The Riverside Press-Enterprise
A diplomatic victory of uncertain staying power
It was so close. Had just one missile or drone gotten through and killed a lot of Israelis, U.S. officials feared, the region could have gone up in flames.
So when Israeli and U.S. forces, with help from Arab allies, managed a nearperfect 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 Joe Biden’s effort to head off escalation of the war in the Middle East.
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 Monday that they would respond — without saying when or exactly how — and Biden’s advisers were bracing.
A less-visible cyberattack or a pointed but limited military action might satisfy Israel’s desire to reestablish 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 IDF playbook,” she said. “A simple ‘don’t’ won’t work. Israel’s response is not a question of if, but when and how.”
Some hawkish analysts said that 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 the Gaza
Strip.
“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, U.S. officials scrambled to activate, for the first time, regional air defense plans that have been in the works for years.