The U.S. Is Caught in an Escalation Spiral in the Middle East | Opinion

Right now, the U.S. is in real danger of being drawn into a conflict with Iran against its own national interests. National security advisor Jake Sullivan confirmed earlier this month that the U.S. will work with Israel to ensure Iran suffers “severe consequences” for its missile attack this month, which resulted in no casualties. Hawks are already picking out targets—perhaps Iran’s oil industry, perhaps its nuclear facilities—for a coordinated retaliatory strike.
Escalation would be madness, but as risks go, it’s hardly unprecedented.
What’s happening now is a classic problem of alliances, called the chain-ganging effect. The interests of allies sometimes diverge, and problems arise when one ally wants to do something in its own perceived interest that hurts the interests of the other—or even drags it into conflict, as is the case now with Israel and the United States.
A major Israeli war in Lebanon is not in U.S. interests at all, because it would unleash escalatory pressures that could be very difficult to resist. Already, pressure is mounting on the U.S. to go on offense with airstrikes against Iran after Tehran’s strike on Israel.
This is a terrible idea. No, we don’t like the Iranian regime, but we also don’t want to destabilize a massive, ethnically fractured country. We don’t want to turn Iran from a viable (if bad) centralized state into a failed state that spawns new militant groups like ISIS and settles into yet another intractable conflict. Remember, that is exactly what happened after the United States attacked Iraq and helped destabilize the regimes in Syria and Libya.
We also don’t want a failed state in Lebanon, which has barely held together since its civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990. The situation there is dire. Some 1 million Lebanese, out of a population of 5.5 million, have already been displaced from their homes.
Any time there’s instability in the Middle East, there is pressure on the U.S. to intervene, even absent a clear endgame or exit strategy. But the pressure is much worse in this case, because unlike the Iraq invasion—an unforced error by the U.S.—we have an ally, Israel, that really wants the U.S. to get kinetic. In this way, it is more like the case of Libya in 2011, where the Europeans dragged a reluctant Obama administration into airstrikes that upended the country and left it an utter mess.
Washington needs to be absolutely clear that while it may defend Israel from Iranian strikes, it is completely against U.S. interests to attack or otherwise destabilize Iran. The U.S. should use whatever influence it has with Israel to restrain Benjamin Netanyahu from attacking Iran.
Unfortunately, judging by its failure to prevent Israel from escalating in Lebanon, Washington is unlikely to dissuade the Israelis from attacking Iran. Yet even if the United States were to avoid such an attack, the opportunities for the U.S. to be pulled in will only multiply as Israel’s war in Lebanon progresses.
Frighteningly, the U.S. has no idea what surprises could lie ahead. Israel did not inform the U.S. of its pager attack on Hezbollah operatives or the Hassan Nasrallah assassination ahead of time. The Israelis have reportedly told Washington they are only planning a limited invasion of southern Lebanon, but that’s the same thing they said last year when they invaded northern Gaza. What started as “just” an invasion in the north turned into an operation in central Gaza, then southern Gaza, and all the way to the Egyptian border.
The U.S. wants to limit escalation, but Israel may be “salami slicing” U.S. resolve by gradually increasing its war aims, slice by slice, rather than making its more maximalist aims clear up front. Had the Israeli government said in Gaza last October, “We’re going all the way to Egypt and staying for a year,” Washington would have freaked out. So, of course, it said something else.
Israeli war aims in Lebanon could be, or could evolve to be, much broader than a limited incursion. Do the Israelis “just” plan to invade and occupy a small buffer zone on the Lebanese border to prevent an October 7-style ground attack from Hezbollah in the north? Or are they really intent on ending Hezbollah’s rocket and missile threat so the 60,000 Israelis displaced in the north can return home, as the Israeli war cabinet recently stated? The latter goal could press Israel to go all the way to Beirut or even farther north, because Hezbollah’s medium- and long-range arsenal can hit Israel from basically anywhere in Lebanon.
Regardless of the circumstances, the U.S. probably couldn’t restrain Israel from going deep into Lebanon if Netanyahu thinks it’s in his vital interests to do so—either for Israeli security or his own political reasons. The Biden administration can’t credibly threaten a major change in the U.S.-Israel relationship less than a month before a close election.
If Israel’s invasion of Lebanon is Gaza 2.0—with the Israel Defense Forces making a major incursion far into Lebanon and staying for a year—will the U.S. be able to hold firm against escalation to offensive strikes against Iran? We’d better hope so, but the precedent isn’t good.
Rosemary Kelanic is the Director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.