What the US can do to deter a wider war in the Middle East

Amid growing concern about a wider war in the Middle East following a series of Israeli attacks, Iran launched a missile strike on Israel Tuesday that Pentagon officials estimate was “twice as large” as an attack last April. 

No U.S. forces were hurt and initial indications are that there was “minimal damage” on the ground, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder said Tuesday, adding that Israel was able, with U.S. help, to “successfully defend itself.” 

U.S. Navy destroyers with Aegis defense systems fired a dozen interceptors at incoming Iranian missiles, Pentagon officials said.

In Tel Aviv, air raid sirens sounded across the city as residents took refuge in bomb shelters, and Israeli military bases as well as the Mossad intelligence agency were also reportedly targeted.

Israel – thanks to its precise intelligence – has decapitated the leadership of key Iranian ally Hezbollah in recent weeks, killing at least seven top commanders, including its longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in a Friday airstrike. On Monday, it launched a ground invasion of Lebanon in a bid to further dismantle the militia.

The question now, some analysts say, is whether the U.S. should still be seeking deescalation or letting the Israeli military continue its rapid dismantling of Hezbollah, the most powerful proxy in Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” against Israel and American influence in the region.

That hinges on whether the risk that destroying Hezbollah could spark a wider war outweighs the potential to reshape the region into a more stable, prosperous place.

“Sometimes you have to escalate to deescalate,” says Richard Shultz, director of the International Security Studies Program at The Fletcher School at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

The possibility for a wider war in the Middle East has been a top-of-mind concern for U.S. officials – particularly since Hamas attacked Israel last fall, provoking a devastating war in Gaza.

To prevent such an escalation, the Department of Defense announced Monday that it was sending a “few thousand” more troops to bolster the roughly 40,000 U.S. service members currently in the region. 

The U.S. military presence includes attack planes designed to protect ground forces, fighter jets, and a submarine capable of carrying as many as 175 Tomahawk cruise missiles – all at the disposal of U.S. commanders should they be needed to defend Israel or U.S. forces, Pentagon officials say.

The U.S. this month also deployed a contingent of troops specializing in evacuations. There were some 85,000 Americans in Lebanon as of 2022. 

Should the U.S. support Israel’s escalation against Hezbollah? 

This well-worn military strategy is particularly apt, analysts add, given that Iran uses Hezbollah as a proxy force to wage war without having to declare it. 

A U.S.-designated terrorist group, Hezbollah grew under Mr. Nasrallah’s leadership into a powerful political force in Lebanon. Over the past three decades, Hezbollah members and its affiliates have been accused of a series of deadly attacks, from the 1983 Beirut bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks, to bombings of Jewish targets in Argentina, to a cross-border raid into Israel in 2000 in which three Israeli soldiers were abducted and killed. Hezbollah has since built up an arsenal of more than 100,000 missiles pointed at Israel. 

Israel, which borders Lebanon and fought Hezbollah in two major wars during Mr. Nasrallah’s tenure, has led a blistering offensive against the Shiite militia in recent days.

Israel has reportedly killed 19 senior Hezbollah officials in recent airstrikes and a Sept. 17 operation that rigged pagers of Hezbollah operatives and wounded about 4,000 people. 

That rapid decapitation of the militia’s leadership is the result of years of preparation. 

When retired U.S. Army Col. Derek Harvey was serving as the National Security Council’s senior director for the Middle East in 2017, he was struck by the “meticulous” monitoring and mapping of such Hezbollah assets and leaders that Israel brought to the White House. 

“The Israelis know almost every house that Hezbollah has munitions and communications centers in, where it has missiles, garages built for their launchers – every gas station, every small business entity, every warehouse,” he says. “It’s 15 years of detailed intelligence work that is allowing them to deconstruct Hezbollah.”

“Why would you stop before the job’s done?” asks Mr. Harvey, who also served as senior adviser to Gen. David Petraeus when he commanded U.S. forces in Iraq. The Lebanese people have had to live under the rule of a “criminal mafia organization” that has destroyed their economic opportunities and their lives, he says. “They see it as a new opportunity – if Israel can finish the job.” 

Republican members of Congress have criticized the Biden-Harris administration for appeasing Iran, to the detriment of the region, and see this as an opportunity to take a stronger stance of deterrence.

