S. financial, military, and diplomatic support?The world won't likely remember gentle admonitions from President Biden about observing the rule of law. It will instead focus on the U.S. effectively giving a green light for — and materially assisting — an assault that not only flouts the laws of war but brings death and suffering to thousands of innocent persons.There will be hostile reactions to all this, including from violent extremist groups. Revenge is an urge that is not unique to Israelis. Those who are quick to make comparisons with ISIS should reflect on the fact that probably the most consistent theme in the propaganda, interrogations, and claims of terrorists — including al-Qaida — who have attacked U.S. interests has been U.S. support for Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians.

In a moment of unguarded honesty that went viral last week, President Biden was asked by reporters if U.S. airstrikes in Yemen targeting the Shia Islamist group known as the Houthis were "working."The President sheepishly replied, "Well, when you say 'working'—are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes." In a single sentence, Biden captured the impuissant hollowness of two decades of U.S. foreign policy bromides on the use of military force, the Middle East, and deterrence.Washington's critics have often said that, whenever a crisis occurs, U.S. policymakers exhibit an almost Pavlovian instinct to reach for military options — no matter the facts on the ground or the odds of success — in a desperate attempt to "do something." Amid mounting tension in the Middle East stemming from the Israel-Hamas conflict, the foreign policy establishment is again hand-waving those criticisms away amid vague calls for indefinite U.S.-led intervention in Yemen and even war with Iran — this, despite the President's own admission that doing so will fail to change a thing.Indeed, despite at least eight rounds of U.S. strikes that expended hundreds of valuable precision-guided munitions, Houthi attacks on ships transiting the Red Sea have only increased in frequency and scope, targeting more U.S.-owned and U.S-flagged vessels. While legitimate military analysts and regional experts knew these strikes were doomed to fail from the start, it should now be obvious there is no credible military solution to the crisis in the Red Sea.More importantly, as three U.S. troops were killed and more than 30 injured in a local Shia militia attack on a remote outpost along the Syria-Jordan border known as "Tower 22" on Sunday, the last thing the Biden Administration should be doing is looking to escalate things in Yemen. Instead, Washington should start by recognizing that both its economic and national security interests are largely unaffected by Red Sea transit. If it wants, the U.S. can truly afford to do nothing there. Despite a 65% decline in expected freight container volumes transiting the Red Sea, the U.S. saw just a 1% decline in net imports for the month of December. The U.S. does not need to spend between $260 and $573 million per month, as some analysts estimate, to defend foreign merchant shipping with no end in sight.Meanwhile, China has eschewed the use of force and is instead free-riding on U.S. military action in the Red Sea, even though Beijing faces mounting freight and insurance costs that have caused its economy significant harm. China has a destroyer, frigate, and replenishment vessel currently situated in the Gulf of Aden — not to mention a naval base in Djibouti at the mouth of the Bab el-Mandeb strait — and is perfectly capable of stepping up to conduct defensive operations in the Red Sea.Yet, through no cogent or intentional U.S. action, the demonstrated ineffectiveness of military action — alongside rising costs — are likely now spurring new Chinese efforts to pressure Iran to rein in the Houthis. While Iran retains very strong ties to the group, having provided them with weapons, training, and assistance over the years, it doesn't have total control over the Houthis. Nonetheless, China has the requisite economic leverage over Tehran — and by extension the Houthis — to demand an end to the crisis.For its part, the U.S. should not impede any such resolution simply because it didn't play a leading role in brokering a deal. If a deal is eventually reached, many in Washington would view it as evidence of Beijing establishing itself as a key security broker in the Middle East. But if America's recent experience as a security provider in the region is any guide, it is not clear such a development would be bad for the United States vis-à-vis its rivalry with China.However, if the U.S. wanted to take a more active role in resolving the crisis than passing the buck to China, a diplomatic response could also be pursued. Diplomacy would serve to avoid an unpredictable and costly U.S. military campaign that would immediately compromise two of Washington's stated objectives in the Middle East: to prevent the war in Gaza from further consuming the region, and officially ending the civil war in Yemen.The Houthis have repeatedly linked their motive for attacking ships in the Red Sea to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Over the course of the war, Houthi attacks have correlated with events in Gaza. For example, Houthi attacks decreased during the brief truce in November, only to resume afterwards. In December, the group's official spokesman claimed attacks on ships transiting the Bab el-Mandeb Strait toward the Suez Canal will continue until "Gaza receives the food and medicine it needs." As Houthi strategic intentions have not changed, and their attack capabilities have not been meaningfully degraded, diplomacy is a low-cost option for Washington to consider without foisting some terrible result on the United States.Working to increase aid shipments to Gaza would not just help to alleviate the humanitarian crisis there, but would deprive the Houthis of their claimed justification for attacks in the Red Sea and provide the group with an offramp for de-escalation that would also serve to prevent indefinite U.S. participation in a broader regional war. However, this would also necessitate increased diplomatic pressure on the Israeli government to allow more aid into Gaza, a step the Biden Administration remains uninterested in taking.Put simply, there are no existential or vital U.S. national interests at stake in Yemen, and very little is at stake for the U.S. economically in the Red Sea. Any multi-billion-dollar effort to fight a war in Yemen would render no political, economic, or security benefits to the United States. Strategies like "buck passing" and diplomatic engagement are perfectly viable, would do the U.S. no harm, and could resolve the crisis. Continued military action in Yemen, by contrast, presents dubious prospects for success. The pitfalls of sustained U.S. military action in Yemen — and in other fronts across the Middle East tied to the war in Gaza like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, or yesterday's tragedy in Jordan — still include a non-trivial risk of regional war that can only be ignored at the world's peril.

