The Middle East Earthquakes

Some obvious and not-so-obvious events that could shake up the region.

Photo by Adrian Dascal on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World would strongly prefer not writing about the international relations of the Middle East. This is for a variety of reasons:

1. The October 7th assault and the war in Gaza are just littered with violations of the laws of war;

2. Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s leader and if Netanyahu said the sky was blue I would go outside for independent confirmation;

3. Arab allies of the United States behave just as badly as Israel;

4. The Middle East is always the region that brings out the hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy;

5. Despite a region seeped with realpolitik U.S. foreign policy, U.S. enemies have gotten stronger and not weaker in the 21st century.

Nonetheless, a lot has happened over there as of late and it’s worth assessing the significance of it all.

The loudest thing has been Israel escalating its fight with Hezbollah. First there was the pager attack on Hezbollah members, followed quickly by exploding walkie-talkies. Last week Israel launched airstrikes that killed some top Hezbollah commanders, including one of the planners of the 1983 bombing attack on a U.S. Marines barracks that killed more than 240. Then, last night, another Israeli airstrike killed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader for over thirty years.

Israel’s escalatory attacks clearly caught both Hezbollah and its chief backer Iran by surprise. The New York Times’ Ben Hubbard gets at this in his analysis:

In deciding to lead Hezbollah into a new battle with Israel, Mr. Nasrallah appears to have assumed that the fighting could be contained, and that Israel’s exhaustion from its war in Gaza and fear of the damage that Hezbollah’s missiles and commandos could cause in Israel would keep it from responding with too much force.

That strategy largely worked for many months, as Israel and Hezbollah bombed and shelled each other across the Lebanon-Israel border but largely avoided larger attacks.

But in recent weeks, Israeli leaders, facing domestic pressure to find a way for tens of thousands of Israelis who had fled the country’s north to return home, swiftly escalated their attacks. The sustained effort has sown disarray inside Hezbollah and hobbled its ability to respond.

Israel had two advantages against Hezbollah. First, its intelligence services deeply penetrated the group, allowing it to track and kill a large number of mid- and high-level commanders….

Israel’s second advantage was that Mr. Nasrallah’s actions showed that he was reluctant to respond to Israel’s attacks in ways that most likely would have expanded the war.

After Israel killed the head of Hezbollah’s military operations in an airstrike near Beirut in July, Hezbollah did not mount a significant response.

The group had long boasted that it had powerful missiles that could hit cities deep inside of Israel, and Israeli leaders worried that Hezbollah could hit sensitive infrastructure with precision-guided missiles or send commandos to storm Israeli communities. But those capabilities, if they had not been disabled by Israel’s attacks, remained largely unused.

So what now? Decapitation strategies are often believed to have the best chance of success against terrorist groups. Nasrallah led Hezbollah for more than thirty years, so killing him would seem to be a serious blow. The Washington Post’s David Ignatius concludes, “Hezbollah will surely seek to avenge Nasrallah’s death, but he was the rare leader who was close to irreplaceable…. his death offers a chance for Lebanese to reclaim their country after nearly 40 years of ruinous Hezbollah leadership.” CFR’s Bruce Hoffman reaches a similar conclusion: “It is a huge, potential game-changer.  Nasrallah’s death is a crushing blow: one that follows on the heels of the systematic elimination by Israel of most of Hezbollah’s military leadership.”

I hope that Ignatius and Hoffman are correct. Israel’s ability to take out a lot of Hezbollah’s leadership suggests that they might be. The political science literature on decapitation strategies is more pessimistic, however. Jenna Jordan’s work, for example, suggests that decapitation works under a particular set of circumstances:

Organizational resilience explains why decapitation results in the decline of some terrorist organizations and the survival of others. Organizational resilience is dependent on two variables: bureaucratization and communal support. Older and larger organizations tend to develop bureaucratic features, facilitating a clear succession process and increasing their stability and ability to withstand attacks on their leadership. Communal support plays an important role in providing the resources necessary for terrorist groups to function and survive. Religious and separatist groups typically enjoy a high degree of support from the communities in which they operate, and thus access to critical resources.

If one codes Hezbollah according to this criteria, it seems likelier to persist despite the effectiveness of the Israeli attacks. Other research points to the likelihood of more Hezbollah attacks in response to these strikes, which would be counter to Israel’s stated goal of repatriating Israelis back into northern settlements. And while Hezbollah might not have powerful missiles, they can make up in quantity what they lack in quality.

