Does the U.S. Even Want out of This Middle East War?

One year after Hamas murdered 1,200 and abducted hundreds more, and one year after Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment and starvation of Gaza killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, the war is unresolved and still expanding. 

About 100 of Hamas’s hostages are still missing. Israel is still bombing and starving a ruined Gaza, and it is now destroying villages in Lebanon. Israel has expanded its ground invasion in southern Lebanon, even after taking out the leader of Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia, and severely weakening Hezbollah’s capabilities. Iran launched about 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, apparently in retaliation for the attacks on its proxies. As Israel determines how it will respond, and it will respond, the region spirals toward a more direct confrontation between Israel and Iran, which threatens to engulf the Middle East into a wider, more unpredictable war.

The United States, as Israel’s closest ally, risks getting pulled into this war it says it doesn’t want. Yet a year of decisions by the Biden administration has made America a participant in this catastrophe, narrowing the possibility the U.S. can disentangle itself or de-escalate this careening conflict. 

“At this point, I don’t think it’s even right to say we will be stumbling in or being dragged along,” said Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy. “We seem to be rushing headlong into a regional war.”

In a statement marking a year since Hamas’s attack on Israel, President Joe Biden said the U.S. “will not stop working” for a ceasefire in Gaza that brings hostages home, allows for humanitarian relief, ensures Israel’s security, and ends the war. Biden added that a “diplomatic solution across the Israel-Lebanon border region is the only path to restore lasting calm and allow residents on both sides to return safely to their homes.” 

This is not a new line from the Biden administration. Calling for a Gaza ceasefire has become a rhetorical tic whenever the administration speaks on the conflict, yet U.S. efforts at diplomacy have been wholly unsuccessful. Hamas has rejected certain terms, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly sabotaged the deal while leveling Gaza. 

In late September, the U.S. and France pushed for a 21-day ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel, which Netanyahu also rejected. Now the U.S. has shunted aside its own diplomatic proposal amid Israel’s tactical success in degrading Hezbollah. “It was the conclusion of the United States and its partners around the world that that was a path forward at the time,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Monday about the ceasefire. “The situation on the ground has changed.” 

The U.S. is now fretting over Israel’s potential response to Iran and is concerned that Israel could target Iran’s oil or gas infrastructure, which could disrupt global energy prices ahead of the election. Also, Tehran has called such energy-targeted attacks a “red line,” along with theoretical attacks on its nuclear facilities. As the Washington Post reported, Israel has assured the U.S. it does not feel the need to go hard on Iran right now, but Israeli leadership has not exactly been transparent with U.S. officials over its planned military actions, particularly in recent months. U.S. officials may express frustration with Netanyahu behind the scenes, and they may even slip in sharp public criticism from time to time, but none of that has meaningfully changed U.S. policy toward Israel.

Washington keeps sending, or approving the sale of, weapons to Israel. The Biden administration temporarily paused the shipment of thousands of bombs this spring in opposition to Israel’s planned invasion of Rafah, yet Israel still invaded Rafah and the delivery of 500-pound bombs resumed. The U.S. has allocated $17.9 billion in security assistance to Israel since October 7, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure balloons to $22.76 billion when it includes U.S. operations in the region, specifically those against Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who say they are attacking shipping routes in response to Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. Last week, the U.S. military struck at least 15 Houthi targets in Yemen.

“Look, I don’t believe there is going to be an all-out war,” Biden told reporters that same week. “I think we can avoid it.”

It is an open question, though, how something that certainly seems to be underway already could somehow be avoided. 

A regional conflict could always escalate further, growing more catastrophic and protracted, especially if Iran and Israel intensify their confrontation. If the U.S. goal is to avoid such a scenario, then the better question is “how.” 

The Biden administration is relying on the same approach that helped march the world to its current precipice. There are obvious limits to U.S. influence, but it cannot — or will not — apply whatever leverage it has left, specifically in its unconditional aid for Israel. The presidential election undeniably makes a shift even more difficult for Biden, but the awkward timing amplifies the administration’s policy failures since last year. All of which makes it hard to see how the U.S., or anyone else involved in this conflict, could avert the all-out catastrophe that is already unfolding in the Middle East.