“While I appreciate the administration’s positioning of military assets in the region to support Israel, there is much more that needs to be done to defeat these adversaries,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, chair of the House Foreign Affairs committee, recommending expedited arms transfers and sanctions. “It is abundantly clear that after its April missile attack, Iran was not deterred.”

Like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah embeds itself in cities. So taking it out means harming civilians, too. That has sparked global opprobrium against Israel, even as the Israeli military says it strives to minimize casualties.  

U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that while Israel unquestionably has the right to defend itself from terrorist organizations, how it does so matters. 

“The question is, What is the best way to achieve its objectives, to reach enduring security?” he said in a press conference on Friday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. 

Determining the risks of an all-out war

An “all-out war” between Israel and Hezbollah would be “devastating” for both countries, with numbers of displaced people and casualties that could “equal or exceed what we’ve seen in Gaza,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned Friday on CNN.

Every time the region has been brought to the brink of a wider war since Hamas’ Oct. 7 cross-border attack, the U.S. has exerted its levers of power “in every way possible.” A twin approach of deterrence and diplomacy has so far succeeded in averting escalation, say State Department officials. But Tuesday’s Iranian missile barrage poses a new challenge.

“Obviously, we do not want to see this conflict continue to escalate,” said State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller at a Tuesday afternoon briefing. “That said, we have been clear that there must be consequences for this attack.”

Israel is continuing to pursue Hezbollah, while also now talking about retaliation against its sponsor, Iran. As it stands, Hezbollah’s decision-making capabilities are seriously disrupted. Depending on who takes over leadership, it could choose to fire missiles at Israel or to deescalate. 

There are reasons they may choose the latter, says Sean McFate, a former Army officer and now adjunct professor of war and strategy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. But to encourage Hezbollah to do that, he adds, the Biden administration must more clearly articulate where its red lines lie. 

A political party as well as a militia, Hezbollah could also be hammered at the polls for the Israeli airstrikes that have stepped up in recent days, hitting central Beirut for the first time in a year of fighting, displacing more than 200,000 Lebanese civilians, and killing more than 1,000. Across the border in Israel, some 60,000 citizens have been displaced from the north since the government evacuated them last year.

One plus of the proxy war that Iran and Israel have been waging up until now, Dr. McFate adds, is that it offers both countries not only plausible deniability but also face-saving off-ramps for deescalation. For the past decade, Israel has been conducting air strikes against the Iranian Qods Force in Syria. It hasn’t turned into a wider war, he adds, because the states compete in the shadows.

The role U.S. troops in the region play 

As the conflicts increasingly move out of the shadows, and Hezbollah and Iran weigh next steps, the U.S. aims to be a key factor in their decision-making calculus.

The Biden administration’s ability to influence Israel is another matter still, as its operation into Lebanon this week has laid bare. Defense Department officials had stressed their opposition to it. “We certainly don’t think a ground operation is the right path forward,” Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said Friday. “That’s something that the secretary has been pretty clear about in his calls” with his Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant. 

By Monday, the operation underway, Secretary Austin “agreed on the necessity of dismantling attack infrastructure along the border,” according to a summary of a phone call between the two leaders released by the Pentagon. 

Against this backdrop, U.S. military troops are in the region “to protect our own forces and also defend Israel, should it be attacked,” Major General Ryder told reporters in August. 

When asked what defending Israel means, or whether the U.S. would ever attack Iran, he declined to share specifics, saying the focus remains on deescalation.

Beyond public messaging, having troops in the region, however, also makes them a military target, analysts point out. 

“The only strategic logic I would see of Hezbollah taking pot shots at [a U.S. aircraft] carrier would be to try to suck the U.S. into an overreaction on the ground,” Dr. McFate says. “That would be a huge propaganda win for Hezbollah in the Arab world.”

It would also be the opposite of deescalation. The U.S. dilemma in this conflict, and for the prospects of a wider war, is that deterrence not only means putting mighty forces in place. 

It also means being ready to use them. 

Christa Case Bryant reported from Washington, and Anna Mulrine Grobe from Brussels.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with news of Iran’s missile strike against Israel, and responses from U.S. officials.