The U.S. Must be Proactive to Avoid War with Iran

Gregg Priddy 

The Biden administration must defuse escalation before it’s too late.

The sighs of relief in Washington that accompanied Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s speech on November 3, in which he did not signal any immediate escalation against Israel, now seem premature. While it is clear that neither Iran nor Hezbollah are eager to widen the war, there is still plenty of potential for it to happen, either as a result of their unwillingness to allow Hamas to be completely defeated in Gaza or as a result of U.S. forces in the region taking significant casualties as a result of attacks by Iran-backed militias. U.S. and Israeli policies are diverging somewhat as Palestinian civilian casualties mount. While it was right for the U.S. to support Israel’s right to self-defense, the U.S. also needs to take proactive steps now to avoid being drawn into the war as weeks drag on into months of combat. Those should include privately conveying to Israel that the United States will not automatically intervene in Lebanon with air support in the event Hezbollah escalates its missile attacks, as well as taking steps to redeploy U.S. forces away from their most isolated and exposed positions in Syria, where their mission was completed long ago. Their presence now poses an unnecessary risk. The United States should focus on preventing the conflict from spreading to the Persian Gulf, where our core interests in the region lie.

The U.S. and Israeli approaches have begun to diverge. Where during the first week, U.S. officials actually attended meetings of Israel’s war cabinet, in recent weeks, the White House has advocated for a degree of restraint by Israel: “humanitarian pauses” for aid deliveries, a ground campaign that stops short of a full reoccupation of Gaza, and a complete rejection of any idea of even temporary relocation of Gaza civilians into Egypt. The first objective was partially met on November 9 with Israel’s announcement of four-hour daily pauses in combat to permit aid to flow, but the measure still fell well short of Biden’s objectives. Israeli leaders are united behind a consensus view that Hamas must be eradicated entirely from Gaza and should not be allowed long pauses to regroup. This will necessitate Israel’s military eventually taking control of the entire Gaza Strip, not just Gaza City in the north where the current fighting is concentrated. This is strongly implied by recent statements by Benny Gantz about the current war having no time limit and a need for Israel to be in charge ofsecurity in postwar Gaza. Achieving this objective will likely take months of additional fighting, and it is not clear that the campaign will end decisively, with Hamas likely continuing attacks as a guerrilla force.

The Biden administration will likely continue to gently push Israel on humanitarian objectives rather than trying to force a reduction of Israeli war aims from the goal of crushing Hamas. There would be very little support in the U.S. for withholding arms as a means of leverage, and Israel would decide its own war aims. But these maximalist aims in Gaza run right up to Iranian and Hezbollah red lines in terms of not letting Hamas suffer complete defeat. Hezbollah presently seeks to lessen the burden on Hamas by drawing off some Israeli forces to the north with contained attacks along the Lebanese border. Nasrallah may also believe, as he alluded to in the November 3 speech, that Israel will ultimately back down from their war aims the way they accepted an outcome less than the total destruction of Hezbollah in Lebanon at the end of their war in 2006. If Israel approaches complete territorial control over Gaza, Hezbollah and Iran will have a difficult decision to make.

If Hezbollah does escalate, Washington should step back and not intervene directly with the aircraft aboard the USS Gerald Ford in the eastern Mediterranean. A fully generated Hezbollah missile salvo against northern Israel would cause horrendous damage. Still, Israel is fully capable of the required response, which would involve mounting a ground invasion of southern Lebanon in addition to an air campaign. A U.S. decision to intervene could add some additional air sorties at the outset. However, as the 2006 war showed, air interdiction of Hezbollah missiles was relatively ineffective, and the ground invasion was what eventually proved decisive. The United States would not participate in the latter. A U.S. intervention, however, would have massive implications in the Persian Gulf, where maintaining the free flow of oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) are core U.S. interests. U.S. forces, now active as co-belligerents alongside Israel, would also be present in all the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, where popular sympathies are overwhelmingly with the Palestinians. U.S. naval vessels also would be operating in close proximity to Iranian vessels. If the United States avoided becoming an active belligerent, we would have a much better chance of avoiding the final step of escalation into a conflict pitting the United States against Iran, with the Gulf Arab states likely absorbing Iranian strikes against oil and LNG infrastructure due to their hosting of U.S. forces which would become involved in combat against Iran. If it happened, that escalation would, in turn, mean catastrophic oil prices and a recession heading into the 2024 presidential elections.

The Biden administration appropriately gave Israel the strong impression that we “had their back” during President Biden’s visit the week following the October 7 attack. But some in Israel, including national security advisor Tzachi Hanegbi, came away with the impression that they had a U.S. commitment to back them up with direct U.S. military involvement if the war widened. President Biden briefly denied that such a commitment had been made on the flight home, but the administration needs to go further and make it very clear to Israel that the United States does not intend to join them as a co-belligerent absent a casus belli against U.S. forces or regional and global interests.

The United States also has a major escalation risk in the continued deployment of small contingents of military forces in Iraq and Syria. While the stated mission for these units is still to prevent the re-emergence of the Islamic State, an unspoken rationale is that they sit astride Iran’s logistical lines to their allies Syria and Lebanon and perhaps buy us a measure of additional influence with the Iraqi government. That notion has been sorely tested of late. The United States againretaliated with an airstrike against a facility in Syria linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) last night, after dozens of attacks with drones and artillery rockets since Hamas launched its attack from Gaza. Ironically, many of the attacks against U.S. forces have come from units of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), which draw government paychecks from the Iraqi state.

While there is an argument that a withdrawal under fire is an unacceptable loss of face, the potential for these small attacks to jeopardize broader U.S. interests has to be weighed against the fact that they represent a vulnerability regarding Iran and its proxies, not a position of leverage in our favor. We need to urgently reassess each of these outposts from a security standpoint and withdraw from the most vulnerable of them. The U.S. bases in Al Hasakah province in northeast Syria and at Al Tanf near the Jordanian border are particularly vulnerable and remote from U.S. reinforcements. Some would argue that this was an abandonment of local partners. Yet, the Syrian Kurdish People’s Defense Units (YPG) militia has long understood that it would eventually have to reconcile with the Syrian regime and is not central to long-term U.S. interests.

Ronald Reagan was confronted with a similar choice just over forty years ago when Hezbollah killed 241 U.S. servicemen in the Beirut Marine barracks bombing. He soon chose to have the Marines “redeploy offshore” in February 1984 to an amphibious ship to end a costly intervention that no longer served U.S. interests, despite the loss of face and disappointment to Israel and some pro-U.S. Lebanese Christian factions. Hopefully, President Biden will find a similar focus on core U.S. interests, which in this case dictate a focus on preventing conflagration in the Persian Gulf.

Greg Priddy is a Senior Fellow for the Middle East at the Center for the National Interest.