According to his aides, President Biden has begun to realize that he has run out of time to assist in negotiating a cease-fire and hostage agreement with Hamas. And there’s never been a bigger chance of a wider war.
The Israeli attack on Hezbollah signals not only a dramatic escalation of the conflict but also a major breach between President Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This marks Israel’s strongest battle with the Lebanese militant organization since 2006.
Mr. Biden has been warning publicly as well as privately over the past year about the need to stop a regional war that has the possibility of turning into a public war between Israel and Iran. When he went to Israel just days after Hamas attacked, his caution was an important subject of discussion. He came there to assure Israel of American support and to warn against repeating the mistakes the US made after the attacks on September 11, 2001.
Even as the conflict between Israel and Hamas broke at the peace agreement’s basis, Mr. Biden continued keeping out hope for the revolutionary peace agreement for the Middle East that he believed was achievable a year ago.
The president has begun to realize that he has simply run out of time, according to Mr. Biden’s advisers. Just over four months left in President Biden’s term, and the possibility of a cease-fire and hostage agreement with Hamas appears less likely than it has since he presented his proposal in the summer. Furthermore, there is a higher chance than ever of a larger war.
Administration members maintain that they are not giving up, at least not in public. They claim that as long as missiles continue causing damage in southern Lebanon and northern Israel, they are unlikely to proceed. And they’re holding onto the belief that even this amount of rocket and missile exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah won’t escalate into the kind of regional conflict they’ve been attempting to avert.
“We may ask, ‘Is this an escalation?’ in response to every time Hezbollah missile launches or Israeli strikes. Is that going to become worse? The national security advisor to Vice President Biden, Jake Sullivan, emphasized over the weekend. He made his remarks shortly after Israel assassinated a Hezbollah leader who was sought for his involvement in two Beirut bombs in 1983 which lead that killed over 350 people, most of them U.S. service members.
While an excavator works to remove damage from a broken-down structure, people wearing safety jackets stand above it.
Rescue workers attempted to remove remains from the area of last week’s Israeli attack in Beirut.
“I don’t think it’s a very helpful exercise,” Mr. Sullivan continued on. The most helpful exercise for us is to try to move both groups to an acceptable and compatible solution that will stop the cycle and prevent us from getting involved in a bigger conflict.
Mr. Sullivan, at least publicly, is in multiple ways impossible to afford to have another view. announcing that Mr. Biden’s aims are now broken serves no use. Despite Mr. Sullivan’s claim on Saturday that there remains a “winding path, a frustrating path” to reach his goal, many in the area around him feel the president’s tactics are nearing the end.
As they point out, neither Mr. Netanyahu nor Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar will likely take it under consideration at this point, thus the United States has not even been able to offer the “bridging plan” for a final cease-fire, despite having stated three weeks ago that it would do so soon.
Therefore, Mr. Sullivan said, “Well, at the moment, we don’t feel like we are in a position, if we put something down today, to get both sides to say yes to it.”
In these ending months of his presidency, Mr. Biden’s best hope is that his successor would accept a historic agreement in which Israel approves the two-state solution and Saudi Arabia recognizes Israel, providing the Palestinian people an independent home and an identity in the international community.
However, many of Mr. Biden’s national security team members now seldom try to disguise their frustration with the prime minister in private. These days, they discuss topics like the president’s heated phone exchanges with Mr. Netanyahu and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s troubling visits to Jerusalem, where he received personal assurances from the prime minister only to have Mr. Netanyahu subsequently deny them.
They now openly question if the prime minister continued to add additional demands to the cease-fire talks in an attempt to hold onto his vulnerable coalition or to avoid going to court.
They also claim that it was telling that the White House declared there would be no phone calls between the president and the prime minister while beepers exploded in the pockets of Hezbollah members and missiles were being fired, even though they believe he has every right to attack the group, which has evolved into a “state within a state” in Lebanon. It seemed as though they didn’t have anything to say to one another.
Longtime Middle East negotiator Dennis B. Ross stated in an interview on Monday that part of the issue was that Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu had never agreed on their ultimate goals, with Mr. Biden attempting to facilitate a peace agreement and Mr. Netanyahu being certain he could remove every existential threat to his nation that has included every American president since Richard Nixon.
Linking objectives with approaches is an essential component of statecraft, according to Mr. Ross, who is currently a distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute. “And I don’t see what Israel is doing now as having the goals or the means to achieve them.” According to Mr. Ross, Israel believed that it might make Hassan Nasrallah, the persistent head of Hezbollah, and his Iranian supporters realize that they would pay a heavy price for carrying on with their attacks against northern Israel until an agreement is reached with Hamas in Gaza.
Standing behind a lectern is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, outfitted in a black suit and blue tie. Behind him is an Israeli flag.
Just as it is difficult to imagine that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be able to destroy Hezbollah, so too is it difficult to imagine that he will eliminate Hamas.
Israeli authorities respond that their goals are clear-cut: they want to launch a missile campaign to destroy Hezbollah’s weapons stocks and command and control infrastructure. And that process has been planned since Israel said last week that the conflict’s focus was shifting north, to Lebanon.
The torrent of pagers and walkie-talkies last week was only the beginning; the goal was to weaken Hezbollah members a group that the US classified as a foreign terrorist organization decades ago—and it must make them afraid to speak to one another. Years of planning went into the scheme, which involved front organizations that had strong ties to Hezbollah’s supply chain. The decision last week by Israel’s leadership to carry it out was a sign that its broader campaign was about to begin. (Israel has neither confirmed nor denied any role in the explosions.)
Now that the campaign has started. Israeli special troops landed in Syria and destroyed a building thought to be producing weapons and supplying Hezbollah. Furthermore, it appears that Israeli missiles fired into Lebanon are aimed toward basements and basement storage tunnels—basically, wherever Israeli intelligence thinks tens or hundreds of thousands of weapons may be stored. According to American and Israeli sources, the quantity of secondary explosions shown in the part of the attack’s footage indicates that at least some of the intelligence was correct.
The operation’s scope and depth indicate that Mr. Netanyahu is no longer content to sometimes restrict Hezbollah’s authority. He said that everything changed on October 7 and that it is now necessary to find a permanent solution that addresses both Gaza and Lebanon.
But it is impossible to think that Mr. Netanyahu will be able to remove Hezbollah, just as he has been unable to eliminate Hamas. Furthermore, it is even more difficult to believe that Mr. Netanyahu will give crossing Mr. Biden any thought. He is aware that he will have significantly more freedom to carry out the battle against Hamas and Hezbollah as he sees fit if former President Donald J. Trump is elected.
Steven A. Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations, who recently returned from a trip to speak with Israeli officials, stated, “Israelis, especially the right wing of Netanyahu’s coalition, are determined to solve this and they think they left this all to fester too long.” And they believe they have bad advice from the US.
whereas Mr. Biden stated that he “never really used his leverage over Netanyahu,” pointing to the president’s authority to end specific types of military assistance in the event that the prime minister rejected his advice. Furthermore, until you are prepared to utilize your leverage, you have it.