The Ukraine War has dragged on for nearly three years with no current end in sight. The United States' pledge to Ukraine's defense has grown increasingly costly and unpopular, and talks on both sides of escalation — and even the potential use of nuclear weapons, on the part of Russia — threaten to expand and inflate the conflict. Ukraine has defended itself admirably, but the time is now to set out a plan for negotiations and de-escalation.
In the above video, former CIA Russia Analysis Chief and Quincy Institute's Director of Grand Strategy George Beebe discusses the context and potential avenues for diplomacy with Russia.
Then if you are interested, check out the boxed set:
Khody Akhavi is Senior Video Producer at the Quincy Institute. Previously he was Head of Video for Al-Monitor and covered the White House for Al Jazeera English, as well as produced films for the network’s flagship investigative unit.
An Iranian woman wears a portrait of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and holds a portrait of Lebanon's Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in the suburb of Beirut. She dances on the U.S. flag and Israeli flags during a gathering marking the memory of Hassan Nasrallah and an Iranian commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' (IRGC) Quds Force, General Abbas Nilforoushan, in Tehran, Iran, on October 2, 2024. (Photo by Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto) via REUTERS
The Biden administration is not only endorsing but also on the verge of actively assisting a new Israeli armed attack on Iran. National security adviser Jake Sullivan says that the United States is working directly with Israel regarding such an attack. “The United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel,” declares President Joe Biden.
The projected attack serves no U.S. interests. The attack perpetuates a broader pattern of escalating violence in the Middle East that also serves no U.S. interests. The Iranian missile salvo to which the coming Israeli attack is ostensible retaliation was itself retaliation for previous Israeli attacks. Retaliation for retaliation is a prescription for an unending cycle of violence.
The United States is facilitating an attack on a nation that does not want war and has been remarkably restrained in trying to avoid it, in the face of repeated Israeli provocations. A sustained Israeli bombing campaign against Iranian-related targets within Syria elicited a response only when it escalated to an attack on a diplomatic compound in Damascus, killing senior Iranian officials. Even then, the Iranian response, in the form of an earlier salvo of missiles and drones in April, was designed and telegraphed in a way to make a show of defiance but — with most of the projectiles certain to be shot down — to cause minimal damage and almost no casualties.
When Israel assassinated visiting Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in a government guest house in Tehran in July — the sort of attack that would elicit a quick and forceful response by the U.S. or Israel if it happened in one of their capitals — Iran did nothing until last week. It finally acted only after yet another Israeli attack— this time an assault on residential buildings in a suburb of Beirut that killed a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer along with Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah. Far from being motivated by any grandiose ambitions of regional dominance or desire to destabilize the region, Iranian leaders believed that they were getting killed by a thousand cuts from Israel and that they had to respond to the repeated Israeli attacks lest they lose the confidence not only of their own people but of regional allies. The missile firings that constituted Iran’s retaliation, like the ones in April, again caused minimal damage or casualties.
By cooperating with Israel in a new attack, the United States is assisting a state that has been responsible for most of the escalation and the vast majority of death and destruction in the Middle East for at least the past year. Although Hamas’ attack on southern Israel last October is commonly seen as the starting point of the subsequent mayhem in the Middle East, the question of who is responding to whom could go back farther than that. For example, the 1,200 deaths from that Hamas attack, horrible to be sure, were fewer than the number of Palestinians that Israel had killed in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip just from the day-to-day operations of the occupying Israeli army, supplemented by settler violence in the West Bank, during the previous eight years.
Since the Hamas attack, the devastating Israeli operation in the Gaza Strip has gone far beyond anything that can be construed as defense, or even as a response to Hamas, and has brought suffering to innocent civilians that is orders of magnitude greater than anything Hamas or any other Palestinian group has ever done. The still-rising official death toll exceeds 41,000, with the actual number of Palestinian deaths probably much higher and likely into six figures. Much of the Strip has been reduced to rubble and rendered unlivable.
