A regional war in the Middle East is already here

For decades a low-intensity regional war in the Middle East has been ongoing, but it took Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7 to bring this conflict into sharper focus.  

For some time, a mostly shadowy “gray zone” contest for influence in Syria and Iraq has taken place. Occasionally, “tit-for-tat attacks” play out elsewhere in the Middle East. But now, the conflict is coalescing into a full-blown Iranian axis of resistance that’s been growing stronger for years.  

When I departed the National Security Council in 2018, I expressed serious concerns that the U.S. was at risk of overcorrecting its counterterrorism policy attention and resources by pivoting too hard toward great-power competition. Policy critics from outside the Trump administration opined that 9/11 had disproportionally “warped U.S. foreign policy,” concluding that it would take years to correct. 

Oct. 7 validates how strategically risky pivoting away from the Middle East and undoing steady counterterrorism investments can be.  

To be fair, both the Trump and Biden administrations wanted to focus more on great-power competition. As a consequence, in the last few years, while the U.S. was realigning its foreign policy focus to counter Russia and China’s influence, Iran seized plenty of political space to fill the vacuum and wage a war with its proxies.  

Biden officials have been saying that it is premature to predict whether a wider war would break out in the Middle East. Yet in recent days, a suspected Israeli drone strike killed a top Hamas leader in Lebanon. Israel reportedly killed a second militant commander from Hezbollah a few days later in southern Lebanon.  

In Iran, the Islamic State was responsible for a martyrdom attack, killing scores of people during a memorial. In solidarity with Hamas, Houthi militants in Yemen are disrupting the free flow of commerce in the Red Sea; those Houthi disruptions triggered retaliatory American-led missile strikes. All of this is happening while Israeli and Hezbollah skirmishing continues to ratchet up tensions on the Israel-Lebanon border.  

In Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces continues its punishing military campaign against Hamas. As a result of Oct. 7, Israel has also increased its security measures in the West Bank by restricting the freedom of movement of Palestinian residents. 

 If all of this is not convincing enough that a wider war is here, add a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad to the counterterrorism ledger. 

So, yes, there is indeed a regional war in the Middle East. But additional context is in order. Before Oct. 7, a Middle East war was on a slow boil for years. None of this came into focus for me until I was part of an official delegation to Israel in 2017 while serving in the Trump administration.  

Just a few hours spent at the Golan Heights helps me contextualize the current Israel–Gaza war through a broader geo-strategic lens. From there, I concluded that Syria is a metaphor for competition and conflict that goes well beyond U.S.-led counterterrorism campaigning against the Islamic State.  

In Syria, Russia supports Assad’s malign regime, a state that waged a genocidal civil war against its own people, not to mention holding American journalist Austin Tice hostage for over a decade. Syria is also the same terrain where the U.S. and Kurds remain locked in a low-level fight against ISIS and other militants.  

In the summer of 2017, even though the ongoing ISIS campaign and U.S. hostages were very much on my mind when our party was hosted by Israel, I saw few parallels between the U.S.-driven ISIS campaign and how Israelis viewed the ever-present threats from Hamas and Hezbollah.  

Predictably, we met with the heads of Israel’s intelligence and security services and Mahmoud Abbas at his Palestinian Authority office in Ramallah. There was relative calm across Israel and the West Bank. This was illusory. In November, Biden’s national security advisor wrote how quiet the Middle East seemed to be — deceptively so, as it turns out.  

Hamas’s terrorist attacks have already opened a Pandora’s box for unifying an axis against Israel, which means that the Biden administration has to reboot a counterterrorism strategy that takes into account these regional dynamics to confront an Iran-directed axis that’s much more expansive than what I observed in 2017.  

None of this is hype; since spring, Hezbollah, Hamas and Iranian leaders have come together to wage the “ultimate jihad” against Israel. It seems that Iran has unified an array of jihadists and Shia fighters by offering what the welter of other factions could not: a violent antipathy toward Israel.   

In hindsight, I didn’t have time to reflect on lessons learned from a frenetic few days in 2017, until our itinerary concluded at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem; ironically, this was the scene of a horrific terrorist attack in a bygone era last century. But I knew enough about terrorism to appreciate that the weight of history on Israelis and Palestinians cannot be understood without knowing the long arc of political violence in the region.  

So, events in Gaza and the West Bank have come full circle; even the ghosts of the Israel-Palestine colonial past are being resurrected in polarizing debates about this conflict.  

In this wider war, that’s all to Iran’s advantage.  

Christopher P. Costa is an adjunct associate professor with Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is a former career intelligence officer and was special assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2018.