Biden’s Middle East inaction is only making more violence inevitable

Three months into the growing Middle East crisis, the U.S. remains in search of a strategy.  Its only response, Operation Prosperity Guardian, has had uneven results at best. 

The Biden administration’s fixation on escalation management, intended to mitigate the odds of conflict, is having the opposite effect. The longer the crisis continues, the more likely it becomes that the U.S. faces a major regional war down the line — one that threatens its interests and involves its forces. Preventing this escalation spiral through the careful use of force today is crucial to prevent American overextension.

The U.S. faces pressure in each of Eurasia’s regions in what is unmistakably a coordinated assault on America’s strategic position.

In Europe, Russia has not changed its objectives. Its ongoing peace offensive, designed to trigger leaks and opinion pieces in Western media implying the Kremlin might negotiate, is simply meant to freeze the U.S. and its allies in place as Russia bombards Ukraine and seeks to overwhelm it. Russian battlefield victory is exceedingly unlikely, but Russia’s Soviet-style effort to erode Western support is a long-term plan. Putin would place himself in position to swallow Ukraine whole later and subsequently carry the war to Europe.

In Asia, China menaces Taiwan, with Xi Jinping again stating that Beijing will bring the island republic under its dominion. China does not yet hold superiority over the U.S. military and its allies in the Indo-Pacific, and it is unlikely to achieve superiority for the next ten years.  However, the margin of error is increasingly slim. The degree of pressure China has applied to Taiwan since the late 2010s — violations of its airspace, multiple large-scale military exercises, and two visible rehearsals of a blockade against Taiwan — would have been unthinkable even a decade ago, when U.S. military superiority was unquestioned. 

Xi’s generals will never deliver a guarantee of victory. But the closeness of the military balance, along with the Chinese communists’ overloaded central decision-making mechanism, implies that China opportunistically act to tie down American assets.

This context explains the stakes of the Middle East crisis. Iran is a full-fledged member of the revisionist coalition that seeks to destroy the U.S.-led security and economic system in Eurasia.  Its ideological goal is the ascent to Islamic leadership, and the propagation of its 1979 Islamic revolution. The only way to achieve this objective is through the destruction of the U.S. security presence in the Middle East and, in tandem, the destruction of Israel, the only regional power with the capability and will to challenge Iranian expansion. 

The Oct. 7 attack was the beginning of a new, active phase in this contest. Iran seeks to win through attrition, placing Israel in an indefinite state of crisis. Threats from Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon and Syria are intended to undermine and eventually snap Israeli society.  By broadcasting Israel’s supposed atrocities to the world, while also pressuring international maritime traffic through its alliance with the Yemeni Houthis, Iran also hopes to undermine U.S.-Israel cohesion.

The Biden administration surged assets to the Middle East following the Oct. 7 attack. But it has done little beyond this. It has conducted a handful of strikes in response to Iranian-backed militia attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria — forces that play a critical strategic role disrupting the Iranian logistics system through the Levant to the Israeli border. 

These “precision self-defense strikes” have not stopped the pressure. U.S. forces were attacked more than 100 times between Oct. 7 and the end of 2023.  The U.S. responded recently with a strike in Baghdad, killing Iranian-aligned militia leader Moshtaq Talib Al-Saadi. But absent a far broader campaign that actually degrades Iranian-aligned command-and-control, Iran will exploit US escalation sensitives, setting the conditions for a ground assault on an American base.

Indeed, the only major U.S. response thus far has been Prosperity Guardian, a primarily European maritime coalition intended to protect Red Sea shipping from Houthi harassment. The Houthis have not yet used top-line weapons against merchant shipping, instead resorting to loitering munition and ballistic missile attacks, the vast majority of which the U.S. and other allies have intercepted. But the Biden administration’s unwillingness to move against the Houthis guarantees continued pressure, which will further disrupt global shipping markets. 

Moreover, the Houthis present a continued threat to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.  A limited American response could trigger a large-scale Houthi reprisal against Saudi and Emirati targets, causing even greater economic disruption.

More broadly, the Biden administration’s theory of the case is clear: escalation must be avoided at all costs. This parallels its approach to Ukraine, slow-rolling weapons deliveries and disassociating the White House from Kyiv’s decision-making when Ukraine conducts legally, morally, and militarily justified strikes against Crimea and in Russia proper. Biden proclaims an American willingness to proceed “as long as it takes,” rather than helping Ukraine win decisively. There is also some resemblance to the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy: the U.S. has sought a detente with China multiple times, most recently gaining a high-profile summit in San Francisco with no tangible political results.

The White House’s view is therefore simple: War is to be avoided for political and moral reasons.  A major Middle Eastern conflict may well be a domestic disaster for Biden, triggering an oil and supply-chain shock that feeds inflation, and inundating American audiences with images of supposed Israeli brutality that emboldens the Democratic Party’s radical left and irritates an already uncomfortable left-leaning bureaucracy. 

With Biden trailing in most polling against Donald Trump, who seems poised to clinch the Republican nomination, a major conflict and economic crisis would hand the White House to Trump and might well hand the Congress to Republicans as well.

The difficulty is, the longer the Biden administration allows each crisis to simmer, the greater the likelihood and cost of escalation down the line. By letting Iran control the pace and timing of escalation, whether in the Levant or Red Sea, the U.S. allows Tehran to press harder at the most politically damaging point. The resulting political disarray may well prompt other pressure, most dangerously in the Indo-Pacific.

A more prudent policy would respond with disproportionate force, primarily in the Levant, the most relevant and exposed part of Iran’s logistical and command system for its Middle Eastern proxy alliance. Airstrikes in Syria, and ideally a complementary series in Iraq with sufficient deniability to limit the damage to the Washington-Baghdad relationship, would undermine Iranian coordination and relieve pressure on Israel and U.S. assets.

Historically speaking, Iran contracts and resets when punched, as with the assassination of Qassem Soleimani. Any further reprisals in the Levant or Red Sea could be met with an equally aggressive retaliation, but a well-planned initial campaign would reduce the odds of counter-pressure.

Major wars are not typically chosen. They instead spring from a series of crises that put stress on the international system, pushing it from pre-conflict simmer to open combat. It is crucial to control this pre-conflict phase, demonstrating that the U.S. will secure its interests firmly.  Irresolution invites further pressure and raises the odds of catastrophe. Just ask Neville Chamberlain’s ghost.

Seth Cropsey is the founder and president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy Undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of Mayday and Seablindness.