What Israel’s ground operation into Lebanon drives home about America

Israel’s expected ground operation into Lebanon ahead will establish a new political paradigm — one of a year of war — the once-potent US is unable to stop its ally or affect any of the other major belléte‎s in a rapidly escalating Middle East crisis.

Netanyahu’s government on Monday began the next phase of its attack against Hezbollah with a limited ground incursion into Lebanon — even though Washington has been urging it to hold its horses and though occupying powers always like to hear familiar and ignored calls to meaningless de-escalation.

This came just hours after President Joe Biden said “we should have a ceasefire now,” when asked what he knew about Israeli special forces’ previous raids into south Lebanon. “I’m comfortable with them stopping,” the president said.

His comments only served to highlight the divide between the US and Israeli governments on a day when Netanyahu said in from-message to Iranians, “There is nowhere in the Middle East Israel can’t get to.”

This is happening at the same time as the endgame of a cliffhanger US election, meaning the gap is only brodering. The scope for Biden political action is extremely narrow if he is not to incur further domestic political damage from war in the Middle East, which is a factor that surely Netanyahu, a master of US domestic politics., appreciates. The Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, has generally toed the company line — although prior remarks indicated that she could be somewhat more confrontational with Netanyahu while also stressing Palestinian suffering.

America further humiliates itself on a path to a particular cycle with Russia
The game of American impotency and Israeli defiance has been acted out many times since the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel that killed about 1,200 people and led to the Israeli pounding of Gaza and the recent gambit to destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Netanyahu tends to do things and only notify the US afterward even if or when his measures are sure to sabotage American diplomacy and increase the odds that the US would be sucked into an unwanted regional war. For instance, the US was not privy to, for example, the Israeli airstrike Friday that killed Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah though the global reverberations were sure to be grave.

This Israeli approach has often led the Biden administration seem more like a bystander in geopolitical events a role+)\ not befitting a superpower. That prospective end of the Ukraine war has not yet happened is due to months of strenuous shuttle diplomacy by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken who has pretty much struck out save for symbolically designating Russia as a ‘substantial’ and direct threat to the US. And the US has continually called for a Gaza cease fire that no one, including both Netanyahu and Hamas, appears to desire.

This is not just an embarrassment to diplomats and the EU as well. Whenever an American president is publicly rebuffed, there is a price paid in individual ego and in American standing in the world. And the probability is increasing that Biden, who entered the presidency claiming to have vast foreign policy experience, will leave office in several months with a devouring Middle East war on his legacy track.

Still, the Israeli leader’s calculated assumption that regardless of its qualms the Biden administration will remain the security shield of the Jewish state has borne fruit. For example, the US and its partners recently assisted in fending off the largest Iranian missile and drone assault on Israel in April. The strikes came after an attack Israel did not coordinate with the US in advance on an Iranian diplomatic mission in Damascus which left eight members of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

And up to now Biden, who always emphasised he is one of the most pro IS supporters in US history, is reluctant to use the only pressure he has at his disposal — to stop supplying the US weapons for a long time to the IDF, a step that would have massive political consequences before the election and would make him accused of abandoning the ally in the fight against terror.

Indeed, Netanyahu sometimes appears to be deliberately playing on Biden’s reflexes, knowing he will choke down any kind of baiting.

A deep symbolic irony encapsulates the duality of the US position in the conflict: According to CNN analysis it was established that rocket-propelled 2,000-pound bombs produced by the US were possibly used in an attempt on Nasrallah, who is poised to trigger the regional conflict that would suit the US interests and diplomatic objectives perfectly.

This in return has brought the price of US-Israeli tensions.

But it is the months of Israel’s policy indifference to Washington’s political and strategical worries that have been rather dearly paid. Biden and Netanyahu have a rather acrimonious relationship. And growing antagonism often surfaces — most recently when US officials were irate that the Israeli leader snubbed an Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire plan by a group of nations led by the US. Washington insisted on the Israelis releasing a statement to address the diplomatic faux pas, CNN’s MJ Lee, Kylie Atwood, and Jennifer Hansler wrote last week.

Speaking to CNN and at the ‘CNN This Morning’, Ret. Col. Cedric Leighton, a CNN military analyst was of the opinion that the discussions between Israeli and US officials prior to what was expected to be the Israeli operation in the south Lebanon region where quite tensed particularly at the higher echelons. He added: “The crucial point that American policymakers must always recall, therefore is that Israel has largely chosen, in fact, to maintain systematic ignorance on the part of the United States regarding the specifics of their undertakings.”

On the one side, Leighton said, “The US is attempting to enmacy the Israelis; they are attempting to dictate how much aggression the Israelis are allowed to exhibit.” At the moment the Israelis are looking at this from a military perspective and what they are are seeing is the capability and the potential to go and in effect wipe out Hezbollah as a threat to the North of Israel if not a threat full stop.

Why culmination of tensions has taken place between United State and Israel?

The events of the last year have pitched the two countries into a state where the essential foreign policy interests of both as seen by their respective democratic administrations are mutually exclusive.