After Hezbollah fired rounds into Israel last October in a show of support for the Palestinians in Gaza, the story of conflict along the Israeli-Lebanese frontier has mainly been one of repeated Israeli escalations. Israeli attacks in Lebanon have far exceeded Hezbollah attacks on Israel, in number but especially in physical effects, with almost no casualties within Israel apart from a few military personnel at the border. The rapidly rising toll of deaths in Lebanon from Israeli attacks has now passed 2,000, with about 10,000 injured and about 1.2 million people displaced from their homes. As in the Gaza Strip, civilians constitute much and perhaps most of that toll, including as a result of Israeli airstrikes that have demolished residential buildings in densely populated neighborhoods.
As a growing Israeli ground assault in Lebanon accompanies the aerial bombardment, Israel has told people in almost the entire southern third of Lebanon to move north, even though Israel already has been conducting lethal aerial attacks throughout Lebanon, including as far north as Tripoli. This also is reminiscent of the pattern in Gaza, in which residents are told to move, only to be bombed again in their new location.
The offensive Israeli actions that figure into confrontation with Iran — including the aerial and clandestine assassination operations in Lebanon, Syria, and the heart of Tehran — also have each constituted escalation. Those operations appear designed at least in part to goad Iran into entering a wider war, preferably one that also involves the United States.
Other motives behind the Israeli escalation are multiple and vary with the specific target. The deadly assaults on the Palestinians — in the Gaza Strip and increasingly also in the West Bank— are part of a long-term effort to use force to somehow make Israel’s Palestinian problem go away, through a combination of outright killing, inducing exile by making a homeland unlivable, and intimidation of any who remain.
Israel’s officially declared objective for its attacks in Lebanon is to permit a return home of the 70,000 temporarily displaced residents of northern Israel — whose numbers constitute less than six percent of the Lebanese who have been driven from their homes so far by the Israel offensive. That objective is genuine, but an escalating war along Israel’s northern border only places the objective farther out of reach. The Israeli operations also clearly are designed to cripple Hezbollah as much as possible, although they sustain and heighten the sort of anger that led to Hezbollah’s establishment and growth in the first place.
An Israel that is the strongest military power in the Middle East and is throwing its armed might around in seemingly every direction but the Mediterranean Sea is a nation drunk on the use of force and stumbling into still more use of it with little or no apparent attention to any long-term strategy for achieving an end state, other than living forever by the sword. Each tactical success, including the killing of a prominent adversary such as Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, only seems to deepen the inebriation.
Beyond this, one gets into a mixture of motivations that are specific to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ones shared with other Israeli policymakers. It is widely recognized, including by Netanyahu’s domestic opponents, that he has a personal stake in continuing and even escalating Israel’s wars. This is partly because of the usual rally-round-the-flag effect that attenuates the political problems of a wartime leader. It is also more specifically because Netanyahu is dependent on the support of the most extreme members of his right-wing ruling coalition to hold that coalition together, thereby keeping Netanyahu in power and delaying the day he has to confront fully the corruption charges against him.
An armed attack on Iran would extend the Israeli policy— not unique to Netanyahu, although he has been its most prominent exponent — of stoking maximum hostility toward, and isolation of, Iran. That policy serves to weaken a rival for regional influence, to place blame for everything wrong with the region on someone other than Israel, to inhibit any engagement with Iran by Israel’s patron the United States, and to divert international attention away from Israel’s own actions.
The diversion seems to work. The international attention to what may come next in the confrontation with Iran, in addition to the escalating operations in Lebanon, has meant less attention than would otherwise have been given in newspapers and the airwaves to the continued carnage in the Gaza Strip that claims civilian lives, such as Israeli attacks within the last few days on a girls’ school and an orphanage that several hundred displaced persons were using as shelter.
The U.S. presidential election provides another motivation for the Israeli government to escalate regional warfare. Netanyahu certainly would like to see a second term for Donald Trump, who gave Israel just about anything it wanted during his previous time in office, with nothing in return except political support for Trump. This relationship is part of a broader political alliance between the Republican Party and Netanyahu’s Likud Party. To the extent an escalatory mess in the Middle East causes problems for the Biden administration and thereby hurts the election chances of Vice President Kamala Harris, that is a bonus from Netanyahu’s point of view.
Netanyahu is more likely to enjoy that bonus and the other fruits of ramping up conflict with Iran to the extent that the United States gets directly involved in that conflict. Such involvement not only makes the politically costly mess for the Biden administration all the messier, but also enables Netanyahu to claim credibly that he has the United States fully at his side in his government’s lethal activities.
