Israel’s killing of Hezbollah’s longtime leader has driven home how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has set the agenda in the Middle East in recent months, with a frustrated Biden White House unable to shape events or defuse a spreading conflict in the region.
Officials in the Biden administration felt blindsided by the Israeli air strikes Friday in southern Beirut that killed Hassan Nasrallah, and other senior Hezbollah figures, current and former officials say.
In the days before the Israeli attack, Secretary of State Antony Blinken had intensively shuttled between delegations in New York during the U.N. General Assembly session, trying to forge a 21-day cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah.
The Biden administration was so confident in the proposal’s success that a senior administration official briefing reporters after its public debut suggested both parties’ agreement was a foregone conclusion.
American and European officials believed they were moving closer to a possible deal, but then came the television images of a massive plume of smoke rising over southern Beirut.
President Joe Biden, Pentagon senior leaders and other senior officials across the administration were infuriated by the timing of the Israeli government operation, U.S. officials said.
Israel’s continued air strikes in Lebanon, which have killed more than 1,000 people in two weeks according to Lebanese health officials, have reinforced the administration’s fears that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s aggressive approach could trigger a chain reaction, resulting in a wider regional war that could possibly draw in the United States.
The White House said in a statement Saturday that the strike that killed Nasrallah brought “a measure of justice for his many victims, including thousands of Americans, Israelis, and Lebanese civilians.”
But it also called for de-escalating the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon “through diplomatic means” and said it was time for all sides to accept the proposed ceasefire deals on the table for Gaza and Lebanon.
Faced with another failed U.S.-led bid to lower the temperature, Blinken once again urged Israel to choose diplomacy, warning the alternative would lead to “greater instability and insecurity, the ripples of which will be felt around the world.”
“The choices that all parties make in coming days will determine which path this region is on with profound consequences for its people now and possibly for years to come,” Blinken said Friday in remarks after the strike that was later confirmed to have killed Nasrallah.
The decapitation strike in Lebanon was just the latest example of how Netanyahu and his far-right ruling coalition have followed their own course since Hamas militants in Gaza staged a surprise terrorist attack on Israel nearly a year ago, rejecting international criticism of the civilian death toll in Gaza.
Since Israel launched an offensive in Gaza last year, more than 41,000 people have died, according to Palestinian health officials.
In the days after the October 7th attack, Biden fervently embraced Netanyahu and Israel, literally and figuratively, calculating that unvarnished American support for the Jewish state would result in a willingness to accede to some American demands.
Instead, over the past year, Biden and his aides, have appeared to have steadily less influence with Netanyahu.
As the civilian death toll in Gaza soared, U.S officials repeatedly made private and public appeals to the Israeli government to change its tactics in Gaza and agree to a compromise to allow for a cease-fire deal.
But those appeals have failed to sway Washington’s closest ally in the region. Even vague threats that the administration might scale back or suspend weapons deliveries apparently had no concrete impact on Netanyahu’s decision making.
For his part, Biden has been unwilling to halt military assistance for Israel, despite calls from some fellow Democrats in Congress, and the U.S. has continued to send 2,000-pound bombs and Hellfire missiles to Israel.
But even if the administration had taken the unprecedented step of cutting arms shipments, it’s not clear it would have shifted Israel’s stance, analysts say, as it has large weapons stockpiles.
Biden has been powerless to shift Netanyahu, partly because Israel has a different set of objectives and partly because the prime minister cannot afford to alienate far right political voices that form part of his ruling coalition, Western officials and analysts say.
For Israel and Republican critics of Biden, the administration’s concerns about escalation are misplaced. The Israeli prime minister and his supporters believe the best way to prevent a wider war is to strike back at Iran and its proxies, to raise the cost of any attack on Israel and force its adversaries to recalculate the benefits of attacking Israel.
A senior Israeli official said they hoped the operation against Nasrallah would eliminate the need to stage a ground invasion of Lebanon, but said Israel would take advantage of the momentum it had now that their adversary had been set back.
The senior Israeli official expressed gratitude for the support the United States has provided in defending Israel against rockets from Iran and its proxies, but said Israel was the only one actually fighting back against what it called the existential threat posed by those forces.
Not only has Washington struggled in its diplomacy with Israel, the administration has also found Arab allies and partners reluctant to throw their full weight behind efforts to weaken Hamas or Hezbollah or other measures that could spark anger among their Muslim populations, many of whom see Israel persecuting the Palestinian people.
“Their publics are horrified by the destruction the Israelis have caused. They can’t get too close,” said author Aaron David Miller, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. “They can’t become the tip of the American spear against Hamas or Iran.”
The conflicts now unfolding, between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Israel and Iran, are “ongoing wars of attrition,” Miller said. “There are no stable end states, no transformative diplomatic efforts that could fundamentally end these wars of attrition,” he said.
The only options are containing or deterring adversaries, and incremental “transactional” steps that do not address the underlying causes of the conflict, he said.
And the decision-makers who will decide what next steps are taken are Netanyahu and the leaders of Iran, Hamas and the future head of Hezbollah, he added, not Biden.
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