I’m getting whiplash trying to follow the waning days of the Biden administration’s Mideast diplomacy. For months we heard nothing but “de-escalation.” Now, suddenly, instead of telling Israel to stay out of Lebanon, Team Biden has a new idea: Everyone into the pool!
“Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the leaders of Qatar, Egypt and Saudi Arabia in recent days to ask them to support the election of a new Lebanese president,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “Senior White House official Amos Hochstein has also told Arab officials that the weakening of Hezbollah by Israeli attacks should be viewed as an opportunity to potentially break a political impasse. The country’s political parties have been unable to agree on a new president since the previous leader, Michel Aoun, left office at the end of his term in 2022.”
The basic problem is this: Hezbollah and its allies have a large enough bloc in parliament that it effectively gives the Iranian proxy a veto over legislation. Hezbollah also controls the Beirut airport and holds South Lebanon in an iron grip. Hezbollah thus has a great deal of influence over the institutions of Lebanese government and has its own institutions, including an army, that operate independently of the state. What began as an Iranian outpost has been slowly molded over time into essentially a second Iranian state.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s attacks have been so insistent and provocative and threatening to Israel’s sovereignty that it has invited a military response serious enough to allow the world to imagine a post-Hezbollah Lebanon. Perhaps that possibility has convinced Team Biden to pull a 180.
There are two reasons for skepticism.
The first is related to the fact that we’re having this conversation at all: The administration proposing this fix is fickle, strategically erratic, and at the end of its term in office.
Is it good that Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the top figures at the National Security Council are willing to acknowledge that America and its allies have a keen interest in rolling back Iranian expansionism? Absolutely. But a week ago they were shouting for a ceasefire and demanding Israel reduce its list of Iranian retaliatory targets. Where will they be on this tomorrow?
Indeed, if there’s anything that characterizes this administration, it’s the attention span of a labradoodle puppy. Commitment and follow-through are foreign concepts.
President Biden was committed to Hamas’s defeat at the beginning of the war a year ago. Halfway through, his efforts became singularly focused on ending the hostilities in any way possible, leaving Yahya Sinwar untouched and consigning at least some of the hostages to permanent captivity.
The original plan was to rebuild Gaza after removing Hamas from the strip. That required putting together a regional coalition willing to stick its neck out and plunk down ungodly amounts of money while taking at least some responsibility for management of Gaza during a dangerous and chaotic transition period. The flaking-out of the Biden administration didn’t just give Sinwar a new lease on life; it put our Sunni allies out on a limb and then cut that limb down.
The amount of commitment it would take to “fix” Lebanon would dwarf Gaza reconstruction. This is the second problem with the administration’s new grand idea. In four weeks, America will elect Biden’s successor. That person, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will replace the Cabinet with their own. Harris’s national-security team is dominated by those who want the U.S. less, not more, entangled in the politics of the Middle East. Which is to say, Joe Biden’s chosen successor would shred Biden’s plan on her first day in office.
Without a commitment from the U.S., there won’t be a commitment from anyone else. Our allies have already been burned by Biden’s about-face on Gaza.
All of this reveals the wasted potential of U.S. policy in the Mideast. The Obama-Biden administration’s coddling of Iran enabled the Gaza and Lebanon crises to reach this point. Four years later, Donald Trump handed Biden and Harris the Abraham Accords and an ongoing set of negotiations with Saudi Arabia, which they promptly shoved in a drawer so they could try to revive a policy that privileged Iran. When that went nowhere, the fickle crew went back to Saudi Arabia, too late to secure an agreement.
Now they want an Iranian proxy to remain in Gaza but an international coalition to push out an Iranian proxy in Lebanon?
Their hearts are in the right place—for now. But they have mortgaged the American credibility that would be needed to follow this path. Such are the wages of indecision and strategic caprice. The legacy of this administration will be chaos and missed opportunities.