Fears are rising of ‘regional escalation’ in the Middle East. But that wider war is already here
Photograph: Yahya Arhab/EPA
It may be a small detail, but it tells a big, clarifying story: the Biden administration did not appoint an ambassador to Cairo until March of last year. After he came to office, President Biden’s orders to his foreign policy staff were to “keep the Middle East off my desk”. The idea was that the Arab case was largely closed. “The Middle East is quieter today than it has been in decades,” said the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, in a fate-tempting speech just a week before the Hamas attacks.
The plan was to “ultimately integrate” the region by encouraging further normalisation between Arab states and Israel, thereby isolating and taming Iran. As the scholar Edward Said once put it: “It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar.”
It hasn’t worked out. The 7 October attacks put the Middle East back on Biden’s desk. The region isn’t made up of so many peanuts in a jar, and Arab countries have a habit of behaving in ways dictated by domestic calculations and regional ambitions rather than western foreign policy priorities. The result is that all bets are colossally off. And in a matter of weeks the Middle East and wider Arab world have become drawn into the war in a way that has not been met by appropriate action by the US and other Israeli allies that would force a cessation of hostilities and a cooling of the regional temperature.
Underpinning the paralysis is a linchpin of the US’s Middle East foreign policy: that Israel is the US’s key security partner in the region, and that reconsidering its arming and support is therefore out of the question. “Israel is a bright spot in a tough neighborhood,” posted Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley last week. “It has never [been] that Israel needs America. It has always been that America needs Israel.”
The cost of this logic is high, and escalating. The talk is of “fears of a wider war in the Middle East”, but the truth is that war is already here. It has now spilled into Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea. Strikes and counterstrikes have been traded between Israel and Hezbollah along the south Lebanon border for weeks now. In November, Israeli strikes targeted Damascus airport, taking it out of service. Last week, a drone strike in the heart of Beirut assassinated a Hamas leader and six others, widening the theatre of war away from Hezbollah strongholds in the south of the country. From Yemen, Houthi militia have struck and seized vessels that the group says have ties to Israel, in protest against the bombardment of Gaza.
All of this is happening in a wider context of crises and divisions in individual countries. Each escalation results in a rippling series of repercussions. Houthi attacks in the Red Sea have diverted commercial traffic headed to North America and Europe away from the waterway, affecting Egypt’s much-needed revenues from the Suez canal and potentially the country’s stability in the middle of a prolonged financial crisis.
Globally, if the Red Sea cannot be made safe, we will see rising trade costs and insurance premiums, and supply chain congestion in a world commodity market already unsettled by the war in Ukraine. This is already resulting in increased military activity in the area – last week, US navy helicopters sank Houthi boats that fired on them. Anything more coordinated on the part of the US and its allies, which have already sent a strong cease-and-desist message by targeting Houthi bases in Yemen, risks destabilising a precious truce in the country and raises the possibility of open clashes with Iran, which has announced the deployment of warships to the Red Sea.
There is little risk that any of these countries would openly declare war on Israel – that would be suicide. But therein lies both the false comfort and hidden threat. Mischievous non-state actors, proxies and political instability can unravel peace almost as effectively. Islamic State claimed responsibility last week for the deadliest attack in Iran since the 1979 revolution. The timing of the attack suggests a vanquished group making hay of the political volatility in order to make itself relevant. IS is “kind of like the Joker”, Aaron Y Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told NPR. “They want to see the world burn. They don’t care how it happens as long as it benefits them.”
They may get their wish. Groups such as IS thrive on instability, and in countries with weak sovereignty. Across the Red Sea in east Africa, Sudan, the site of a large port city, is in the throes of a messy war where currently two regimes jostle for control, while much of the country lies ungoverned, its borders pregnable. Lebanon’s foreign minister is open about the inability to rein in Hezbollah, telling the BBC that his government can only “impress on them that they should not respond themselves. We don’t tell them, we dialogue with them in this regard.” In Yemen, there are effectively two governments that control different territories in the north and the south.
Throughout the region, there is one constant: Iran’s ability to effectively fund and deploy proxies, a facility made possible by the US’s historical role in empowering it through the Iraq war, and then failing to contain it.
But the risks are even bigger than that. It is hard to overestimate, in these power vacuums and proxy groupings, the effect of the scenes from Gaza and the West Bank. Arabic satellite channels run a rolling, forensic account of the devastation. Al Jazeera Arabic broadcast the funeral and last rites of the assassinated Hamas political leader, just as domestic Arab channels traditionally would the weekly Friday prayers from Mecca. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees reside in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, and public discourse across the region, from dinner tables to panel shows and newspaper coverage, is dominated by the war in Gaza, events in the West Bank and developments in the wider region. The threat is looming, as already seen in Iran, of terrorism that preys on febrile climates of high feeling.
If and when such events unfold, they will no doubt be framed, without context or history, as the result of extreme religious ideology, the chronic bloodlust of Arabs or Muslims, and further proof of a “tough neighbourhood” that needs policing. The reality is that the status quo that the US and Israel hoped would happily turn into wider Arab “integration” and normalisation with Israel, containment of Iran and the slow, quiet death of the Palestinian cause was always secured on the basis that no one would make any sudden moves that would trigger prides and paranoias about who really holds power.
Then Hamas struck, and what followed were the actions of an Israeli government that is not behaving like a stabilising force in the region, but an aggravating one. As long as the US and other western allies fail to confront that fact, out of inertia or fear of domestic blowback, everyone, including Israel, will pay a high price for a war that has long gone past justifiable self-defence, and could soon become a global threat.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist