A dangerous Middle East crisis
It’s hard to imagine a more unwelcome intangible a few weeks from an election than a security crisis in the Middle East, a region that has confounded American presidents for decades.
Following Israel’s ground offensive in Lebanon and its assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, the region has been on even more of a knife-edge after months of Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, which followed the October 7 Hamas terror attacks. The US and its allies helped repel Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel this week, but attention has now shifted to Israel’s response following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s warning to Tehran that nowhere is out of reach from Israeli forces.
Netanyahu’s supporters in Israel and the United States are urging him to take advantage of a moment of weakness for the Islamic Republic after Israeli forces’ success in taking out key leaders of Iranian proxy groups. Netanyahu raised expectations of another escalation by warning that Iran made a big mistake with its reprisal attacks and “will pay for it.”
But Biden on Wednesday took the highly unusual step of publicly warning Israel against any attempt to strike Iranian nuclear facilities. “The answer is no,” he said when questioned about such a potential operation, and said the US would be discussing with the Israelis about how they might respond.
But Biden’s problem is that Netanyahu has acquired a taste for ignoring US concerns about his actions in Gaza and Lebanon. This has damaged the administration’s authority. But the Israeli leader has also acted with the expectation that Washington will be forced to come to Israel’s defense in any case.
There’s also a significant political dimension to the worsening tensions. Trump and his allies are egging Netanyahu on — both because of ideological synergy with his far-right government and also perhaps because a sense of growing crisis could boost the former president’s hopes of winning a non-consecutive second term. And Israel’s military moves, which have led to thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon, also threaten to widen splits in the Democratic Party over the failure of Harris and Biden to restrain Netanyahu. Some community leaders, for example, warn of depressed progressive and Arab American turnout in key swing states, including Michigan, next month.