None of these Israeli objectives are in the interest of the United States. Several of the objectives, such as hamstringing any U.S. diplomacy that involves Iran, are directly and manifestly opposed to U.S. interests.
Israel’s regional warfare — and more specifically a U.S.-backed attack on Iran — would harm U.S. interests in several additional ways.
Closer association with Israel’s lethal operations increases the chance of reprisals, including terrorist reprisals. It also worsens U.S. isolation in international politics.
Supporting or participating in an Israeli attack on Iran would further undermine U.S. claims to be in favor of peace and observance of a rules-based international order. It would mean attacking the country that in this confrontation has exercised restraint in the interest of avoiding war and is firmly in support of ceasefires on each of the fronts seeing combat. It would mean aiding further attacks by the country that in the same confrontation has inflicted far more death and destruction, and done more to promote escalation of the violence, than any other in the region.
An attack on Iran would roil the oil market and cause economic dislocations that would reach the United States, especially but not solely if such an attack targeted Iranian oil facilities.
An attack would set back any chance for fruitful diplomacy involving Iran on matters such as security in the Persian Gulf region.
An attack would increase the chance that the Iranian regime would choose to develop a nuclear weapon. Nothing would be better designed to strengthen the arguments of those in Tehran willing to take that step than armed attacks demonstrating that Iran does not now have a sufficient deterrent.
Israel has already entrapped the United States to a large degree in its lethal ways in the Middle East, and the entrapment threatens to become deeper with the anticipated new attack on Iran. The entrapment would not have been possible without mismanagement of the U.S.-Israeli relationship on the Washington end. President Biden’s approach of holding Netanyahu close in the hope of influencing his policies has failed. It also has been counterproductive. In the absence of any willingness to employ the leverage that U.S. material aid to Israel represents, all the bear-hugging and expressions of support have only reassured Netanyahu that he can continue to prosecute his wars and ignore American calls for restraint without losing that aid.
It is refreshing to see reports that at least within the Department of Defense there is some recognition that the policy has been counterproductive by emboldening Israel to escalate. It is perhaps unsurprising that the department whose personnel would be on the front line of any expanded warfare involving the United States is more willing than others to recognize the nature and sources of the violence plaguing the Middle East and the need to deter or restrain Israel rather than embolden it. One can only hope that this willingness will spread more widely in policymaking circles.
A year ago, Azerbaijan attacked and took control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region — a disputed territory between Armenia and Azerbaijan — displacing more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians in a violent military operation many have called ethnic cleansing.
A year later, almost to the day after the invasion began, Azerbaijan announced a “COP 29 Truce,” calling for a cessation of all hostilities around the world during the climate summit it is hosting in November.
While Azerbaijan swears its “COP Truce” is not just a “cynical PR stunt,” its $4.7 million contract with a public relations firm suggests otherwise.
In just one day, the PR firm, Teneo Strategy, treated three journalists to dinner at a five-star hotel restaurant in Nagorno-Karabakh during a media forum. The very next day, one of them celebrated Azerbaijan’s newly established control of the region in an article published in Pakistan. A few weeks later, he tweeted that Azerbaijan is “lucky to have such a leader” in President Ilham Aliyev.
Teneo Strategy has a tall order: making a warring petrostate look like Mother Teresa. But the PR firm has embraced the “flood the zone” mantra to great effect, contacting 144 journalists in 88 different global media outlets some 500 times to promote Azerbaijan’s COP 29 agenda — including its peace-seeking narrative.
According to disclosures under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, the COO of COP 29, Narmin Jarchalova, brought on Teneo to “establish the COP29's communications function, including narrative development, initial content development, communications and engagement campaign planning, issues management, organizational development, establishing media relations capability, and media training.” At least five Teneo executives are always on the ground in Baku — racking up a tab of $350,000 on airfare and hotels to date.
Teneo sent out embargoed copies of the COP29 agenda to journalists, including what it called the COP Truce Appeal: “COP29 will seek to maintain a focus on the importance of both preventing conflict and supporting some of the most vulnerable populations.” "Our approach to the peace agenda is to live by example," said Hikmat Hajiyev, a top advisor to President Aliyev.