Iranian proxies throughout the Middle East are involved in a multifront escalation. The correct approach for the United States is to engage the Middle East consistently through this crisis and beyond to promote long-term stability.
The post Iran's Hand in Attacks Targeting US, Israel appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Recent events in Bulgaria have brought the true extent of its rule of law decay to the fore. The wars between the highest-ranking prosecutors in the country, public testimonies by participants in crime syndicates implicating senior magistrates and politicians, and the brutal murders of potential witnesses against organized crime demonstrate that the line between organized crime, the judiciary, and the political apparatus is increasingly difficult to draw. In this post, I argue that the current escalation of Bulgaria's rule of law crisis lays bare the European Commission's continued mismanagement of the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM).

Hamas's horrific attacks last weekend and the subsequent Israeli bombings of Gaza have put the entire world on edge. Beyond concerns for the fate of the 2.2 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza with nowhere to flee, there is also a palpable fear that the conflict will escalate into a region-wide war. None of the main actors — with the possible exception of Hamas — want or benefit from such a war, yet all sides are acting in a manner that increases its risk by the day. There is little to suggest that Israel or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seek to widen the war. The chaos in Israel and his government's failure to not only prevent the attack but also manage its aftermath defies the idea that he was preparing or yearning for a larger war. Israel would indeed find itself in a precarious situation if it ends up in a two-front war with Hezbollah attacking Israel from the north.There is also nothing to suggest that Hezbollah desires a war with Israel either, despite the Wall Street Journal reporting that Hamas had coordinated the attack with Hezbollah and Iran. Hamas alone attacked Israel, and there was no simultaneous or subsequent large-scale attack from the north. Given Lebanon's dire economic situation — it is in its fourth year of a deep economic and political crisis, with inflation at 350% and 42% of the total population facing acute food insecurity — war with Israel would risk bringing the entire nation to a breaking point. Similarly, there is no evidence that Tehran would benefit from a larger war. As a European diplomat put it to me, "Iran prefers a low-intensity conflict with Israel, not open warfare." The regime in Tehran has just survived one of the greatest challenges to its rule and appears relieved that the anniversary of the killing of Mahsa Amini did not reignite these protests on a large scale. Its economy is also in dire straits, and its focus has mainly been on reaching a de-escalation understanding with Washington that would secure the release of Iranian funds and the softening of the enforcement of US sanctions on Iranian oil sales. Rather than coordinating the attack with Hamas, Tehran was taken by surprise, according to US intelligence. Tehran has also taken the unusual step of sending a message to Israel through the United Nations, stressing that it seeks to avoid further escalation. It has, however, warned that it will be compelled to intervene if Israel continues bombing Gaza.If there is any rationality in the Biden administration's Middle East policy, it too will oppose further escalation of the fighting. Between the war in Ukraine and a potential crisis with China over Taiwan, the Biden administration simply cannot afford a broader war in the region. The administration's focus — however misguided —has instead been on securing a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The White House has been so obsessed with this idea that they have even begun considering offering the Saudi rulers a security pact as well as nuclear enrichment technology. War in the Middle East has not been on Biden's agenda. Finally, the Arab states in the region, from Egypt to Syria to Saudi Arabia, have nothing to gain and much to lose from a larger war. Egypt fears a massive influx of Gazans into the Sinai that, in the words of David Hearst, has the "potential to tip Egypt over the edge after a decade of economic decline." Syria's Bashar al-Assad has been focused on normalizing relations with Sunni Arab states and re-entering the Arab League — critical both for his political rehabilitation and Syria's economic rebuilding. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — who was on the verge of normalizing relations with Israel and throwing the Palestinians under the bus — felt compelled to revive Saudi Arabia's traditionally pro-Palestinian profile given the wider Arab world's immense anger over Israel's bombing of Gaza. His call this week with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi — the first time the two ever spoke — was at least partly motivated by a desire not to cede leadership on this issue to Tehran. Both a bloodbath in Gaza and a broader war will severely complicate his ambition to assert himself as the undisputed leader of the Arab world, given his neglect of and disdain for the Palestinians. Despite clear interests on almost all sides against a regional war, all sides are acting in a manner that makes such a war increasingly likely. If Israel's invasion of Gaza proves successful in terms of decimating Hamas, Hezbollah may feel compelled to intervene — not necessarily to save Hamas, but to save itself. A successful Israeli campaign against Hamas will tilt the balance in the region, with Israel having freer hands to go after Hezbollah. An attack from the north by Hezbollah may not save Hamas as much as it will make it too costly for the Netanyahu government to extend the war into Lebanon after Hamas has been defeated. Hezbollah may not be able to prevent an Israeli victory, but it will have a compelling interest to turn it pyrrhic. Hezbollah's involvement, in turn, will bring Iran much more directly into the conflict. While declaring its opposition to a wider war, Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has warned that unless Israel stops its attacks, the war will be widened and that Israel will suffer "a huge earthquake." With Iran and Hezbollah drawn into the conflict, the Biden administration will be under tremendous pressure to intervene militarily despite clear U.S. interest in staying out. There is little in Biden's conduct thus far that suggests that, in this scenario, he will prioritize America's long-term strategic interest over what is politically expedient for him in the immediate term. Direct American military intervention in Gaza, or against Hezbollah and Iran, is all but certain to generate major attacks against U.S. troops and interests throughout the Middle East by armed groups supported by Tehran. Militias in Iraq and Yemen have already issued stern warnings of a multi-front response to any American intervention. The White House is well aware of these escalation risks. At a meeting earlier this year between two senior American officials and a high-level representative of the Iranian government, one of the Americans warned Tehran that if it enriched uranium to 90% purity, the U.S. would strike Iran militarily. Without skipping a beat, the Iranian official responded that Iran would respond immediately by destroying fourteen American bases in the region by raining thousands of rockets on them within 24 hours.It is in this context that the Biden administration's refusal to call for de-escalation and a ceasefire — or to practically pressure Israel to exercise its right to defend itself within the confines of international law — is so problematic. It is not just the moral bankruptcy of the Biden White House to stand in the way of efforts to end the crisis (shocking internal emails have revealed that State Department officials have been prohibited from using terms such as de-escalation, ceasefire, ending the bloodshed, and restoring calm). It is not the blatant disregard for human life shown by the White House when its spokesperson blasts Democratic lawmakers advocating for a ceasefire and calls them "repugnant."It is also the strategic malpractice of giving Israel a carte blanche to act as it wishes despite knowing and understanding the tremendous risk that Israel's unrestrained actions in Gaza can drag Washington into a wider regional war that neither serves the interest of the U.S. nor Israel. The combination of issuing warnings to Hezbollah and Iran to show restraint, while demanding no restraint from Israel, may be politically expedient for Biden, but it is likely to produce the very nightmare scenario Biden presumably seeks to avoid. As Ben Rhodes from the Obama White House put it in his podcast this past week, counseling restraint and calls "to follow the laws of war, are not to show a lack of regard for what Israel has gone through. On the contrary, it's kind of what I wish someone had done for the United States after 9/11."But Biden is not only giving Israel bad advice. He is giving Israel bad advice that risks getting thousands of Americans killed in yet another senseless and preventable war in the Middle East. If he lacks the humanity to call for a ceasefire to prevent the killing of thousands of Palestinians, he should at least not abdicate his responsibility as President of the United States to keep Americans out of the killing zone.