“We’re on the brink of war – a regional, full-fledged, open-ended, direct war between Iran and Israel,” said Bilal Y. Saab, Head of the U.S.-Middle East Practice at TRENDS Research & Advisory. “It all now depends on how the Israelis choose to respond to the Iranian attack.”

If It Looks Like an All-Out War…

Israel has renewed operations in northern Gaza, potentially trapping hundreds of thousands Palestinians in an active war zone. Netanyahu has threatened Lebanon with suffering and destruction “like Gaza,” an explicit promise of collective punishment for Lebanese civilians despite boasting of Israel’s success in degrading Hezbollah. Israeli citizens are also sheltering from cross-border rocket attacks from Hezbollah and Hamas. Both the U.S. and Israel have struck Houthi targets in Yemen. Israel is also bombing Syria, conducting at least 17 strikes there since October 1. On Wednesday, Israel struck an apartment building in Damascus, killing at least seven civilians in an attempt to take out one Hezbollah weapons smuggler.

The Syrian strike was close to Iran’s embassy in Damascus, and it was unclear whether it was an opening to Israel’s expected response to Iran’s ballistic missile barrage last week. 

Iran’s salvo was the largest since April, the last time it looked like Israel-Iran might be on the brink of a war. But back then, Iran telegraphed the attack, Israel and its allies deflected it, and the U.S. encouraged Israel to take the win. But a lot has changed since then, most notably Israel’s dismantling of Hezbollah’s leadership. Netanyahu is now emboldened, escalating in Lebanon to fully take down the infrastructure of Hezbollah, which was the most valuable player in Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance,” the network of militias and proxies Iran uses to confront the U.S. and Israel in the region. 

This apparent success may push Israeli leadership to see debilitating Iran as an opportunity it cannot pass up. Hardline voices in Israel (and exactly who’d you expect in the U.S.) are pushing for a more aggressive strike, potentially on Iran’s energy infrastructure, or an even more sensitive target, like Iran’s nuclear facilities. “We must act *now* to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, its central energy facilities, and to fatally cripple this terrorist regime,” former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett wrote on X Tuesday. “The octopus’s tentacles are temporarily paralyzed — now comes the head.”

If Israel targets Iran’s critical infrastructure, whether oil refineries or nuclear infrastructure, or even Iranian leadership, that is “certainly going to lead to a forceful response from the Iranians,” Saab said. “At that point, it would be incredibly difficult for any president, politically speaking, to stay on the sidelines.”

That escalation could explode into that full-fledged war between Israel and Iran, which could pull the U.S. into a war to defend Israel. U.S. assets and troops – there are some 43,000 stationed in the region – could become targets for Iran and its proxies. In January, Iranian proxies killed three U.S. service members and injured dozens in Jordan; Iran de-escalated and cautioned restraint among those groups to avoid provoking the U.S. But the peril to U.S. troops still looms.

This would be a precarious situation at any time, but it is heightened by the extraordinarily tight U.S. presidential election. “The U.S. administration is not going to massively change support for Israel a month before an election. The U.S. is pretty locked into the support now,” Rosemary Kelanic, the director of Middle East Engagement at Defense Priorities, told reporters last week. 

Biden’s policy toward Israel and Gaza has divided the Democratic Party, but Donald Trump and the GOP will exploit any whiff that Biden is not fully supporting Israel against Iran. Trump has framed the global chaos as a consequence of Biden’s weakness, and Kamala Harris, of course, is attached to this administration and its decisions. Trump has said Israel should “hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later,” but he gets to say insane things without having the consequences fall back on him. Instead, everything leads back to Biden, and Netanyahu may be keenly attuned to this political inertia – this may be the time, before Biden officially becomes a lame-duck president, to box the U.S. in. 

