Low-intensity regional wars have been going on in the Middle East for decades, but Hamas's surprise attack on Israel October 7th To make this conflict more clear.
For a while, it was mostly in the shadows. ”gray zoneThere was a struggle for influence in Syria and Iraq. sometimes, “tit-for-tat attack” will be rolled out elsewhere in the Middle East. However, this conflict is now evolving into a full-scale conflict with Iran. axis of resistance It's gotten stronger over the years.
When I left the National Security Council in 2018, I expressed serious concerns. Concerns that the United States was at risk overcorrection Too much emphasis on great power competition has led to a loss of attention and resources to counterterrorism policy. Policy commentators outside the Trump administration opined that the impact of 9/11 was disproportionately large. “Distorted US foreign policy” They concluded that it would take years to fix it.
October 7 examined how strategically risky it would be to pivot away from the Middle East and undermine steady counterterrorism investments.
To be fair, both the Trump and Biden administrations wanted to focus more on great power competition. As a result, in recent years, while the United States has recalibrated its foreign policy focus to counter Russian and Chinese influence, Iran has gained much of the political space to fill the void and mount a counterattack. was under control. war with that agent.
Biden officials say it is too early to predict whether Biden will become president. wider war It will break out in the Middle East.However, in recent days, suspicions Israeli drone attack killed supreme leader of hamas In Lebanon. Israel reportedly killed a second militant commander. hezbollah A few days later, in southern Lebanon.
In Iran, Islamic State was responsible for the incident. martyr attack, killed dozens of people during a memorial service. In solidarity with Hamas, he Houthis Yemeni armed groups are disrupting free trade in the Red Sea.Houthi chaos sparked retaliation US-led missile attack. All this is happening as skirmishes between Israel and Hezbollah continue to escalate tensions in the country. border between israel and lebanon.
in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces continues to carry out punitive military operations against Hamas. As a result of October 7, Israel also strengthened internal security measures. west bank By restricting the freedom of movement of the Palestinian population.
If all this isn't convincing enough that there's a broader war here, add this: US drone attack in Baghdad In the counter-terrorism ledger.
Yes, there are indeed regional wars in the Middle East. However, additional context is required. Before October 7, the Middle East war had been slowly boiling over for years. None of this became a focus for me until I became part of the official delegation to Israel in 2017 during the Trump administration.
Spending just a few hours in the Golan Heights helped me contextualize the current war between Israel and Gaza through a broader geostrategic lens. From there, I concluded that Syria is a metaphor for competition and conflict that goes far beyond the U.S.-led counterterrorism campaign against Islamic State..
In Syria, Russia supports the Assad regime, and the Assad regime genocidal civil war Not only to detain Americans, but also to their own citizens. Journalist Austin Tice Hostage for over ten years. Syria is also the same terrain where the US and Kurds remain locked in low-level fighting. ISIS And other extremists.
In the summer of 2017, when our party was hosted by Israel, even though we were very concerned about the ongoing ISIS operation and the American hostages, the US-led ISIS operation and the Israelis were constantly There were few similarities between how they viewed existing threats. Hamas and Hezbollah.
As expected, we met with the head of Israel's intelligence and security services and Mahmoud Abbas at the Palestinian Authority offices in Ramallah. It was relatively calm across Israel and the West Bank. This was an illusion. In November, Biden's national security adviser wrote: As quiet as the Middle East seemed, it wasn't.
Hamas' terrorist attacks have already opened a Pandora's box for a unified axis against Israel. In other words, the Biden administration needs to restart its counterterrorism strategy that takes these regional dynamics into account in the fight against Israel. Iranian-led axis It's much more expansive than what I observed in 2017.
This is not a hype. Since the spring, the leaders of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran have united to “The ultimate jihad” against Israel. Iran appears to have unified its ranks of jihadists and Shiite fighters by doing what other factions have not been able to do: offer fierce antipathy toward Israel.
In hindsight, I didn't have time to reflect on the lessons I learned from those frenetic days in 2017 until the end of the itinerary. King David Hotel In Jerusalem. Ironically, it was the site of a horrific terrorist attack in a bygone era of the last century. But I knew enough about terrorism to understand that you can't understand the weight of history on Israelis and Palestinians without knowing the long-term context of political violence in the region. .
In short, events in Gaza and the West Bank have come full circle.even the ghost of Israeli-Palestinian colonial past The issue has come up again in the polarized debate over the conflict.
It's all to Iran's advantage in this broader war.
Christopher P. Costa is an adjunct associate professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is a former career intelligence officer who served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director of Counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2018.
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