But Azerbaijan and Armenia have yet to sign a peace agreement, and there’s evidence the conflict is still simmering. Azerbaijan reportedly killed four Armenian soldiers inside of Armenian territory in February. This is why some have labeled Azerbaijan’s “COP Truce” idea as “peacewashing.”
Artin Dersimonian, a Junior Research Fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute and coauthor of a Quincy Institute brief on Azerbaijan’s influence in the U.S., told RS that it's odd for Azerbaijan to tout the region as a success story given that tensions remain high between Azerbaijan and Armenia. “Baku’s framing is contradictory because the two sides have not yet formally established interstate relations or peace, and it doesn't seem terribly likely that they will do that to any meaningful extent before the summit.”
Azerbaijan has become notorious for flaunting its oil wealth to court foreign officials, lawmakers, and journalists with gifts, free flights, and luxury hotels, dubbed “caviar diplomacy.” The Azerbaijan government paid for a trip to Azerbaijan last year for two aides to New York City Mayor Eric Adams — who himself was indicted last week for luxury trips and a straw-donor scheme orchestrated by the Turkish government, a close ally of Azerbaijan.
Officials from other states have taken Baku up on its generosity, too. According to a trip itinerary obtained by RS via a Freedom of Access Act Request, state lawmakers from Maine spent nine days in Azerbaijan in May with flights, food, and lodging paid for by the State Committee on Work with Diaspora of the Republic of Azerbaijan, the same agency that hosted Adams’ aides. Part of the itinerary included two days learning about “new development after liberation from occupation” in Nagorno-Karabakh. “Guess I should locate my passport. I am very excited!” wrote State Representative Jill Duson in response to the invitation. In June, Azerbaijan’s embassy in Washington even hired former Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) in part to coordinate congressional delegation visits to Azerbaijan.
The Friedlander Group, a firm retained by Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry, is leading the charge on Capitol Hill in Washington. An email obtained by RS shows that the firm sent an email on September 23 to members of Congress asking them not to sign onto a congressional letter calling for Baku to release Armenian prisoners ahead of COP29. “On top of it, we owe Azerbaijan praise, an apology and an open hand,” wrote the firm’s CEO, Ezra Friedlander.*
However, FARA disclosures suggest that Teneo has become the key cog in Azerbaijan’s COP29 media relations operation.
When Azerbaijan flew out some 300 foreign journalists to the newly-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh region for a media forum in July, Teneo held meetings and hosted expensive dinners — during which it discussed interviews with Azerbaijan’s COP leadership team.
“They are aiming for quantity over quality. With more than 1,000 people going on these trips, their goal is a handful that eat the caviar and remain loyal,” said Rasmus Canbäck, an investigative journalist at the Swedish online platform Blankspot, during a phone interview with RS.
During a press trip to Baku, Teneo met with Frank Kane, Editor-at-Large of Arab Gulf Business Insight (AGBI). Kane later remarked that the COP29 organizers should be prepared for an unprecedented level of ignorance and prejudice against Azerbaijan; “They will attack you on perceived corruption, human rights, and geopolitics—the myth of Azerbaijan aggression.” Three days after meeting with Teneo, the influential Indian newspaper, The Hindu, published an article titled “Climate conference in November to emphasise ‘peace’ and ‘truce.’” The firm also facilitated a New York Times article featuring Babayev in Azerbaijan that was based in part on a trip to Nagorno-Karabakh.
Teneo was a natural fit for Azerbaijan’s COP 29 “peacewashing” campaign. The company, which owns a majority stake in the Biden administration’s darling consulting firm WestExec, was fresh off of a contract advising the UAE’s state-owned renewable energy company. The UAE had appointed Sultan Al Jaber, the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company to lead the COP28 climate summit — sparking an outcry over the UAE’s environmental and human rights records. Teneo was brought in at the last minute to help soften the reputational damage, eventually pocketing over $1.5 million for its work.
Most of the 17-person COP29 team began its work in February, but Teneo didn’t formally register under FARA until June. Parties have a 10-day window to register, and, according to FARA’s regulations, they “may not begin to act as an agent of a foreign principal before registering,” so it’s unclear why Teneo’s registration occurred months after its work began. A Teneo spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
With just over a month to go until the summit, however, Teneo’s client appears satisfied with its PR blitz.