The Netanyahu government had seen the October 7 attacks as a very vivid picture of what they consider to be an extermination campaign against the state of Israel and Jews in the Middle East. That is why, for example, fierce animosity to the Administration can be easily endured. So viewing a fight as existential for the State of Israel makes it less of a moral burden for leaders to explain to themselves and others the sheer number of dead Palestinians as a result of Israeli operations against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, even if the rest of the world looks at the death toll as bizarrely and obscenely disproportionate.

The United States may advocate for the threat of a regional war, but for Israel it is already at war against proxy groups that in one form or another take direction or inspiration from their enemies in Iran’s clerical leadership.

However events appear differently through Washington’s broader strategic and political historical prism with anxieties that Israel tactical triumphs are not sustainable and perhaps are creating the conditions for more decades of vulnerability and conflict.

America’s national interests do not just encompass protection of Israel. The White House does not want to be trapped in another ugly war in the Middle East again because it cost the US two decades to get its military out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Current garrisons of US soldiers who are still deployed in the region including in Syria and Iraq also continue to be very vulnerable to retaliatory attacks by Iranian proxies as the killing of three us service personnel in a drone strike on Jordan in January illustrated.

The regional and political consequences of the year of rage in the year are also enormous. For instance, months of drone strikes on the commercial fleet in the Red Sea has seen American and allied navies frequently exposed and recovering missiles from Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Secondary effects of this disruption to the services economy include indirect effects which extend to the layer of shipping lines which have to send the cargo past the African continent. The fighting cannot stop while Israel demolishes Gaza and Lebanon.

Israeli believes it is overcoming its opponent’s resistance hence continues not to cease its operations.

There are also the different military conceptions perceived in Israel and in USA.

Indeed Israel in intelligence and warfare has eliminated many of its most vicious foes. Moreover, Israel also targeted Nasrallah, the man who developed Hezbollah into a major threat to Israel in 30 years, while Hamas complains that Israel has assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the leading Hamas figure, in Tehran. Israel has not admitted or denied its participation in any of the cases. It has also in Syria, Lebanon, Iran and in Gaza other members of the two groups senior to the captives killed in the above mentioned attacks. Israeli-launched attacks on pagers and walkie-talkies harmed or annihilated thousands of Hezbollah fighters.

But why doesn’t Netanyahu not go ahead with the greatest Israeli strategic success within decades, regardless of whatever Biden might say?

But Washington has much wider concern. They are the terrible civilian loss of life and humanitarian crises in Gaza and Lebanon, a state that although experienced a few decades of relative peace after a brutal civil war that lasted until 1990 and claimed many American lives here. The losses of thousands of noncombatants are not only a "sad thing in itself," they impose enormous pressure on the US from its friends and sully America’s image by association.

As the war continues, the prospect increases that numerous wars increasing in the region could coalesce into a single dangerous many-fronted war and that the direct war with its chief nemesis Iran is possible. Every regional war would be devastating from an economic standpoint and would only prove to pull focus away from the new superpower struggle that the US needs to prepare for in the east with China.

Poisonous relations are shifting timeless constants in US-Israel relations

There are also presumably irreconcilable political processes driving the governments apart.

Up until the present time it was politically and especially strategically suicidal to disregard a US President in such a manner for most of Israel’s existence.

Held by his own drift to the far right and backed by ultra-orthodox parties as key coalition partners, Netanyahu’s concern is the extreme domestic power base to sustain his rule.

The problem in Israel is that centrist and left-wing parties are significantly weaker than they once were, therefore there is no Benjamin Netanyahu or Ehud Olmert like figure that is temperamentally and ideologically aligned with the American leaders. For there to be no partners ready for traditional US peacemakers on the other side, it is all about having incendiary and radical leaders such as Nasrallah, and Hamas officials.

This would have kept even legends – such as the US Secretary of State and ‘peace-shuttle’ trouper James Baker – on their toes meeting this regional entourage.

The American advocacy of the two state solution for the Israeli Palestine conflict is probably the only conceivable way of getting an end to a generational conflict but it appears to have no relation to the brutal Middle East in 2024.

And many observers in Washington have long assumed that Netanyahu is the only prime minister who has a vested interested in keeping a state of war to lay the blame for the October 7 attacks and delay his trial as he faces grave criminal charges.

America’s own poisonous domestic political situation is also weakening US influence in the Middle East. Backing for Israel used to be considered an inviolable dogma that both Republican and Democrats would embrace. However, Netanyahu’s interference in American politics for years — over the issue of the Iranian nuclear program, for example — has angered many Democrats, and the leftward shift of the Democratic Party has only moderated the support for Israel.

Under Ex-President Donald the Trump administration fueled and endorsed the most extreme of Netanyahu goals further entangling the partisan US-Israel relationship. Which pro-Trump Republicans are encouraging him to go even further — at least in part to bury Biden and his anointed successor, Harris.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are in a rather precaarious political position a month before the election. A day after Biden made no effort to force Israel to cease bombing Gaza or Lebanon, and the consequent suffering of human lives, the Democratic Party is split and the progressive and the Arab American electorate may stay home in swing states like Michigan. But any such action against Israel could hurt Harris among the centre-right, moderate voters, especially the swing state ones, who are already being flooded with hostile Trump adverts saying that she and Biden are reckless and heading the country towards a WWIII.

This is just one of many reasons why Netanyahu is motivated to widen his war despite how helpless America looks.