How the Middle East crisis could actually end
Tehran’s missile attack on Israel amid intensifying operations by Israeli troops in southern Lebanon appear to be sobering waymarks on a journey towards an enduring state of escalating conflict in the Middle East.
Within Western diplomatic circles there is a growing recognition that Israel’s offensive successes against Hezbollah, effectively decapitating the leadership of Iran’s most capable proxy in the space of a few days, provides it with little incentive not to continue to pursue its goals by – increasingly muscular – military means. The precise nature of Israel’s promised retaliation to Iran’s missile barrage in the coming days or hours, in particular whether it chooses to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, is likely to dictate the intensity of the conflict for months, maybe years, to come.
But even as the region experienced yet another seismic escalation on Tuesday night as Iran launched a missile attack on Israel, there remains a belief that the scale of outcomes in the Middle East ranges from all-out war through to an unlikely peace brokered by a re-elected Donald Trump.
Experts have thereby pointed to three potential scenarios for the unfolding situation – an escalated regional conflict; a slow-burn war of attrition; and a peace process potentially born out of the unorthodox diplomacy of a second Trump presidency.
Regional war
With Israeli troops entering southern Lebanon and Tehran launching a significantly more menacing version of the missile and drone attack which it unleashed on Israel in April, the scene is increasingly set for just the sort of conflagration which the West in particular has been at pains to state it wanted to avoid since the murderous Hamas incursion into southern Israel on 7 October 2023.
Behind such concerns lie two key considerations – firstly, that Iran’s long-term of strategy of seeking to pressure and deter Israel by surrounding it with a ring of aggressive proxies (Tehran’s so-called “Ring of Fire”) is unravelling in an uncontrolled manner; and secondly that Israel will choose to push home what many in the country consider to be a rare chance to defang its arch regional foe.
Experts on both sides of the Atlantic argue that Israel’s success in penetrating and damaging Hezbollah, whether it be by maiming its rank-and-file members through booby-trapped devices or assassinating senior cadres including the militia’s totemic leader Hassan Nasrallah, leaves it with an incentive to press forward – and indeed escalate – its military actions in the region.
At the same time, the prospect of Israel capitalising on its weakening of Hezbollah, in particular the Iranian proxy’s ability to co-ordinate its actions, could yet provoke the group to unleash what remains of a fearsome arsenal, including precision ballistic missile, built up in the last two decades – not least because further Israeli success in a ground invasion could neuter its ability to fire its weapons in the first place. According to US estimates, Hezbollah had until last month amassed some 150,000 missiles and rockets, the majority supplied by Iran.
As Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think-tank in London, puts it: “It is possible to imagine that many [in Israel] would argue there will never be a better time to go into southern Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah’s military infrastructure there, while striking further north against ballistic missile and rocket storage or launch sites. This course brings with it the possibility that Hezbollah chooses to unleash its remaining arsenal, choosing to use it rather than lose it.”
A different but no less alarming calculus affects Iran’s actions in this context. The Islamic Republic is, according to many analysts, facing the dismantling of its “Axis of Resistance” – the network of proxy militias ranging from Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, through to the Houthis in Yemen and groupings in Syria and Iraq, set up to surround Israel and project Iranian power.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a fellow at the Atlantic Council think-tank in Washington, said recent events, including the assassination of Nasrallah, had exposed the “futility” of Tehran’s investment of billions in its allied militias. He said: “The Islamic Republic bet big on these proxies, but their collapse in Gaza and Lebanon demonstrates how the region might be witnessing the beginning of the end of Iran’s Axis of Resistance.”
From an Israeli perspective, the result is what Mr Savill describes as a “generational opportunity to deal a setback to Iranian regional influence”.
The grim problem is that as each side pursues its goals – Iran seeking to maintain its influence and credibility by striking back at Israel, and Tel Aviv in turn sensing a chance to restore some of the inviolability it considered itself to have prior to 7 October – a cycle of escalation is opened.
