On the brink: Diplomacy isn’t slowing the march to wider war in the Middle East – David Harland

If Israel were under attack, could the US really stay out, particularly with a Presidential election just weeks away?

Both Iran and the United States have said repeatedly that they aren’t looking war with the other and don’t want a wider war in the Middle East. And yet a path to exactly that scenario is now very plausible. 

Three possible steps to a wider war

Step one: Israel, as promised, strikes Iran hard in retaliation for the 1 October Iranian missile attack on Israel. There are various ways in which this could play out. Israel might, as President Biden let slip, strike at Iranian oil production facilities. Or they might strike at Iran’s nuclear programme, though President Biden has said that he opposes this. Or they might strike at the Iranian security establishment, particularly bases and installations associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

All of these options have their drawbacks. Hitting the oil will push up global energy prices, which would be a boon to Russia but badly affect Western economies. Hitting the nuclear sites hard enough to seriously set back Iran’s nuclear programme would likely require US help that may not be forthcoming. And striking at the military and the IRGC is really just ‘mowing the grass’ – it degrades enemy capabilities, but only until the next time. So it might be one of these or something else, but, unless it ends up being more symbolic, it is unlikely that Iran will just let it pass. 

Step two: Iran strikes back. There are hawks in the Israel-US camp who feel that Iran’s Axis of Resistance has turned out to be something of a paper tiger. Hezbollah was for a long time seen as Iran’s forward deterrent in Lebanon. According to this logic, Israel wouldn’t dare strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities because Hezbollah would then use its large stockpile of medium-range missiles to strike at Israeli cities right next door. Israel, however, has taken the war to Hezbollah, killing its leader and allegedly his presumed successor, and subjecting its Lebanese base to one of the heaviest bombardments of modern history. A full scale  ground invasion may ensue, as Netanyahu warns Lebanese they could face the same fate as Gaza. 

But Hezbollah is not Iran. US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan described Iran’s 1 October missile salvo as ‘ineffective’. Independent analysts disagree. They note that a number of the 180 missiles penetrated Israeli-US defenses, hitting targets that included a heavily defended Israeli air base. Iran, in other words, demonstrated a capability without hitting populated areas.

Moreover, future rounds might well tilt the equation further in Iran’s favour. On 1 October, it fired fewer than 200 of an estimated arsenal of some 3,000 ballistic missiles. Even this first salvo was able to penetrate the Israeli-US defense shields; subsequent attacks in larger numbers would strain defenses further and swiftly deplete the expensive interceptors used by Israel and the United States in the first round, leaving Israel more vulnerable with each round. 

So Iran has a capacity to strike back, and, if it feels itself to be under serious attack, will almost certainly do so. Like Israel, it has a number of options, all of which have their drawbacks. It could try launching additional salvoes of ballistic missiles towards Israel, perhaps this time against populated areas – Hezbollah has already managed to strike at Haifa, one of Israel’s most populous cities. Or it could focus on softer targets that could harm Israel’s friends and allies, by for example closing the Straits of Hormuz, thus creating havoc in the world energy markets.

Iran has never wanted a full-scale regional war, and is therefore likely to respond in a roughly proportionate way. But even a ‘roughly proportionate’ response will have huge consequences for the next round. 

Step three: The US joins in. So far, the US has refused to provide Israel the means to hit Iran really hard. A new level of bunker-busting bombs would be required to reach sensitive nuclear installations, and the B2 bombers needed to deliver them, which only the US has.

But however much the US also wants to avoid a wider regional war, and whatever tensions it may have in its relations with Israel, any serious Iranian strike on Israel, or even on the global energy supply, would likely force the US into a war with Iran. If Israel were under attack, and civilians were being killed, or Iran cut off the Gulf oil supply, could the US really stay out, particularly with a Presidential election just weeks away? At this third step, therefore, the US is exactly where it hoped never to be, in a direct war with Iran. 

All this could happen very fast. President Biden has just cancelled an appearance at President Zelensky’s ‘victory summit’, supposedly to focus on a massive hurricane bearing down on Florida. Yet Israel’s defence minister was scheduled to visit Washington to discuss war plans and Netanyahu is expecting a call from Biden. It could be that the US is expecting Israel to take the next step very soon. 

If it does happen, the world security system will be almost immediately upended. Israel and Iran will be at war and in mortal danger. The US will have embarked on a war that it never wanted. The global economy will be reeling from the shut-off of oil from the Gulf. And then the world will be in uncharted territory. If the war is going badly for Israel, will it turn to its as yet undeclared nuclear arsenal? If the war is going badly for Iran, will Russia stand by, given how much it relies on Iranian weapons for its war in Ukraine? And what about China, which imports almost all of Iran’s oil and whose economy is under strain? 

Absence of diplomatic options

It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. But it might be, and the likelihood that it will be is greatly exacerbated by the miserable state of international diplomacy. 

The much-derided UN Charter has provided a framework that has kept the world mostly safe for almost 80 years by establishing three basic rules: former colonies will become free through self-determination; the use of force as an instrument of international relations – invading other countries or annexing their territory – will be forbidden; all states will have the right of self-defense, including collective self-defense. 

This framework is now breaking down. There is a scholarly and political debate about whether the real death blow was the NATO invasion of Kosovo in 1999, or the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, or the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But there is no disputing that the international system is badly damaged. And the mechanism designed to oversee the functioning of the system, the UN Security Council, is almost defunct, with its five permanent members having failed to agree on any consequential matter since 2011. And the UN Secretary-General, who has a role in international peace and security under article 99 of the Charter, has established a solid record of total inaction. 

So the UN, which helped create Israel in 1947, isn’t going to be of much use if any of this happens. 

What else is there? Due to the general erosion of diplomacy, all the obvious paths away from the brink are blocked. Officials from Iran and Israel don’t talk, at all. Iran and the US only barely talk, usually relying on neutral intermediaries like Switzerland and Oman. Besides, the US has shown that even when it does talk to Iran, its word means almost nothing. In 2015, it agreed with Iran on what to do about Iran’s nuclear programme, only to break the deal as soon as Trump came into office.  Iran has said in recent weeks that the US lied about delivering a ceasefire in Gaza in return for Iranian restraint after the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

Qatar has played an intermediary role in the Gaza crisis, as has Egypt, but these efforts have come to nothing. Nor are bigger countries further away likely to help. Europe is completely preoccupied with Russia and Ukraine, and anyway very divided on what to do about the Middle East. China, which last year brokered a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia, has no great incentive to act, as the US is once again massively distracted from the tectonic changes under way in Asia.  

There is some hope that the Global South could fill the breach, and even talk that de-escalation can be achieved using alternative multilateral forums such as the G2o and BRICS. But these are no real substitutes for the nuclear-armed superpowers, which in previous eras managed to find ways to exploit mutual vulnerability.

Even at the height of the Cold War, diplomats – sometimes working bilaterally, sometimes multilaterally — were able to address war-threatening issues like the status of Finland and Austria, and were able to put in place a whole architecture for managing the risk of nuclear war. Since the end of the Cold War, we have thrown it all away. We are dismantling the institutions and agreements that kept the peace and kept the nuclear balance. Diplomacy has become a public shouting match. 

If we get through this latest crisis, there will be more crises ahead, each time taking us closer to the cliff edge. And so it will go on until we re-learn the lost art of diplomacy. 

Photo: © Unsplash/Mahmoud Sulaiman