A survey of official reactions from 11 Global South states outside the Middle East/North Africa region — Brazil, Mexico, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam — reveals a consensus on condemnation of Hamas' attacks. But their statements differ on who's to blame, what's the solution, and what to do next. Most of the states selected in this survey are among the Global South's key middle powers. Four smaller or less influential states — Bangladesh, Kenya, Malaysia, and Singapore — also included.In Latin America, Brazil said it "condemns the series of bombings and ground attacks carried out today in Israel from the Gaza Strip (and) expresses condolences to the families of the victims and expresses its solidarity with the people of Israel.""There is no justification for resorting to violence, especially against civilians," the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote in a statement. "The Brazilian Government urges all parties to exercise maximum restraint in order to avoid escalating the situation."Brazil also "reiterates its commitment to the two-state solution...within mutually agreed and internationally recognized borders" and "reaffirms that the mere management of the conflict does not constitute a viable alternative for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and the resumption of peace negotiations is urgent."Brazilian President Luiz Inacio "Lula" Da Silva also expressed his "rejection of terrorism in any of its forms" and called for a two-state solution. Brazil, as the United Nations Security Council president for October, called a closed emergency session of the Council this weekend. The meeting failed to agree on a statement.Mexico's foreign ministry "condemns the attacks suffered by the people of Israel (and) calls for an end to this inappropriate violence...to avoid an escalation that (will cause) greater...suffering to the civilian population."The Mexican statement also argued that it is "essential to resume the process of direct and good faith negotiations between both parties...within the framework of the two-state solution...within mutually agreed upon and internationally recognized secure borders in accordance with (United Nations resolutions)."Turning to Africa, Kenya's Ministry of Foreign and Diaspora Affairs "condemns, in the strongest terms possible, the unprovoked attack by Hamas militants" and called on both sides to "exercise restraint and seek a negotiated agreement" to the conflict.Nigeria, for its part, said it is "deeply concerned" at the "outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hamas" and "calls for de-escalation and ceasefire" and a "peaceful resolution of the conflict through dialogue."South Africa called for an "immediate cessation of violence, restraint and peace." "The new conflagration has arisen from...illegal occupation of Palestine land, desecration of Al Aqsa mosque & Christian holy sites and ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people," the South African foreign ministry said in a statement on Saturday, calling for a return to the "1967 internationally recognized borders with East Jerusalem as capital" and also mentioning "the right of return."Looking at Asia, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was quoted as saying he is "deeply shocked by the news of terrorist attacks in Israel, adding that he and his government "stand in solidarity with Israel." The Indian foreign ministry had not issued a press release on the crisis at the time of writing.Bangladesh's Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that it "denounces the ongoing armed conflict between Israel and Palestine and deplores the resultant loss of innocent civilian lives (and) calls for an immediate ceasefire.""Living under the Israeli occupation and forced settlements in Palestinian territory will not bring peace," the statement continued, adding that Bangladesh "supports a two-state solution, Palestine and Israel, living side by side as independent states free of occupation following UN Resolutions No. 242 and 338."Indonesia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it "is deeply concerned with the escalation of conflict between Palestine and Israel.""Indonesia urges the immediate end of violence," the statement said. "The root of the conflict, namely the occupation of the Palestinian territories by Israel, must be resolved, in accordance with the parameters agreed upon by the UN."Vietnam said it is "profoundly concerned" and called "on relevant parties to exercise restraint" and "refrain from taking actions that complicate the situation." Hanoi added that it calls on "relevant parties" to "soon resume negotiations to resolve disagreements through peaceful means, on the basis of international law and the relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council."Meanwhile, Singapore stated that it "strongly condemns the rocket and terror attacks from Gaza on Israel, which have resulted in deaths and injuries of many innocent civilians.""We call for an immediate end to the violence and urge all sides to do their utmost to protect the safety and security of civilians," said a spokesperson for Singapore's foreign ministry.Malaysia said it "is deeply concerned over the loss of so many lives due to the latest escalation of clashes in and around the Gaza Strip. At this critical time...parties must exercise utmost restraint and de-escalate.""The root cause must be acknowledged," the statement continued. "The Palestinians have been subjected to the prolonged illegal occupation, blockade and sufferings, the desecration of Al-Aqsa, as well as the politics of dispossession at the hands of Israel as the occupier.""There should be no...flagrant hypocrisy in dealing with any regime that practices apartheid and blatantly violates...international law," Malaysia's foreign ministry added. "Palestinians have the legal right to live in a state of peace within its own recognised borders based on pre-1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital."While each of these 11 states has, as one could expect, condemned the horrific attack by Hamas, their statements reveal different leanings on Israel. India (though an official foreign ministry statement is still not out) currently seems closest to the Israeli and American position, by invoking terrorism with no mention of de-escalation, the two-state solution, or key UN resolutions on Palestine. Singapore too invokes terrorism. Kenya mentions terrorism indirectly, but calls the Hamas attack "unprovoked." Though the official Brazilian statement does not mention the T word, Lula's comments clearly label the Hamas attacks as terrorism.The seven other states have not characterized the attack as terrorism. Nigeria however avoids criticizing Israel and couches its calls to peace in general terms. Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Africa criticize Israel and specifically cite the Israeli occupation as the root cause. Brazil, Mexico and Vietnam stay focused on restraint, the two-state solution and UN resolutions or relevant international law. If we were to project these reactions on a spectrum of the degree of alignment to U.S. and Israeli positions on the crisis (admittedly a challenging task due to the complexity of the issues involved and the early stage of the responses), India and Kenya seem to be at the end closest to the U.S. and Israel. They are followed by Singapore and Nigeria. Brazil, Mexico, and Vietnam appear to be next.At the other end of this spectrum, and thus relatively the least aligned with Israeli and U.S. positions, lie Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Africa. If the violence in the Middle East escalates much more, as seems likely, expect the diplomatic action to move to the United Nations. We will then know much more about where Global South states stand on the matter.

