As Biden Term Ends, Middle East Dynamics Look Better for Washington

President Joe Biden has spent much of the last year trying — and often failing — to contain the spiraling violence in the Middle East. As his term draws to a close, the devastation in Gaza and the new uncertainty in Syria mask some geopolitical gains for Washington — even if Biden’s team wasn’t directly responsible for them.

The main US adversary in the region, Iran, has seen its so-called Axis of Resistance devastated in the 14 months since Hamas militants stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing 1,200 in the deadliest attack on the country in decades. Hamas and Hezbollah — once Iran’s most-formidable proxies — are reeling after months of Israeli attacks. 

Fears the fighting would spread into a regional conflagration so far also haven’t materialized, and Israel has for the moment gotten the better of Iran in the countries’ first-ever exchanges of direct strikes. Tehran, along with Moscow, proved unable to protect the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, whose removal had long seemed an unattainable US goal.

There’s even growing hope a cease-fire deal in Gaza might finally be close that would lead to the release of hostages taken by Hamas and possibly bring an end to the civilian suffering.

“We’re seeing Russia retreat, Iran retreat and we are now at the point where the military battlefield successes have enabled a transition to political processes” in both Gaza and Lebanon, said Dana Stroul, who was the Biden administration’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East from 2021-2023, and is now a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

For all those changes, the Biden administration remains burdened by accusations that it didn’t do enough to stop an Israeli campaign that’s killed more than 45,000 Palestinians and 3,000 people in Lebanon. And the Biden administration has sometimes struggled to show any positive developments have come thanks to its efforts, rather than despite them. 

Instead, the US found its leverage limited as powerful regional players took the lead.

It was Israel’s forces that delivered the blows against Hamas and Hezbollah, often against the warnings of the White House. In Syria, Turkey backed the rebel forces whose offensive drove Assad to flee to Russia and Israeli strikes have been the ones to decimate his regime’s military capabilities. 

“The damage Israel has done to Hamas and Hezbollah, coming around the same time as the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, means that the Islamic Republic of Iran is at its weakest point since coming to power in 1979,” said Brian Katulis, a former US official and senior fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. 

Along the way, Biden’s public calls for restraint were often ignored. 

The administration has so far failed to deliver a Gaza cease-fire deal, though officials in Israel suggest one could come any day. Netanyahu’s government also resisted US demands to allow in a regular flow of humanitarian aid to desperate Palestinians. The domestic political fallout from the war eroded enthusiasm, particularly among progressives and Arab- and Muslim-Americans, as the Democrats vied for the White House.

The US also warned Israel for months against a Lebanon campaign, only to turn around and support it when it went better than expected.

“From the very first days of the war in Gaza, it was clear that Israel was in the driver’s seat, with the United States in tow,” said Jon Hoffman, a research fellow at the conservative, Washington-based Cato Institute. “There has been a striking inability by the Biden administration to achieve the outcomes it claims to want in the Middle East.” 

The Biden administration has consistently argued that its military support for Israel, and its positioning of additional military assets in the region, deterred Iran and enabled Israeli success. Privately, US officials also say the devastation in Gaza, while horrendous, would have been even worse without the US pushing Israel on aid. 

“There have been disagreements about collateral damage, civilian casualties and certain Israeli decisions at different points since Oct. 7th, but at the strategic level, there’s really never been daylight,” Stroul said. “People on the inside of the Biden administration believe that they are on the cusp of delivering a decently-set table to hand over to the next team.”

In dealing with the unfolding chaos in Syria, Secretary of State Antony Blinken once again made the rounds of Middle Eastern cities to press US priorities — last week making his 12th trip to the region since Oct. 7th. Yet his diplomacy has yielded few visible results. 

On a typical day of Middle East diplomacy last week, Blinken boarded an Air Force C-17 cargo plane in the Turkish capital, landed in Baghdad a short while later and flew off on a Blackhawk helicopter for a meeting with Iraq’s prime minister. He ended the day in the coastal port city of Aqaba, on Jordan’s mountainous Red Sea coast, to speak about Syria’s transition. 

Asked in Jordan about Israeli actions in Syria that have angered a number of Arab states, Blinken said he supported them. As he criss-crossed the region, it was also clear the US was also struggling with Turkey, which has backed militias in Syria that have fought against US-backed Kurdish forces keeping Islamic State in check — and guarding thousands of the Islamist group’s fighters. 

Washington was able to negotiate a cease-fire between a Turkish supported militia and the US-backed Kurds in the northern town of Manbij through a long-running military and diplomatic channel, a US official said. 

But the future is uncertain. Syria’s new government is likely to want the oil wealth lying in Kurdish territory, and Turkey is unlikely to accept an autonomous zone in the area given it views Kurdish militias as terrorists. 

At the same time, President-elect Donald Trump — who praised Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan as “a very smart guy” with a “major military force” on Tuesday — has said the US should stay out of Syria. 

Trump may pull out the 900 US troops stationed in Syria as part of the mission to counter Islamic State, further reducing US leverage over the country and allowing Turkey – which he said “is going to hold the key in Syria” – a freer hand in potentially enabling attacks against the Kurds. 

“Right now, Syria has a lot of — there’s a lot of indefinites,” Trump said Monday. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen with Syria.”

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.