The Biden administration also understands the risks of this escalation, and they have warned Israel against attacking energy infrastructure and nuclear facilities because they understand what it could unleash: oil prices spiking, American troops under threat, the U.S. engulfed in another Middle East war. “Do I have any confidence that the Israelis would entertain the American preference?” Saab said. “No, because we’ve been telling them what not to do for months now, and not at any juncture did they actually respect our wishes.”  

Exactly how far Israel can go in defiance of U.S. wishes is also a bit murky. Israel may still need a lot of American help and coordination to fully take out something like Iran’s nuclear facilities, but Israel likely does have the capabilities to inflict a great deal of damage on their own — which is why U.S. officials remain on edge. Yet some experts thought Israel would not risk going it alone here.

“I don’t think we’ll go after the nuclear capacities. I don’t think that’s within the scope of where Israel is at the moment,” said Nimrod Goren, senior fellow for Israeli Affairs at the Middle East Institute (MEI). “It is expected that it needs to be so closely coordinated with the Americans, for whom the main objective is preventing the regional war.” 

On Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant reportedly said Israel’s retaliation will be “deadly, precise, and above all, surprising.”  “Iran,” he added, “would not understand what happened and how it happened, they will see the results.” Gallant abruptly postponed a meeting in Washington with the U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, which was supposed to go over Israel’s response. Yet President Biden and Netanyahu did speak Wednesday, apparently – wildly — their first phone call since late August, an entire invasion ago. Kamala Harris was reportedly also on the call. The White House called it “productive” and “direct.” 

What Now? 

Israel is going to retaliate against Iran. Even if it does not take the most dangerous gamble of going after Iran’s critical or nuclear infrastructure, that may just postpone the risks of all-out-escalation until the next miscalculation or provocation.

As Israel wages a largely unrestrained multi-front war and attempts to rebalance power in the Middle East, Iran will also recalibrate, even if it’s not clear how just yet. Will it reinvest and rebuild and remake proxy networks like Hezbollah? Will it shift its security strategy, instead focusing on its own capabilities – including, potentially, its nuclear program? Nasrallah’s death prompted Iran to launch its most brazen attack on Israel, and though Israel said it intercepted most missiles, some intelligence analysts noted dozens of direct hits on military targets, showing Iran was capable of penetrating Israeli defenses and could do real damage. A war with Iran will look different than a war with Hamas or Hezbollah.

And Israel has no plan for what happens after this war, which increases the chances it finds itself in a protracted conflict or occupation in what is left of the places it is destroying. Civilians, thousands and thousands of them, are suffering, starving, dying, furious. Israel may seek to reshape security in the Middle East, and it may – but as the U.S. could probably tell it, it comes with costs and mostly bad outcomes.

The U.S. has remained ironclad in its defense of Israel, even as Israel’s decisions put its own troops at risk. Israel’s repeated failure to inform the U.S. of its plans – including its strike on Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader – has angered U.S. defense officials, as it leaves them unprepared to reposition American troops who might be more vulnerable to retaliation. Though the U.S. and Israel are reportedly closer to an agreement on the Iran response, Israel had been cagey on its Iran plans. 

Yet the U.S. weapons and cash still flow. These may be the only real levers the U.S. has left and it’s not going there. Of course, even if the U.S. cut off the arms spigot tomorrow, it would not halt the war, and it would not disentangle the U.S. from this conflict. But the U.S. would be following international law, which it once believed in upholding, and its own laws on weapons transfers. 

Some experts I spoke to did not think Israel would take the most escalatory approach against Iran, while others worried that the chances to prevent such an escalation were already vanishing. Even if Israel and Iran avoid an open confrontation this time, Israel’s multi-front war is not ending. It is intensifying, with explicit U.S. support. The months of death and destruction in Gaza did not motivate the U.S. to change course, and now Washington looks willing to gamble its security and more civilian lives in Israel’s attempt to destroy Hezbollah, and by extension, weaken Iran. As Saab grimly put it, you might “need some kind of escalation to get into de-escalation.”