Since November, the Houthis in Yemen have launched scores of missile and drone attacks on vessels in the Gulf of Aden and the southern Red Sea in reaction to the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Gaza. Ansarallah, the dominant Houthi militia, also hijacked the Japanese-operated and partly Israeli-owned Galaxy Leader on November 19.On December 19, the Pentagon responded by establishing Operation Prosperity Guardian, a mostly Western security initiative aimed at deterring the Houthis from disrupting shipping near the Bab el-Mandeb, the narrow straight separating Yemen from the Horn of Africa. About 30 percent of all global containers and approximately 12 percent of world trade transit the Bab el-Mandeb.Yet Operation Prosperity Guardian failed to deter Ansarallah from continuing its missile and drone strikes. The group has said consistently that these attacks on vessels off Yemen's coast will end if and only when Israel ceases its attacks on Gaza. Rather than using U.S. leverage to persuade the Israeli government to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza, the Biden administration, along with the UK, has carried out over the past week a series of airstrikes against Houthi targets across Yemen while continuing to supply Israel with bombs and other weaponry to continue its Gaza campaign. The Pentagon was keen to emphasize that this month's U.S.-UK strikes against Ansarallah targets in Yemen took place outside Operation Prosperity Guardian's framework.These strikes, the first direct U.S. military intervention against the Houthis since October 2016, are escalating regional tensions in ways that are unsettling Washington's closest Arab allies and partners in the Persian Gulf.Apart from Bahrain, which joined Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands in playing nonoperational roles in these American-British strikes, the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have refused to participate. And most of them have expressed concern about Washington and London's escalation. Even before January 11, when the first wave of strikes took place, some Gulf Arab officials warned explicitly against such military action.During a joint press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on January 7, Qatari Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani made clear his concerns. "We never see a military action as a resolution," he asserted, adding that protecting shipping lanes through "diplomatic means" would be the "best way possible." Nine days later, while addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Sheikh Mohammed warned that military strikes against the Houthis would fail to contain Ansarallah's operations. "We need to address the central issue, which is Gaza, in order to get everything else defused... If we are just focusing on the symptoms and not treating the real issues, [solutions] will be temporary," he said.Shortly after the U.S.-UK strikes, Kuwait also expressed "grave concern and keen interest in the developments in the Red Sea region following the attacks that targeted sites in Yemen."As for Oman, which has often served as a key mediator and geopolitical balancer in the region, its foreign ministry declared that Muscat "can only condemn the use of military action by friendly countries" and warned that the U.S.-UK strikes risk worsening the Middle East's perilous situation. "We denounce the resort to military action by [Western] allies while Israel persists in its brutal war without accountability," read a statement from the ministry.Saudi Arabia's high stakesBut the GCC member most concerned about the escalating tensions in the Gulf of Aden, southern Red Sea, and Yemen is likely Saudi Arabia. Late last year, Riyadh asked the Biden administration to show restraint when responding to Ansarallah's attacks on vessels off Yemen's coast. After the U.S. and UK strikes began, the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs called for "avoiding escalation" while noting that Riyadh was monitoring events with "great concern."In an interview with RS, Mehran Kamrava, a professor of government at Georgetown University in Qatar, explained that "[t]his statement indicates Saudi efforts to encourage de-escalation and at the same time to ensure its short- and medium-term diplomatic interests by signaling its concern to all the parties involved, including the U.S. and Britain.""The Saudis are concerned and for good reason," according to Aziz Alghashian, a fellow at Lancaster University in Britain. "The Saudi ruling elite want to avoid being caught in the middle of regional and international conflicts," he told RS.Among other things, the Saudis want their nearly two-year-old truce with the Houthis to be preserved. The kingdom is also determined to ensure that the Saudi-Iranian détente, that was mediated by Oman, Iraq, and China last March, remains on track. The view from Riyadh is that the U.S.-UK military intervention in Yemen threatens to undermine both interests."The Saudi concern is that attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, and U.S. and UK attacks on Yemen bring Iran and the Houthis closer together and that Iran [will] become more directly involved in Houthi [operations]," according to Kamrava. "By attacking Yemen, the U.S. and UK have already escalated the Gaza war beyond Palestine. Saudi Arabia would want to do whatever it can to contain a further escalation as it may spill over into its own borders and to result in a radicalization of domestic political sensibilities."The Saudi leadership recognizes that the kingdom would be in a much more vulnerable position if the ongoing regional crisis were unfolding during the 2016-20 period, when tensions between Riyadh and Tehran were sky high. Due to their recent détente, the kingdom perceives the Iranian threat to the kingdom as far more manageable. "The escalation of regional tension due to the war on Gaza and the subsequent escalation of tensions in the Red Sea are examples of why the Saudi-Iranian normalization deal struck last March is strategically [valuable to Riyadh]," said Alghashian.Ultimately, with Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman, better known as MbS, at the helm, the Saudi leadership wants to prioritize its Vision 2030 — the kingdom's ambitious economic diversification agenda. A successful Vision 2030 requires stability in Saudi Arabia and its neighborhood. It's within this context that the Saudi government renormalized diplomatic relations with Iran last year, embraced opportunities for rapprochement with Qatar and Turkey in 2021/22, and engaged the Houthis in talks about a permanent truce.With NEOM, a futuristic metropolis, and other Vision 2030 projects based along Saudi Arabia's Red Sea coast, officials in Riyadh are gravely concerned about how the Gaza war, the related Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, and U.S.-UK retaliation could destabilize this body of water and the surrounding territory. Further escalation by any of the parties is a scenario that the Saudi government wants to avoid at all costs.To ensure that Ansarallah does not resume its attacks against Saudi Arabia, Riyadh has tried to distance itself from this month's U.S.-UK military strikes in Yemen. However, given Manama's participation, however nominal, in Washington and London's attacks on Houthi targets, as well as its normalized relationship with Israel, the possibility that the Houthis may retaliate by targeting the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain, can't be dismissed. Given the extent to which protecting Bahrain's national security has been a high priority for Saudi Arabia and the other GCC states, such a scenario risks serious damage to Riyadh's interests.As Kamrava observed, targeting U.S. interests on the Arabian Peninsula by the Houthis, or "some of the loose grouplets within them," could constitute an "extremely dangerous development and a conflagration that would be difficult to contain."

