NEWS
ANALYSIS
A Diplomatic Victory of Uncertain Staying Power
President Biden successfully assembled a coalition to
defend Israel against Iran’s aerial attack, but the cycle of retaliation could
continue, challenging the White House’s efforts to avert a sustained conflict.
Peter Baker
By Peter
Baker
Reporting
from the White House
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/16/us/politics/biden-diplomatic-victory-israel-iran.html
April 16,
2024, 12:01 a.m. ET
It was so
close. Had just one missile or drone gotten through and killed a lot of
Israelis, American officials feared, the region could have gone up in flames.
So when
Israeli and U.S. forces, with help from Arab allies, managed a near-perfect
defense against last weekend’s aerial barrage from Iran, it represented not
only an extraordinary military and diplomatic feat but also a major victory for
President Biden’s effort to head off escalation of the war in the Middle East.
Mr. Biden
and his team hoped that the developments over the weekend could give all three
major actors enough to claim victory and walk away. Iran could claim
vindication for taking aggressive action in response to the Israeli strike that
killed some of its top military officers. Israel showed the world that its
military is too formidable to challenge and that Iran is impotent against it.
And the United States kept the region from erupting for another day.
It may not
work out that way, however. Rather than pocketing the win, such as it was,
Israeli officials said on Monday that they would respond — without saying when
or exactly how — and Mr. Biden’s advisers were bracing to see what that might
entail.
A
less-visible cyberattack or a pointed but limited military action might satisfy
Israel’s desire to re-establish deterrence without provoking Iran into firing
back again. A more extensive and in-their-face attack on Iranian soil, on the
other hand, could prompt Tehran to mount a counterattack, and suddenly the
conflict could explode into a sustained and increasingly dangerous war.
“This
weekend we saw Biden at his best,” said Laura Blumenfeld, a Middle East analyst
at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies and a former
State Department policy adviser. “The U.S.-led aerial display with European and
Arab regional partners played like an action movie trailer for a new Middle
East air defense alliance.”
But, she
added, the reality is that the Israel Defense Forces will inevitably respond.
“Turning the other cheek is not in the I.D.F. playbook,” she said. “A simple
‘don’t’ won’t work. Israel’s response is not a question of if, but when and
how. You can’t get around Middle East math — one grave, opposite one grave.”
Some
hawkish analysts said that Mr. Biden was thinking about it all wrong. His
effort to avoid escalation may trigger one instead, they argued, because Iran
and other enemies have been emboldened by increasingly public disagreements
between Washington and Jerusalem over Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas
in Gaza.
“This
perception of separation may have been a factor in Iran taking the
unprecedented step of attacking Israel directly,” said Ray Takeyh, a senior
fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
It was not
enough to shoot down Iranian missiles, he added.
“Stopping
the attacks after they launch is not the same as deterring them from being
launched,” he said. “If Biden’s team once more seeks to carve out a space
between itself and Israel, then it will invite further conflict.”
The
successful defense of Israel was the result of 10 days of intense diplomacy and
military coordination by the Biden administration and years of security
relationships built up by multiple administrations throughout the region. After
it became clear that Iran was planning to strike Israel for the first time
after decades of shadow war, American officials scrambled to activate, for the
first time, regional air defense plans that have been in the works for years.
American
military officials worked closely with Israeli counterparts to map out a scheme
to take down incoming missiles and drones, coordinated with British and French
forces in the region, and arranged with Arab allies to provide intelligence and
tracking data and permit use of their airspace.
Jordan,
which has been highly critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, nonetheless shot down
Iranian drones crossing over its territory toward Israel. An American Patriot
battery based in Iraq shot down an Iranian ballistic missile crossing through
Iraqi airspace.
In some
ways, the larger cooperation against Iran is the outgrowth of the changing
politics of the region, as exemplified by the Abraham Accords sealed under
President Donald J. Trump, through which Arab states like the United Arab
Emirates and Bahrain established normal diplomatic relations with Israel for
the first time. The Biden administration has been attempting to draw Saudi
Arabia into the accords, and while no deal has been reached, the sheikhs in
Riyadh have been ready to build ties with Israel in part out of shared
animosity toward Iran.
The
interception of nearly every one of more than 300 missiles and drones without
any fatalities in Israel or even major physical damage felt like validation for
those who have worked on erecting a web of security arrangements in the region.
John F.
Kirby, a national security spokesman for the White House, called it a
“spectacular” success. “That’s the upshot here,” he said at a briefing on
Monday. “A stronger Israel, a weaker Iran, a more unified alliance and
partners. That was not Iran’s intent when it launched this attack on Saturday
night, not even close. Again, they failed. They failed utterly.”
Mr. Kirby
disputed speculation that Iran did not really intend to do damage because it
telegraphed its coming attack for more than a week, and he denied reports that
Tehran had even passed along messages through intermediaries giving details
about time and targets. He scoffed at the suggestion that more than 300
missiles and drones amounted to just a face-saving exercise.
“Maybe they
want to make it appear like this was some sort of small pinprick of an attack
that they never meant to succeed,” he said. “You can’t throw that much metal in
the air, which they did, in the time frame in which they did it, and convince
anybody realistically that you weren’t trying to cause casualties and that you
weren’t trying to cause damage. They absolutely were.”
Mr. Biden
himself has said little publicly about the strike. “Together with our partners,
we defeated that attack,” he said on Monday in his first public appearance
since the strike, a White House meeting with Prime Minister Mohammed Shia
al-Sudani of Iraq. “The United States is committed to Israel’s security.”
Mr. Sudani,
whose country maintains a fragile balance between the United States and Iran,
said he favored efforts to stop “the expansion of the area of conflict,
especially the latest development.”
But he also
used the opportunity to press Mr. Biden about his support for Israel’s war in
Gaza. “We’re actually very eager about stopping this war, which claimed the
life of thousands of civilians — women and children,” Mr. Sudani said.
The
flare-up with Iran has diverted attention from the Gaza war at the very moment
when Mr. Biden had begun turning up the pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu to do more to ease civilian suffering.
Shibley
Telhami, a Middle East scholar at the University of Maryland, said Mr.
Netanyahu had an interest in prolonging the dispute with Tehran, “both as a
distraction from the horrors of Gaza and as a way of changing the subject to an
issue where he is more likely to get sympathy in the U.S. and the West.”
Mr. Telhami
said the success over the weekend did little to undo “the damage of Biden’s
strategic failure” in stopping the crisis in Gaza. “It shouldn’t take our
attention away from this bigger strategic failure, whose costs have been
immense and still unfolding,” he said.
Still,
Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings
Institution in Washington, said it was no small matter to avert a larger
regional war, at least for now.
“Biden
deserves big credit,” he said. At the same time, he added, it may fade fast.
“We’re still on the edge because the circumstances are extraordinary and the
crisis could escalate any day.”
Peter Baker
is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last
five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents
and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker
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