Is Biden too weak or unwilling to stop a 'Sarajevo moment'?

The Middle East is on the cusp of a Sarajevo Moment — an increasingly likely major conflict between Israel and Iran.

Their two leaders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hold in their hands the choice between war and peace. But another leader has a crucial role: U.S. President Joe Biden. To stop conflict before it escalates uncontrollably, he must demonstrate more authority and less passivity than he has done this past year.

With the expanding exchange of fire between Israel and Iran, the collection of conflicts has moved beyond the Levant (plus Yemen) and has become a direct war between Israel and Iran. If together they don’t deescalate now, the scale of fighting and its strategic impact, both in the region and beyond, could dwarf the fighting and destruction we’ve seen so far.

The United States would surely be sucked in. Indeed, Netanyahu would welcome it — it’s long been part of his strategic game plan; and the Ayatollah may find it unavoidable.

Tragically, debate within Biden’s top team is not about whether Israel should launch major strikes against Iran in response to the latter’s missile attacks Tuesday, but where and how, with President Biden even giving public advice. Means to break the cycle of escalating violence, if any, are not apparent.

For most of last year, the United States has been a combatant-by-proxy, in its virtually open-ended support of Israel’s war efforts on multiple fronts. Israel depends absolutely on U.S. weaponry and other support — plentifully supplied and with very few restrictions on their use — plus a direct U.S. role in intercepting two Iranian missile barrages. While Washington has been a proponent of deescalation in both Gaza and now Lebanon, that has consisted mostly of cajoling belligerents rather than acting to impose a halt to the fighting.

On Iran, the United States and Israel do not fully share interests. Both would welcome regime change. Israel also wants Iran to be disintegrated and has worked over the years to bring it about; by contrast, Biden and his team should by now understand the chaos such a development would release across the region and beyond.

Washington’s most important strategic interest in Iran has been to forestall or prevent its development of nuclear weapons. Yet for years, Netanyahu has undercut U.S. efforts in that regard. In 2015, China, Russia, France, Germany, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States concluded a nuclear agreement with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. It effectively rolled back and froze Iran’s nuclear program, and Teheran honored its part of the bargain.

Netanyahu fought this agreement every step of the way, including his direct appeal to a joint session of Congress in 2015 in which he stridently opposed any agreement with Iran that would enable it to retain even a civilian nuclear program.

His efforts paid off. In 2018, President Donald Trump pulled out of the JCPOA. When Biden took office in 2021, he could simply have rejoined the agreement, just as he reversed so many other destructive Trump actions. But he failed to do so. Instead, he engaged in a drawn-out process to negotiate a “better” agreement with Iran. No fair observer judges the negotiations to have been serious, since neither Israel nor its U.S. supporters wanted it done.

Ironically, at last month’s U.N. General Assembly in New York, Iran’s president affirmed his government’s readiness to rejoin the JCPOA; Biden’s team ignored him..

In diplomacy on Gaza, President Biden has long publicly stressed the need for a cease-fire and the release by Hamas of Israeli hostages but has failed to put American power behind that request. Thus, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top U.S. officials have visited the region multiple times; but Biden has refused to demand that Netanyahu genuinely support an agreement.

Even when Hamas showed some flexibility, Netanyahu imposed new demands. Except for one limited withholding of 2,000-pound bombs, Biden has done nothing to condition or stop arms supplies to Israel, even temporarily, when Israel has thwarted U.S. diplomacy. Nor will Biden premise continuing military support on Israel’s (and Egypt’s) opening borders to a free flow of desperately needed humanitarian relief.

With Biden’s unwillingness to do more than talk about a ceasefire in Gaza, plus his effective acceptance of Israel’s rejection of any progress in Palestinian rights, let alone a two-state solution, Netanyahu saw no obstacle to taking the next step in his long-run strategy: to root out Hezbollah from Lebanon.

Here, Biden has effectively given a green light to Israel’s relentless bombing campaign and ground incursion that have already displaced well over one million Lebanese and killed another 2,000, including Hezbollah militants and civilians.

More important, the danger now is that Biden will not act — he may talk and cajole, but not demand — as Netanyahu turns his military focus to Iran, the front that is far more crucial for the future of the entire Middle East and America’s strategic interests there.

As always, Netanyahu has made astute calculations about U.S. domestic politics. With the presidential election a mere month away, he knows that Biden will do nothing to stop Israel from getting its military business done by November 5 or even by Inauguration Day. Biden will not risk alienating Israel and its formidable lobby here in Washington.

His simply asking Netanyahu not to attack critical sites in Iran that could make inevitable a major war, one that would involve the United States militarily, is most unlikely to avoid escalation. Indeed, it has long been Netanyahu’s dream that the U.S. will take care of Israel’s “Iran problem.”

Americans’ popular support for Israel’s fundamental security has always been rock-solid, although at times — notably the 1956 Suez War and its siege of Beirut in 1982 — Washington has opposed some Israeli offensive military operations. It has also denounced — again mainly with talk rather than serious action — some Israeli policies, such as settling hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews in the West Bank in violation of international law.

As Israel’s most prominent and powerful patron, America now must make clear to Israel that continued U.S. military and diplomatic support will be at risk if Netanyahu and his coterie fail to take fully into account U.S. evaluations of Israel’s security needs. Israel must also accommodate U.S. interests, which include not contributing to the risks of a major conflagration. The U.S. and others can then urge Iran also to hold its fire, lest it risk suffering massively in a terribly destructive war. Tehran may already understand this.

If Biden seeks to avert this Sarajevo Moment, he must now put U.S. interests first, rather than continue deferring to Israel’s perspective and desires. A test of Biden’s presidency in foreign policy is thus on the line. It’s not clear even now he will do what he must, as demanded by his role as commander-in-chief.