In the weeks leading up to President Joe Biden's announcement that U.S. forces and a group of allies launched a series of strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, major media outlets were acutely aware of the risk that Israel's war on Gaza could grow into a wider regional conflict. Yet, in the breadth of stories that covered the Biden administration's desire and efforts to avoid such an escalation, mainstream media rarely mentioned the clearest non-military pathway to easing regional tensions: helping to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. The Houthi leadership in Yemen has said their attacks will not cease until Israel's "crimes in Gaza stop and food, medicines and fuel are allowed to reach its besieged population" according to Houthi spokesman Mohammed al-Bukhaiti in December. Who can tell if that's true, but evidence suggests that the attacks in the Red Sea and in Iraq and Syria all but stopped during an earlier brokered "pause" in Gaza in November.But this is never discussed. In the first weeks of January, major media outlets maintained that the Biden administration was grappling with how best to manage the conflict and ensure that it did not extend beyond Gaza. Between October 7 and January 14, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal ran over 60 articles that focused on some aspect of the threat of escalation in the Middle East. At least 14 of them focused on the Biden administration's decision-making process. "Attacks Heighten Fears of a Wider War for the Middle East and U.S.," reported the New York Times. "Tensions in the Middle East are rising beyond Israel. Here's where," said the Washington Post."U.S. Steps Up Diplomatic Push to Avert Broader Middle East War," added the Wall Street Journal. Even following the Jan. 13 strikes in Yemen, media reports contended that the Biden administration was committed to avoiding escalation. "Mr. Biden and his top aides have been loath to take steps that could draw the United States into a wider war in the region, according to the New York Times. But of those 14 articles, only five mention the demands of U.S. adversaries in the region, namely that Israel allow food and medicine into Gaza and end its bombing campaign. In most cases, the articles only briefly note that the Houthi attacks were being carried out "in solidarity" with suffering Gazans. But nowhere in the series of stories about the potential crisis was the pursuit of a ceasefire mentioned as an option.Instead, the articles mostly framed the options as maintaining the status quo or pursuing a military solution."Senior officials said they must decide whether to strike Houthi missile and drone sites in Yemen, or wait to see whether the Houthis back off after the sinking of three of their fast boats and the deaths of their fighters," reported the New York Times on December 31, after a U.S. helicopter sunk three Houthi boats in the Red Sea. "Mr. Biden and his top aides have sought since the Oct. 7 attacks to contain the conflict between Israel and Hamas to the Gaza Strip," reads the New York Times' January 3 story on the Biden team's efforts. "The Pentagon dispatched two aircraft carriers and doubled the number of American warplanes to the Middle East to deter Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq from widening the war." If there were critics of the Biden administration, they always preferred a more aggressive path. "Critics of the administration's approach have called the retaliatory strikes insufficient," said the Washington Post on November 8, following U.S. strikes in Syria. Meanwhile, the reports ignored experts who have been pointing to ceasefire as an option for weeks.In making an argument for Washington to take the lead in pushing for an end to violence in November 2023, three fellows at the Century Foundation offered that a ceasefire would "reduce tensions regionally, lessening the risk—currently increasing daily—of a broader war that draws in the United States."A few hours before the strikes in Yemen on Jan. 11, RAND Corporation researcher Alex Stark made the case that pushing for an end to the war in Gaza was the most effective way for Washington to de-escalate tensions with the Houthis. "Like it or not, the Houthis have linked their aggression to Israel's operations in Gaza and have won domestic and regional support for doing so," she wrote in Foreign Affairs. "Finding a sustainable, long-term approach to both conflicts will be critical to de-escalating tensions across the region and getting the Houthis to call off their attacks on commercial vessels."Following the U.S. operations, the New York Times did note that countries like Qatar and Oman "had warned the United States that bombing the Houthis could be a mistake, fearing that it would do little to deter them and would deepen regional tensions. They have argued that focusing on reaching a cease-fire in Gaza would remove the Houthis' stated impetus for the attacks." Experts have said that the inability to link Houthi aggression with the ongoing war is a strategic miscalculation. "That refusal to see the linkage between Gaza and the Red Sea means we also fail to see the overriding security-strategic imperative here: to avoid a further escalation regionally, and to move towards possibilities that are de-escalatory," wrote the Carnegie Endowment's H. A. Hellyer on X."[I]t's about avoiding a situation that gets out of control quickly and easily, and which could have the potential to drag much of the region into a destructive war. We have a number of clear good pathways in that regard, but we've rejected them."To be sure, it is unclear how the Houthis or militias in Iraq and Syria would respond to a pause in hostilities in Gaza. But the short-term humanitarian pauses in Gaza in mid-November led to the only period of relative calm in the region since the outbreak of the war, particularly in terms of attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria.According to a tracker from The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as of January 16, there have been 152 anti-U.S. strikes since October 18 in those two countries. None of them took place between November 23, when the short-term ceasefire was announced, and December 3, two days after the truce expired. There was also a notable decrease in Houthi attacks in the Red Sea during that timeframe, according to a timeline compiled by the maritime risk intelligence firm Ambrey Analytics."During the ceasefire that was in place in November their attacks dramatically decreased, providing a degree of empirical evidence that the ceasefire had a strong likelihood of being an effective option to stop the attacks," said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute. "The media never had to endorse this option. And they could also rightfully be scrutinizing and be skeptical about it. But by not mentioning it at all, they deprived the American public awareness that the option even existed, leaving Americans with the false impression that the only option was to do nothing or to escalate by bombing Yemen."Meanwhile, momentum in the push for a ceasefire in official Washington also appears to have hit a snag after Congress's return from the holiday recess. In the weeks following the start of Israel's offensive, perhaps influenced by polls that showed strong public support, the number of members who explicitly called for a ceasefire increased steadily, reaching a total of 62 by December 21.Since then, however, only one new member has joined the calls. Several lawmakers from both parties did criticize the White House for not consulting Congress before bombing Yemen. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) took it a step further, drawing the direct link between Washington's unwillingness to call for a ceasefire and the potential for escalation in the region. "This is why I called for a ceasefire early. This is why I voted against war in Iraq," Lee wrote on X. "Violence only begets more violence. We need a ceasefire now to prevent deadly, costly, catastrophic escalation of violence in the region."