The unleashing of a second Iranian missile barrage against Israel in a year brings with it the risk of significant retaliatory strikes directly on Iran from an emboldened Israeli government. The targets available to Israel are multiple and bring with them a shifting menu of advantages and geopolitical snags – ranging from a relatively limited riposte of targeting the sites in Iran from which Tuesday’s attack was launched through to an attempt to eradicate Iran’s jealously-guarded nuclear programme.
What is different from the virtually choreographed nature of Iran’s thwarted April attack and Israel’s restrained response is an appetite in Tel Aviv to hit harder. A case in point is former prime minister Naftali Bennett who on Tuesday night tweeted that Israel now has “the greatest opportunity in 50 years to change the face of the Middle East”. Mr Bennett, who could yet succeed current leader Benjamin Netanyahu, added that Israel should go after Iran’s nuclear facilities, in order to “fatally cripple this terrorist regime”.
At the same time, the evidence that Israel and its allies in the shape of America and the UK have once more been successful in largely intercepting Tehran’s projectiles put Iran at risk of its military strength being shown to be ineffective – and thereby incentivising it to respond to any further escalation with its own increased ferocity.
A Western diplomatic source said: “We are facing the risk of a fully-fledged conflict which neither Israel, nor Iran, nor the West has said it wants but has the potential to take place anyway. The consequences of this confrontation are not hard to imagine – it is always much harder to stop a war than to start one.”
A smouldering conflict
An alternative view of the trajectory of the situation in the Middle East is that – even in the aftermath of Iran’s missile attack – the warring parties settle back into an attritional and drawn-out conflict.
Hitherto, Iran has shown a preference for confronting its foes, whether it be Israel or the United States and its allies, via a grinding, asymmetric process of financing its proxies and keeping itself at one remove from their actions.
It is a strategy which experts believe Tehran will find hard to abandon even as its decision to confront Israel head-on unfolds in the coming days and hours. Massoud Mostajabi, deputy director of the Iraq Initiative at the Atlantic Council, said: “While Israel has effectively employed a shock-and-awe campaign, Iran remains committed to a long-term war of attrition.”
For all that it is currently decimated and weakened, Hezbollah is likely to rebuild. In the meantime, Tehran may yet deepen its relationship with the Houthis by integrating the Yemeni rebels more closely with the extra-territorial activities of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and providing the grouping with more advanced weapons to launch at Israel and use against shipping in the Red Sea.
Speaking before Tuesday night’s Iranian missile attack, Dr Burcu Ozcelik, a Middle East security expert at RUSI, said the tactics available to Tehran in the coming months of a “calculated long game” could include attacks by militia in Iraq and Syria as well as the targeting of Israeli and Western diplomatic missions overseas.
At the same time, for all of Israel’s success against Hezbollah and its devastation of Gaza in its pursuit of Hamas, it still faces a set of unresolved, intractable issues that will attract violence and conflict. Mr Savill said: “In the longer term, Gaza and the West Bank will remain a festering source of security threats. Hezbollah is weakened but it’s too soon to know whether this is the end for the group, or something from which it can recover.”
A path to an improbable peace?
At a time when Iran, whose leaders have for decades denied Israel’s right to exist and posited its eradication, is unleashing ballistic missiles against Tel Aviv and Gaza lies in ruins, talk of peace would seem detached from an unremittingly grim reality.
However, some argue that the foundations of a settlement or peace deal are still to be found among the cloying fog of a Middle Eastern war – and that, for better or worse, its best opportunity may lie in the hands of Donald Trump.
Commentators have noted that the ruling elites in several key Middle Eastern states, among them Saudi Arabia, are either quietly backing Mr Trump or maintaining a studious silence in the expectation that a second Trump administration may be more amenable to the priorities of their regimes.
Writing earlier this year, Gregory Aftandilian, a former Middle East specialist for the US government and now a lecturer in foreign policy at the American University, suggested a range of Arab countries such as Bahrain, Egypt and the UAE, as well as Saudi Arabia, may quietly prefer a Trump victory. He said: “Their support derives at least partly from an expectation that a second Trump administration would pay little attention to sensitive issues such as a human rights. They also believe that Trump, with his unusual style of diplomacy, may be able to end the war in Gaza – something that the Biden administration has not be able to do.”