On the other hand, there is also some solid research suggesting that decapitation strikes can disrupt alliances between violent non-state actors. Seen in this light, the deaths of Nasrallah and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh a few months ago could disrupt the arc of Iranian-backed terrorist groups across the region.

The real question is how Iran responds to all of this. Here, Hoffman stresses how the events of the past few months have reset the balance of power in the region:

Iran has in essence sat by and watched its most important and most powerful proxy in the region be degraded, attritted, and humiliated by Israel. The loss of Iran’s own political leader earlier this year alongside its systemic conventional military weakness—and therefore its longstanding need to rely on proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Yemen-based Houthis—suggests that Iran has little ability to seriously threaten Israel. Last April’s feeble missile attack on Israel clearly showed that….

Israel has clearly regained the deterrent capability it lost so dramatically on October 7, 2023. Its intelligence services, tainted by that unparalleled tragedy, have regained their reputation for tactical and strategic acuity and perceived omniscience. And, the IDF has reacquired its storied ability to act decisively on intelligence and close the operational loop linking collection, analysis and tasking with the application of overwhelming kinetic power.

Finally, a good outcome for Israel will be if Nasrallah’s killing, together with its systemic degrading of Hezbollah’s leadership and command and control capabilities, enables Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to avoid having to launch a potentially protracted and debilitating ground offensive in Lebanon. In addition to saving civilian lives and further damaging Lebanon’s already-fragile economy and infrastructure as well as incurring more international opprobrium, Netanyahu would, critically, also avoid likely IDF casualties and escape another potential military quagmire.

Well… I’m not so sure about that last paragraph. The Financial Times’ Polina Ivanova reported that, “Israel’s army chiefs said the operation against Hizbollah was not over yet, and suggested the country’s goals may have grown.” And the Biden administration sounds equally skeptical. Politico reported that, “President Joe Biden told confidantes and allies this week that he did not believe that Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu wanted a halt to hostilities with Hezbollah, expressing increasing frustration as a proposed cease-fire plan fell apart.” The New York Times’ Peter Baker and Julian Barnes wrote that, “Israeli officials gave their American counterparts no advance warning of the strike, according to U.S. officials, who were already peeved that Mr. Netanyahu brushed off a U.S.-French 21-day cease-fire proposal. Now American officials worry that they face a wider war that could engulf the region after nearly a year of effort by Mr. Biden to head off such an escalation.”

The fundamental problem with how the Lebanon attack proceeds from here is that it remains all in Bibi Netanyahu’s hands. For the past year, the Biden administration has been happy to anonymously vent its frustrations to the media but mostly unwilling to coerce Israel into moderating its course of action. At the current moment even the Biden administration might be unwilling to jawbone Israel. Iran seems to be on its back foot. The Arab world seems content to do nothing and let Israel punish Hezbollah and Hamas, two groups that are almost as despised in Riyadh as in Jerusalem.

This leaves Bibi in charge, and Bibi’s primary motivation is staying in power. For now, that means extending rather than tamping down the conflict.

The killing of Nasrallah is the obvious bit of news, but don’t sleep on this Financial Times story by Tom Wilson:

Saudi Arabia is ready to abandon its unofficial price target of $100 a barrel for crude as it prepares to increase output, in a sign that the kingdom is resigned to a period of lower oil prices, according to people familiar with the country’s thinking.

The shift in thinking represents a major change of tack for Saudi Arabia, which has led other Opec+ members in repeatedly cutting output since November 2022 in an attempt to maintain high prices.

The price of Brent averaged $99 a barrel in 2022, the highest level in eight years, as the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine roiled markets, but has since fallen back.

Increased supply from non-Opec producers, particularly the US, and weak demand growth in China, have reduced the impact of the group’s cuts over time. Brent has averaged $73 a barrel so far in September, even as Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza has threatened to escalate into a wider regional conflict.

Saudi Arabia needs an oil price of close to $100 a barrel to balance its budget, according to the IMF, as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman seeks to fund a series of megaprojects at the heart of an ambitious economic reform programme.

However, the kingdom has decided it is not willing to continue ceding market share to other producers, the people said. It also believes it has enough alternative funding options to weather a period of lower prices, such as tapping foreign exchange reserves or issuing sovereign debt, they added.

If this report pans out, it would spell bad news for a host of U.S. adversaries. Neither Russia nor Iran benefits from lower oil prices. That is the end result of Saudi Arabia attempting to widen its market share, however. This would be another blow to Iranian power.

In the short tern, this bodes well for U.S. interests. The question is whether these tactical successes translate into strategic stability. My answer is that in an equation in which the constants are Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, strategic stability is not going to happen anytime soon.