As Israel steps up its attacks across the region, almost a year into its war after the Hamas attacks of October 8, 2023, its failure to achieve its stated objectives are clear. Hamas has not been defeated, and after the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the October 7 attacks, is now leader of Hamas. Nor have the hundred plus Israeli captives been released. Despite all the backing of global powers and its own military dominance, Israel has managed to rescue maybe eight people. The rest, it has abandoned to the ungentle hands of their captors and the savage and in-discriminatory onslaught it has wreaked on the Gaza Strip.
Of course, this outcome was predictable.
There was no way that Israel could accomplish both its goals at the same time. The release of the captives could only happen through negotiations with Hamas, but Israel had vowed to destroy Hamas. One of the two objectives had to take priority over the other.
Through a long campaign of obfuscation and constantly changing demands, the Israeli leadership chose to put the captives second – and thus effectively abandon them. And now, with the targeting of the leadership of Hezbollah, the bombing of Yemen and Syria, as well as Israeli PM’s belligerent rhetoric at the just-concluded UN General Assembly, Israel has shifted its focus to target Iran and its allies.
Much of this has been facilitated by American money, American arms, American diplomacy and – most importantly – the deterrent power of the US military.
For all its supposed military power, Israel has not decisively won a significant military engagement since 1973. It remains a small Mediterranean country of little strategic significance, and would be easily isolated or even overwhelmed were it not for the fact that the US underwrites its security. And no country wishes to be on the receiving end of an American war.
And yet, the White House seems constantly to be taken by surprise by Israeli actions, a feckless lumbering behemoth that can impose no outcome it wants, and is constantly wrong-footed. The consequences of this visible failure of US leadership – even after the departure of US President Joe Biden – are likely to be far more impactful than Israel’s wars.
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This is not to minimise the consequences of Israeli actions as it starts a “small ground operation” in Lebanon. Similar language was used by the Israeli leadership in the lead up to the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. That invasion, with its multiple catastrophes, including the massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese Shia civilians by Phalangist militias supported by the Israeli military in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, led to a regional conflagration that only ended when Israel retreated in 2000. It also gave birth to Hezbollah, against whom this latest campaign has started.
That said, the critical failures of the Biden administration to manage the conflict have wider ramifications than just the stability of West Asia.
Foremost among them is the war in Ukraine. The obvious double standards deployed around international law in the two conflicts have destroyed any credibility that the US actually believes in a “rules-based international order”. The ill-advised campaigns to badger and threaten the International Criminal Court by the US showed the world very clearly that the only rules the US was interested in were the ones imposed on others.
Much of the world, or what passes as ‘the Global South’ would only have been disturbed by Russian aggression because of what it meant for global rules. The US, and Ukraine’s allies as well as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, have squandered any hope of making that argument by ignoring those rules when Israel breaks them. All of this is happening as a slew of ethnonationalist political parties – all of whom are sceptical of the Ukraine war, and all of whom have used their pro-Israeli rhetoric to attack immigrants while whitewashing their racism – are winning election after election across Europe.
Then there is the wider contest against China. In this, the US had tried to frame the contest as one of democracies against authoritarian governments. Despite its own long history of undermining and toppling democracies, the US – as a relatively open society – has a natural advantage in making this argument, but its actions in West Asia reveal how little it values democracy in practice.
Every single country in West Asia that has worked with the US is a dictatorship of one form or another. It is only because they are dictatorships that they can ignore the disgust of their people at Israeli actions. China has utilised this opportunity perfectly, positioning itself as the promoter of ‘stability’ and emphasising that its actions in Tibet, against the Uyghur in Xinjiang, as well as in Hong Kong and Taiwan are about ‘its own people’ not aggression against others.
In a few months US President Joe Biden will hand over responsibility to Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, both of whom are complicit in this failure; Harris, as a key member of Biden’s team, and Trump for his willingness to give Netanyahu anything he wanted during his term. It would be surprising if either of them has a solution to the squandering of US power by Israel’s criminal behaviour, but what is sure is that the destruction of West Asia is mirrored by the decline of US power in the world. As the pre-eminent military, diplomatic and economic power in the world, few will risk opposing the US, but by so clearly demonstrating its failures, it will find that many will find reasons not to follow it.
Omair Ahmad is an author and journalist.