Notwithstanding the obvious caveat that the outcome of Mr Trump’s race for the White House against his Democrat rival Kamala Harris remains to be seen, there is a sense that for a peace to be possible it is likely to require a shift in approach.
There are signs of a tacit acceptance in Washington that a counter-intuitive result of the hardening confrontation between Israel and Iran, and its proxies, could be an increased potential for a meaningful diplomatic intervention as military action shifts the reality on the ground.
Matthew Miller, spokesman for the US Department of State, said earlier this week that a ceasefire in the Middle East remains the priority of the Biden administration, before adding: “But at the same time there are a couple other things that are true as well, which is that… military pressure can at times enable diplomacy.”
Urban Coningham, a research fellow and Middle East specialist at RUSI, said there is an emerging school of thought that Israel’s battlefield successes could prod Tehran into accepting a ceasefire, albeit one of uncertain longevity. He said: “This does point to the idea that there is the potential of essentially punishing Hezbollah, and through that punishing Iran into a position where they have to take a peace or a ceasefire. But whether that ceasefire is lasting is very unlikely.”
Others suggest that Mr Trump’s preference for a highly transactional foreign policy, in which a blind eye is likely to be cast upon the authoritarian instincts of key brokers such as Saudi Arabia, could be a vehicle for exploring whether Israel’s security needs can be reconciled with the cessation of combat in Gaza and progress on the question of a Palestinian state, according to one diplomatic source.
At the core of this mode of thinking is a rekindling of the Abraham Accords, the process led by Mr Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, which resulted in 2020 in the normalisation of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. The accords, which largely bypassed conventional diplomatic channels, could yet become a focus for an effort by a new Trump administration to seek Saudi support for rebuilding Gaza and Israeli quiescence as part of a complex roadmap towards Palestinian statehood.
As the diplomatic source put it: “Trump could be a game changer. But only in the sense that everything else so far has failed and we may just need a new game.”
It is pointed out, however, that many obstacles – at least several of which currently appear insurmountable – stand between the current bellicose state of affairs and a peace process, whoever may be leading it.
Professor Aftandilian said the primary issue for American and European diplomatic efforts would be the likely refusal of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to countenance a two-state solution in Palestine under any circumstances – a problem not even self-proclaimed “great negotiator” Mr Trump appears equipped to resolve. Prof Aftandilian told i: “Although Trump appears to have a better relationship with Netanyahu than Biden, it is not clear that Trump will be able to negotiate a cease-fire deal. Netanyahu will only end a war if he sees it in his interest.”
Another issue is that Saudi-American relations have cooled over what Riyadh sees as a failure by Washington to restrain Israel’s assault on Gaza or deter a land incursion into southern Lebanon.
Mr Coningham said: “American control over Israel has eroded and I don’t see what Trump does to reassert that control. As matters stand there is little or nothing which brings Israel to the table even if Iran or Hezbollah signal they are willing to do so.”
Sat alongside this geopolitical stalemate is the ongoing war in Ukraine – another conflict which Mr Trump has repeatedly suggested he poses an ability to resolve. Given that most commentators expect a Trumpian resolution to Ukraine to involve an accommodation with Moscow, the possibility arises that a quasi-victorious Vladimir Putin could then be persuaded to apply pressure on his Iranian allies to accept a peace process in Israel and Palestine. Such a scenario, however, remains far-off, if not far-fetched, given the schism with the West and Russia’s success in developing an antagonistic new axis of power with the likes of Iran and North Korea.
There may, however, yet be another unexpected player able to bring influence to bear in the gordian knot that is the Middle Eastern confrontation – China.
Beijing announced its growing influence in the region last year when it brokered a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran to resume diplomatic relations after decades of enmity. Earlier this summer, China hosted talks between rival Palestinian factions and the superpower last week sought to burnish its aspirations as a global peacemaker by calling for a ceasefire in the Middle East.
Mr Coningham said: “I think there’s an interesting wild card in China. We should be watching Beijing because it will be looking to see if it can make a deal.”