While the United States remains the dominant extra-regional superpower as the war between Hamas and Israel threatens to spread more broadly, China's growing presence across the Middle East raises important questions about how it conceives its response to the crisis.Enjoying close ties to Israel and decent relations with major Palestinian and Lebanese players, including Hamas and Hezbollah, Beijing's foreign policy in the post-Mao era has been quite balanced between Israel and Arab actors. But Israel's conduct of the war is pushing Beijing to take a stance that is increasingly pro-Palestinian, which risks harming its relations with Tel Aviv.China's main interestsUltimately, what China wants in the Middle East more than anything else is stability. The region is extremely important to the success of the Belt and Road Initiative, which will face serious problems if wars continue to plague the region. To help stabilize the Gulf, in particular, China played a catalyzing role in the renormalization of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran almost eight months ago. Now, he escalating conflict in Israel/Palestine and along the Israeli border with Lebanon has raised growing concern in Beijing about the possibility of a wider war. Beijing has called for a ceasefire, followed by a lasting political settlement to the conflict based on the implementation of a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians as the best course.China and Israel's multifaceted and complicated bilateral relationship has evolved over the decades. Under Chairman Mao Zedong's rule (1949-76), China supported left-wing and "radical" Arab regimes — namely Algeria, Egypt, South Yemen, and Syria — as well as national liberation movements in the Middle East, including the Palestinian struggle. By contrast, Mao saw Israel as a base of Western imperialism in the Arab world. But since Beijing and Tel Aviv established diplomatic relations in 1992, economic relations between China and Israel have flourished across countless sectors, including technology, infrastructure, tourism, health, education, logistics, ports, and cosmetics. There is also a history of a military-tech exchange between the two countries going back to the 1980s. Sino-Israeli relations have deepened to the point where U.S. officials have pressured Tel Aviv to cool its ties with the Asian giant.Despite these deep economic relations, however, China has opposed Israel's occupation of Palestinian and Syrian territory outside its United Nations-recognized borders and criticized its past bombing campaigns against Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon. Unlike Israel, the United States and some other Western states, China has refused to designate Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, instead viewing them as legitimate representatives of segments of the population in Palestine and Lebanon.Beijing reacts to Hamas' surprise attackIn response to Hamas' unprecedented incursion into southern Israel on October 7 and the Israeli bombing campaign of Gaza that followed, Beijing has stressed three main messages. First, it condemned all attacks on civilians. Second, it called for the reactivation of dialogue between the warring sides. Finally, it has called for the effective establishment of a Palestinian state based alongside Israel's 1949-67 borders."China has tried to maintain [neutrality], criticize attacks on civilians, and call for de-escalation and ceasefire," said Yun Sun, co-director of the China Program at the Washington-based Stimson Center, in an interview with RS. "Hamas's attacks on civilians are inexcusable. But for China, Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian territory is also the origin of the attacks."China's response to October 7 was similar to the way Beijing positioned itself after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to some experts. "If in Ukraine there was talk of a 'pro-Russian neutrality,' in this case it is a 'pro-Palestinian neutrality,'" according to Enrico Fardella, Director of the Italy-based ChinaMED Project."Neutrality is functional to maximize [China's] diplomatic flexibility by presenting itself as the only major power capable of dialogue with both sides," he told RS. "This serves to win consensus at the center (among all those actors critical of the [Benjamin] Netanyahu government but at the same time disgusted by Hamas' brutalities), showing the superiority of its own diplomatic action in the face of the American one that is decidedly pro-Israel. The pro-Palestinian component, on the other hand, serves to gather support on the left, i.e., in the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel (and therefore anti-American) area inside and outside the Middle East."Can China help de-escalate?Earlier this year, the Chinese offered to mediate between the Israelis and Palestinians. Now more than ever, the region could benefit from an outside actor playing an effective peacemaking role. But given Beijing's apparent inability to muster the leverage necessary to bring the Israelis and Palestinians toward a peaceful settlement, it is doubtful that China can succeed."We know that Beijing wants to prevent the escalation of the crisis, but I do not think that it has enough instruments to defuse the crisis," said Nurettin Akçay, of the Center for Global Studies at Shanghai University. He explained that China's limited leverage over Israel is a major obstacle to Beijing successfully de-escalating this conflict through diplomatic means. "It is my belief that China's position in the Middle East is somewhat overstated. Its actual power to shape events in the region is quite limited, despite its economic clout. The ongoing crisis has highlighted the fact that China lacks the necessary hard power to pursue its objectives," he told RS."I think all countries that call for de-escalation will help," noted Sun. "Beijing has relatively good relationships with both Israel and Palestine, as well as other regional players. But such good relationships do not necessarily translate into influence on such a major issue," she added. "To assume that Beijing can effectively help de-escalate is to assume that parties to the conflict are willing to change their course, which I do not see as probable at this point."Implications for U.S.-Israel tiesHow much the ongoing violence in Israel-Palestine and Lebanon will impact China's relationship with Israel is unclear. In recent years, China has become more vocal about the Palestinian cause, which serves to boost Beijing's standing among governments and societies across the Islamic world and much of the Global South. This has served to differentiate China from the U.S. and helps Beijing to depict Washington as the isolated player on this issue while countering Western efforts to use the Xinjiang human rights file to distance Muslim-majority countries from China.While the Chinese and Israelis have generally managed to separate their political disagreements from their economic ties in recent years, China's increasingly pro-Palestinian position has the potential to create considerable irritation in the bilateral relationship. And while Netanyahu was flirting earlier this year with the idea of traveling to China and meeting with President Xi Jinping in the face of Biden administration's criticism of the Israeli leader's far-right domestic agenda, such a show of defiance and independence seems highly unlikely given both Washington's strong backing for Israel in the current conflict and Beijing's more pro-Palestinian position.

