The world beyond the election: Middle East in turmoil

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The deadly cycle of retaliation between Israel and Iran continues to unfold. Israel hit Iranian military targets in a wave of airstrikes in the early hours Saturday, in response to Iran’s Oct. 1 missile barrage against Israel.

Israel did not appear to target Iran’s nuclear sites or oil installations, which some analysts interpreted as a move to give Tehran an off-ramp to de-escalate. “The ball is now in the Iranian leadership’s court,” Danny Citrinowicz, senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, told my colleagues.

Iranian state media outlets reported the deaths of two soldiers in the Israeli attack, but officials seemed to be trying to downplay the scale of the blow. The country’s Foreign Ministry said Iran was “entitled and obliged to defend itself against foreign acts of aggression.” The Biden administration, which is helping defend Israel from Iran, said it did not participate in the latest Israeli operation.

The White House has struggled to contain the fallout of the brutal war between Israel and Hamas. Over and over, top Biden administration officials have shuttled through Amman, Cairo, Doha, Riyadh and Tel Aviv in fitful efforts to chart a path forward. The conflict, which began with the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has since sprawled across the region, ravaged Gaza, torn through Lebanon, pulled in Iran and its proxy militias, and threatened to explode into a full-blown Israel-Iran war.

The troubles in the Middle East could look similar in January to what we see right now. It’s possible that hostilities will be ongoing in Gaza, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed and millions displaced. Arab countries, including the wealthy U.S. allies of the Persian Gulf, are skeptical about a meaningful “day after” plan for reconstruction and reconciliation emerging any time soon. And Israel’s conflict with Iran more than likely will be simmering, if not boiling over. Lebanon is likely to still be dealing with the displacement of a fifth of its population due to Israel’s offensive, as well as pressure to forge a new political dispensation that further sidelines Iran-allied Hezbollah.

The next U.S. president, whether it’s Vice President Kamala Harris or former president Donald Trump, will face an Israeli government that “is trying to really redefine the parameters of its conflicts,” Jon B. Alterman, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of its Middle East program, told me.

Israel’s political and security establishment has stepped up campaigns to degrade Hamas, Hezbollah and chip away at Iran’s strategic assets. As my colleagues reported, Trump has offered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu full backing in his government’s efforts. The Biden administration has, in moments, sought to restrain Israel from provoking a major conflagration, but continued to send billions of dollars in military aid to Israel and shield it from international censure.

Alterman said it’s unclear whether Israel’s attempts to change the “fundamental equations” of the region will yield “a more favorable equation.” But, at a time when successive U.S. administrations have tried to “pivot” away from the Middle East, “the next president is going to have to decide, if all this is changing, whether the U.S. is free to let the chips fall where they may.”

Before the events of Oct. 7 and even in the months thereafter, the Biden administration clung to a vision of peace anchored in a landmark normalization deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Such a breakthrough could reset the board in the Middle East, further integrate Israel into its neighborhood, expand the mandate of the Abraham Accords – normalization agreements between Israel and a handful of Arab monarchies nudged along when Trump was in office – and even build a corridor of trade and cooperation from India to Europe, all while keeping Iran at bay. But that vision was “laid to tatters” by the Gaza war, said Vali Nasr, professor of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Riyadh has cautioned against talk of formal ties with Israel absent any prospect of a viable Palestinian state emerging out of the occupied territories, which few in Israel are willing to countenance. The Gaza war has “reverberated throughout the region,” said Paul Salem, vice president of the Middle East Institute, and dispelled the “presumptions of the Abraham Accords period” that the plight of the Palestinians “doesn’t matter anymore.”

U.S. pressure and leadership still plays a key role in this context. “The new administration will have to start by shoring up America’s credibility as a superpower capable to imposing order on the region,” Nasr told me. “That starts with ending the ongoing wars in Gaza and Lebanon, followed with a credible plan for regional security that it is willing to implement.”

“Otherwise, the U.S. will continue to chase events and be drawn into an ever-dangerous spiral toward a prolonged and broader regional conflict,” he said.

The status quo, as much as the United States has sought to reinforce it over the past decade, seems untenable. A resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “cannot be in the direction of reinforced occupation, siege, suppression and oppression,” Salem told me, gesturing to the ongoing dispossession and victimization of Palestinians living in the occupied territories. He argued that it’s also “not good for Israelis in the long term.”

Trump and top lawmakers in the Republican Party have made clear that they are no longer interested in paying lip service to a “two-state solution” for Israelis and Palestinians, and in some contexts they have openly embraced the program of Israel’s once-fringe, far-right settler movement. Meanwhile, the Biden administration and Democrats have also demonstrated that they are not willing to risk a policy that would alienate Israel’s leadership.

The absence of peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians is what Salem describes as one of two “master conflicts in the Middle East.” The other is the political project of the Iranian regime, which since the trauma of its bloody war with Iraq in the 1980s has always sought to fight its battles outside its borders. That has led to the proliferation of its proxy factions in various countries across the region, a policy of “forward defense” that “generates permanent instability,” Salem said.

The risks posed by Iran and the looming crisis of advances in its nuclear program – a legacy of Trump’s unilateral move to upend the 2015 nuclear deal that curbed Iran’s enrichment activities – will be a top priority for the next president. But U.S. politicians are more wary of overt confrontation, and the coming administration, be it Harris or Trump, will probably seek to revive the possibility of Israeli-Saudi normalization as a way to hedge against Iran and the encroaching influence of rivals including China and Russia.

“Once seen as a problematic partner, Saudi Arabia is now viewed as a coveted ally,” wrote Karim Sadjadpour in Foreign Affairs. “The possibility of a historic Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement under the umbrella of a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty ratified by the Senate will likely remain a signature aspiration of any future American administration, Democratic or Republican.”

Among Washington’s veteran Middle East watchers, a degree of humility and wariness has set in. The failures and traumas of the past two decades have dispelled serious talk of “regime change” in the region.

“The next time U.S. leaders propose intervening in the Middle East to change a hostile regime, it can be safely assumed that such an enterprise will be more costly, less successful, and more replete with unintended consequences than proponents of such action realize or admit,” Philip Gordon, now Harris’s top national security adviser, wrote in 2020. “So far at least, it has never been the other way around.”