Why the world’s biggest powers can’t stop a Middle East war

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A man walking through the rubble of buildings in Baalbek, Lebanon, last week after Israeli airstrikes. Photo / Diego Ibarra Sánchez, The New York Times
ANALYSIS
The United States’ ability to influence events in the Mideast has waned, and other major nations have essentially been onlookers.

Over almost a year of war in the Middle East, major powers have proved incapable of stopping or even significantly influencing the fighting, a failure that reflects a
turbulent world of decentralised authority that seems likely to endure.

Stop-and-start negotiations between Israel and Hamas to end the fighting in the Gaza Strip, pushed by the United States, have repeatedly been described by the Biden administration as on the verge of a breakthrough, only to fail. The current Western-led attempt to avert a full-scale Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon amounts to a scramble to avert disaster. Its chances of success seem deeply uncertain after the Israeli killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, on Friday.
“There’s more capability in more hands in a world where centrifugal forces are far stronger than centralising ones,” said Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Middle East is the primary case study of this dangerous fragmentation.”
The killing of Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah over more than three decades and the man who built the Shiite organisation into one of the most powerful non-state armed forces in the world, leaves a vacuum Hezbollah will likely take a long time to fill. It is a major blow to Iran, the chief backer of Hezbollah, that may even destabilise the Islamic Republic. Whether full-scale war will come to Lebanon remains unclear.
“Nasrallah represented everything for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah was the advance arm of Iran,” said Gilles Kepel, a leading French expert on the Middle East and author of a book on the world’s upheaval since October 7. “Now the Islamic Republic is weakened, perhaps mortally, and one wonders who can even give an order for Hezbollah today.”
For many years, the United States was the only country that could bring constructive pressure to bear on both Israel and Arab states. It engineered the 1978 Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt, and the Israel-Jordan peace of 1994. Just over three decades ago, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasser Arafat, the chair of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, shook hands on the White House lawn in the name of peace, only for the fragile hope of that embrace to erode steadily.
The world, and Israel’s primary enemies, have since changed. America’s ability to influence Iran, its implacable foe for decades, and Iran’s proxies like Hezbollah, is marginal. Designated as terrorist organisations in Washington, Hamas and Hezbollah effectively exist beyond the reach of American diplomacy.
The United States does have enduring leverage over Israel, notably in the form of military aid that involved a US$15 billion ($23.6b) package signed this year by President Joe Biden. But an ironclad alliance with Israel built around strategic and domestic political considerations, as well as the shared values of two democracies, means Washington will almost certainly never threaten to cut – let alone cut off – the flow of arms.
The overwhelming Israeli military response in Gaza to the October 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis and its seizure of some 250 hostages has drawn mild reprimands from Biden. He has called Israel’s actions “over the top,” for example. But American support for its embattled ally has been resolute as Palestinian casualties in Gaza have risen into the tens of thousands, many of them civilians.
The United States, under any conceivable presidency, is not about to desert a Jewish state whose existence had been increasingly questioned over the past year, from American campuses to the streets of the very Europe that embarked on the annihilation of the Jewish people less than a century ago.
“If US policy toward Israel ever changed, it would only be at the margins,” Haass said, despite the growing sympathy, especially among young Americans, for the Palestinian cause.
Other powers have essentially been onlookers as the bloodshed has spread. China, a major importer of Iranian oil and a major supporter of anything that might weaken the American-led world order that emerged from the ruins in 1945, has little interest in donning the mantle of peacemaker.
Russia also has scant inclination to be helpful, especially on the eve of the November 5 election in the United States. Reliant on Iran for defence technology and drones in its intractable war in Ukraine, it is no less enthused than China over any signs of American decline or any opportunity to bog America down in a Middle Eastern mire.
Based on his past behaviour, the potential return to the White House of former President Donald Trump is probably seen in Moscow as the return of a leader who would prove complaisant toward President Vladimir Putin.
Among regional powers, none is strong enough or committed enough to the Palestinian cause to confront Israel militarily. In the end, Iran is cautious because it knows the cost of all-out war could be the end of the Islamic Republic; Egypt fears an enormous influx of Palestinian refugees; and Saudi Arabia seeks a Palestinian state, but would not put Saudi lives on the line for that cause.
As for Qatar, it funded Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars a year that went in part to the construction of a labyrinthine web of tunnels, some as deep as 250 feet, where Israeli hostages have been held. It enjoyed the complicity of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who saw Hamas as an effective way to undermine the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and so undercut any chance of peace.
The disaster of October 7 was also the culmination of the cynical manipulation, by Arab and Israeli leaders, of the Palestinian quest for statehood. A year on, nobody knows how to pick up the pieces.
So in their annual pilgrimage, world leaders troop to the meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations, where the Security Council is largely paralysed by Russian vetoes over any Ukraine-related resolutions and American vetoes over Israel-related resolutions.
The leaders listen to Biden depict, yet again, a world at an “inflection point” between rising autocracy and troubled democracies. They hear UN Secretary-General António Guterres deplore the “collective punishment” of the Palestinian people – a phrase that incensed Israel – in response to the “abhorrent acts of terror committed by Hamas almost a year ago”.
But Guterres’ words, like Biden’s, seem to echo in the strategic vacuum of an à la carte world order, suspended between the demise of Western domination and the faltering rise of alternatives to it. The means to pressure Hamas, Hezbollah and Israel all at once – and effective diplomacy would require leverage over all three – do not exist.
This unravelling without rebuilding has precluded effective action to stop the Israel-Hamas war. There is no global consensus on the need for peace or even a ceasefire. In the past, war in the Middle East led to soaring oil prices and tumbling markets, forcing the world’s attention. Now, said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, “the attitude is, ‘OK, so be it’”.
Absent any coherent and coordinated international response, Netanyahu and Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader and a mastermind of the October 7 attack, face no consequences in pursuing a destructive course, whose endpoint is unclear but which will certainly involve the loss of more lives.
Netanyahu has shunned a serious American effort to bring about the normalisation of relations with Saudi Arabia, perhaps the most important country in the Arab and Islamic world, because its price would be some serious commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state, the very thing he has devoted his political life to preventing.
Netanyahu’s interest in prolonging the war to sidestep a formal reprimand for the military and intelligence failures that led to the October 7 attack – a catastrophe for which the buck stopped on the Prime Minister’s desk – complicates any diplomatic efforts. So does his attempt to avoid facing the personal charges of fraud and corruption brought against him. He is playing a waiting game that now includes offering little or nothing until November 5, when Trump, whom he considers a strong ally, may be elected.
Israeli families who send their children to war do not know how committed their commander in chief is to bringing those young soldiers home safely by seizing any viable opportunity for peace. This, many Israelis say, is corrosive to the soul of the nation.
As for Sinwar, the Israeli hostages he holds give him leverage. His apparent indifference to the immense loss of Palestinian life in Gaza affords him considerable sway over world opinion, which has progressively turned against Israel as more Palestinian children are killed.
In short, Sinwar has little reason to change course; and, in what Stephen Heintz, the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund philanthropic organisation has called “the age of turbulence,” the world is not about to change that course for him.
“The institutions that have guided international relations and global problem solving since the mid-20th century are clearly no longer capable of addressing the problems of the new millennium,” Heintz wrote in a recent essay. “They are inefficient, ineffective, anachronistic, and, in some cases, simply obsolete.”
That, too, has been a lesson of the year since Hamas struck.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Roger Cohen
Photographs by: Diego Ibarra Sanchez, Kenny Holston and Graham Dickie
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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