Israeli military operations in response to the October 7 attack by Hamas have continuously expanded throughout its near abroad in an ever-widening range. While it is true that Hamas has many diplomatic and logistical connections with other actors such as Hezbollah and Iran, it also seems apparent that the embattled Netanyahu government wants to prolong the war, if not expand it, in a bid to stay in power.Up until now he has had the support of Israelis — including members of the opposition and the majority of the public — to "finish the job."But patience may be running out, particularly on the issue of the hostages, coupled with a backlash over the many embarrassing intelligence failures that enabled the original terror attack to happen. As many commentators have noted, only by keeping a state of continuous crisis can Netanyahu retain his current position. Already in official statements he declares that military operations will continue at least into 2025.This week's airstrike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus risks significant escalation with Iran and took place in a country currently too embattled with its own still-ongoing civil war to be a significant threat to Israel. This comes on the heels of attempts by Israel to not just strike at Hezbollah across the border with Lebanon, but to potentially make the area uninhabitable for anyone using (U.S.-supplied) white phosphorus munitions. This only helps to prolong and expand the war in Gaza into places the U.S. may not be ready for or even willing to accept.The United States has been attempting to pivot away from the Middle Eastern region for years, and yet its ideological and sentimental attachment to Israel always plays a major role in drawing it back in. The aftermath of the Gaza War has shown beyond a doubt just how much the interests of the two countries have diverged in the post-Cold War world. What once served as a relationship meant to check a perceived (and overblown) pro-Soviet tilt among early Arab nationalists has now become a strategic millstone around the neck of any rational definition of American interest.As early as the First Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein fired missiles at targets in Israel in a bid to lure Tel Aviv into joining — and therefore undermining — the Arab-majority regional coalition against his designs in Kuwait, the signs of danger have been apparent.Both the United States and Israel were badly affected by the hubris of the 'unipolar moment' of the 1990s and 2000s. No longer believing that meaningful counterbalancing against their interests was possible, both societies appear to have let their strategic cultures become distorted toward short-term thinking and an inability to comprehend the growing capabilities of rival powers. The Israeli position seems to assume that its relationship with the United States invalidates any need to seek a true regional modus vivendi with its immediate neighbors, states whose existence are likely more permanent than predominant U.S. influence in the region. This is made all the more apparent by the willingness to sabotage local relations despite having had some diplomatic breakthroughs prior to the war under the framework of the Abraham Accords. This relationship has also become extremely unequal, and not in the way that one would normally think when examining that of a small regional power and a large global one. All the way back in 1996, President Clinton apparently flew into a rage after meeting with Netanyahu, asking who "the fu*king superpower" was in the relationship.Attempts by various American administrations to seek a solution to the Palestinian issue have repeatedly foundered, all while certain elements of the Israeli public advocate for yet more territorial expansion far outside of officially recognized borders in an attempt to create a "Greater Israel."American largesse seems to be fueling a sense of entitlement, to the tune of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, Israeli combat performance against its neighbors since at least the 2006 Lebanon War comes far short of the mythical capabilities of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which many commentators assume remain frozen in the pristine amber of the mid-20th century. This now takes us to today as the United States, a country coming around late to the idea that its own unipolar moment is over, should be seeking to avoid perpetual brushfire wars that are irrelevant to the global balance of power. Operations in the Gulf of Aden and the damage done to global shipping in that region might not be happening at all were it not for Washington's unconditional support for Israel in an otherwise localized struggle.Attempts to work out an arrangement for de-emphasizing the Middle East are consistently undermined by not only Israeli demands, but also by retaliatory strikes launched by Iranian allies and others on tripwire against U.S. bases that serve little purpose outside of providing some kind of non-specified leverage. Every time one of these dubious outposts is fired upon, it increases the risk of casualties and escalation, which in turn increases the chance that the U.S. will redirect force deployments back to the Middle East.Now, with the Biden Administration planning on sending U.S. troops directly into the Gaza combat zone by building a "humanitarian port" there, it is worth acknowledging that the U.S.-Israel alliance has become extremely damaging to Washington's conception of rational self-interest, Israel's ability to realistically adapt to the realities of its neighborhood, and both countries' ability to avoid escalation into a regional war.The key element currently bringing out the worst in both is the Netanyahu government itself, which appears intent on running roughshod over any calculation of long-term interest in a desperate bid to keep itself in power for as long as possible.