Babayev, COP29’s president, boasted on an Azerbaijani state-controlled television program about the government’s media strategy to change international perceptions of Azerbaijan as a success story, including its “restoration of territorial integrity,” referring to its offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh. Without mentioning Teneo by name, he credited a new media team “consisting of serious specialists.”
“Thanks to the work of this professional team, there has not been a week this year when we have not provided information and made statements to international media…Now they all understand and see the strength of our country," he concluded.
In a warning to fellow journalists ahead of the summit, Canbäck, the Blankspot journalist, said “Remember, the caviar served at dinner signals an expectation of loyalty upon your return home.”
The media, it would seem, is helping itself to the caviar.
*Editor's note: this story has been corrected to reflect that the Friedlander Group had filed its Sept. 23 email under FARA within the mandated 48-hour timeframe.
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U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan (U.S. Army photo via Flickr)
Tensions are rising to new levels in the Middle East. Iran responded to Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah by launching 180 missiles into Israel. And more recently, Israel’s bombing and subsequent invasion of Lebanon has plunged the region further into a wider ranging conflict that began with Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza.
Before these recent escalations, the United States had announced in September a plan to gradually withdraw American troops from Iraq. This plan reportedly would start with the removal of hundreds of troops by September 2025, with an unspecified number staying in the country, primarily in the northern Kurdish region of Erbil until at least 2026.
An administration official recently conditioned the report, saying “to be clear, the United States is not withdrawing from Iraq.” According to the official, the relationship between Iraq and the United States will supposedly move “towards the type of productive long-term security relationship that the United States has with partners around the world.”
Given the recent escalations between the so-called “Axis of Resistance” and Israel, combined with President Biden’s order to send more troops to the Middle East, some experts question whether the U.S. will withdraw American forces in Iraq on the specified timetable.
“I will believe our troops in Iraq are coming out when I see it,” said Defense Priorities senior fellow Danny Davis. “This painfully slow withdrawal schedule is suspect, because it gives so much opportunity to the administration to ‘delay’ it later.These troops are nothing but a strategic vulnerability for our country and should be fully withdrawn, in three months, not two years.”
Davis adds that U.S. troops remain vulnerable for longer than necessary with the two year timetable.
This vulnerability is especially important to consider right now, as Tyler Kotesky, policy director at Concerned Veterans for America points out. “The risks of a regional war in the Middle East are acute,” he told RS. “The United States has more important priorities elsewhere and should be reducing, not increasing its military footprint in the region.”
“Keeping our troops deployed now only gives Iranian proxies more ability to target them than otherwise," Kotesky adds.
Indeed, American forces in Iraq and Syria are thin, fairly spread out, and exposed.
“As the conflict between Israel and Iran escalates, the U.S. currently has thousands of troops spread across dozens of isolated and exposed bases in Iraq and Syria that can be easily attacked by Iranian-proxies seeking to punish the U.S. for its support of Israel,” says public policy advisor at Defense Priorities, Dan Caldwell. “It would appear that the only reason some policy makers want U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria to remain in place is to serve as a tripwire for a larger conflict with Iran.”
Despite warnings from some experts, others are more optimistic that the United States may be forced to follow through with its proposal. Michael DiMino, public policy manager at Defense Priorities, said that because risks of keeping forces in Iraq and Syria are high, he does believe that the Iraq withdrawal plan will likely go forward.
“While these deployments increase the exposure for the U.S. to more violence, I actually don’t think they will get in the way of the agreement,” he said. “Washington cannot overcome the stark reality that our presence in Iraq is fundamentally no longer tenable, which is why — begrudgingly — the Biden administration acceded to a deal in the first place.”
DiMino added, “The Iran-aligned PMF and Shia militias which now run Iraq — as a direct result of 20 years of schizophrenic U.S. foreign policy — will simply not allow American troops to remain beyond 2026.”
While experts differ on just how much the current escalations in the Middle East may affect troop drawdown plans, it is clear that American soldiers in Iraq and Syria serve no cogent strategic purpose, as the Quincy Institute’s Middle East deputy director Adam Weinstein notes, “The real risk is that U.S. troops become targets in an escalatory retaliation cycle.”
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