Hello Fully Automated listeners! This is a rebroadcast of Episode 7 of Class Unity: Transmissions, as posted here. Transmissions is the official podcast of Class Unity, and I want to thank them for their permission to use this episode. You can find out more about Class Unity over at https://classunity.org/



For those curious, there will be more independent 'Fully Automated' content coming soon. But I will continue to repost those 'Transmissions' episodes in which I am involved, as I think they will be of interest to listeners of this show, too.







Welcome to Episode 7 of Class Unity "Transmissions." In this episode we are joined by Doug Lain, Commissioning Editor at Sublation Media. Lain is a real veteran of the left podcast scene. From his old philosophy podcast "Diet Soap," which ran from 2009 through 2014, to his work as host of the Zero Books podcast, Zero Squared, Lain's impact as a formative voice on the contemporary socialist left cannot be understated.







In this show we cover a wide range of topics, including Lain's recent ban from Elon Musk's newly "pro-free speech" Twitter (for a joke about RFK Jnr). However, the real purpose of the interview is to revisit an old Tweet of his, from April this year. On April 15, Lain posted three priorities that, he said, "an independent left" should be focused on right now:




Ending the conflict in Ukraine by opposing the very dangerous continuing escalation;



Protecting the working class from the consequences from the continuing financial and fiscal crisis that has been expressed through inflation and the banking crisis;



Opposing the war on disinformation and the expansion of the security state into the "whole of society."




In recent months, Lain has been particularly strident on the first and the third of these priorities. However, his arguments have not been especially well received (his recent encounter with the Majority Report's Matt Binder offers a fairly representative example of the disdain many progressives have for Lain's views). Noting the vehemence of this response, we were curious. And so we decided to invite Lain for a chat.



We start by asking Lain what he means by the phrase "an independent left"? We then move onto the first of his priorities, the war in Ukraine. The US left has been strangely quiet on this conflict. Where it has addressed the issue, it has usually been in handwaving fashion, arguing that it is a case of "imperialism on both sides." We put it to Lain that this is kind of an inversion of Trump's infamous "very fine people on both sides" comment. Perhaps the imperialism on both sides argument had some empirical application in the lead up to World War I. But Russia has a GDP close to that of Italy. Equally, US foreign policy insiders like Former Ambassador to USSR Jack Matlock, George Kennan, William Burns have warned DC policymakers for decades about eastwards NATO expansion, saying in no uncertain terms that Ukraine would be the hardest of red lines for Russia. Moreover, now, as Lev Golonkin reports in The Nation in June, the US is openly funding and arming the Ukrainian military despite the presence in its ranks of openly fascist regiments. It seems clear therefore not only who started this war, and why, but that its moral costs and risks for future catastrophe are unacceptable. So why is the left so adamant in its avoidance of this topic?



Lain's second priority is protecting the working class from the continuing financial and fiscal crisis. Lain argues "there was never any chance to transform the democratic party into a vehicle for socialism." But where does that now leave us, on the question of socialist strategy? Does he think the Bernie wave is over, and the left is now basically done with parliamentary politics for another couple of generations? As he surveys the landscape of the contemporary left, what hope does he see for a revolutionary politics?



The third topic for Lain essentially stems from his commitment t...