Thoughts on Escalation and Descalation

Israel has begun its second land war of the last 12 months by invading Lebanon. Having leveled most of Gaza to the ground with 60% of housing damaged, 65% of croplands destroyed; having killed over 42 thousand civilans in Palestine, with another ten thousand missing and over 100 thousand injured; having rendered Palestine incapable of sustaining life without outside support, which has been kept to a trickle, Israel is now escalating in other directions.

And let’s be clear: The current escalations are entirely being driven by Israel. There has been no escalatory action from either Hamas or Hezb’allah in recent months – merely retaliatory. Israel could have chosen to deescalate, but didn’t.

Instead, Israel has not only invaded Lebanon, but also conducted what is potentially the most widespread supply chain attack performed against electronics in history, rendering all international trade now subject to significantly more complex supply chain tracing, monitoring, and security precautions – although arguably this was always going to happen, and was just a matter of time.

But Israel as a nation state does not have anything strategic or tactical to gain from escalation at this point in time; on the contrary, they’re mostly risking further provocation of peers and near-peers in their region, in particular Iran. As evidenced by the inbound missiles.

The only real beneficiaries of Israeli escalation are, in no particular order: the top political tier of Israeli leadership, the top tier of Russian leadership, and Donald Trump.

In particular among the Israelis, Netanyahu stands to gain, for whom this has been a ploy from some point before day one (almost a year ago now) to stay out of jail, where he was slated to end up due to well substantiated corruption charges. The Israeli public are not particularly fond of this situation, generally speaking.

Putin and his cronies stand to gain substantially by the West being distracted in the Middle East, allowing them more ability to maneuver in Ukraine. There are by the way indications that the October 7th attack may have been funded or supported by Russia, and state destabilization is one of Putin’s favorite playbooks. It’s also worth noting that Russia and various other countries benefit from the West surrendering the moral high ground.

Trump stands to benefit by the perception of hawkishness and instability. Trump’s political narrative generally reduces to “things are chaotic I can fix the chaos”. Which is why he literally promotes chaos, for example by directly asking Netanyahu to not accept ceasefires until after the US election.

It is sometimes insinuated that the unwillingness to reel the Israelis in stems in part from the upcoming US elections; however, I counter that the perception of instability and the US being caught up in two wars is not doing Harris any favors politically, and even though opposing Israel’s actions might dissatisfy the pro-Israeli base in the US, achieving de-escalation and mediating peace would be well received by both the left and the right, at least for the purposes of the upcoming election.

The inability of the Biden administration to reel the Israelis in is a massive policy failure, and demonstrates Biden, Blinken and (to a lesser extent) Austin to be quite weak. All things considered, they should have put their foot down a long time ago, and the fact that they haven’t is pretty telling of the state of things, especially in Foggy Bottom.

The ongoing Israeli invasions of Palestine and Lebanon are not a response to any real existential threat. They are a cold war of historical and complex regional grievances becoming hot, largely for reasons of political expediency. And it’s supported by global political actors who wish to end the liberal world order, and see this as a useful step towards that objective.

Some words need to be said of Iran here. As this is written, Iran’s missiles are inbound to Israel. It remains to be seen whether this is an attack calibrated to defeat the Iron Dome or a rehashing of an earlier attack where they were somewhat obviously just airing their dissatisfaction, but to an extent that would not lead to escalation.

Iran does not appear to want escalation. But they are in a situation where they simply can’t sit idly by, because of their own precarity. They are basically locked in the same situation they’ve been in for the last 30ish years: Trying desperately to be a normal functioning modern country, albeit with some religious conservatism and other quirks of governance that make them look like they belong in the 15th century from the perspective of arrogant westerners, but completely being thwarted at every step because of vilification, sanctions, etc by the US, Israel, Turkey, and others, and therefore having to do a ton of posturing and military buildup that culturally they’d quite happily do without.

This is not to say that Iran isn’t a bad actor. Their chosen form of political projection has been to significantly support terrorist groups and other non-state actors (Hamas, Hezb’allah, and the Houthis, for instance), in addition to the often touted nuclear ambitions. But let’s also recognize (without endorsement) that this is at least in part a reaction to a geopolitical disadvantage they’ve been stuck in for decades.

It’s also worth noting that most of Iran’s population is young (their population pyramid bulges around 35 years old, with like 70% of the population under 45), reasonably well educated, and liberal. The country is dominated by old conservative men. Culturally, Iran should be liberal. It isn’t, because of evil beards. So the key question when thinking about Iran is why do the evil beards stay in power?

The best attempt at fixing Iran’s power problems in recent years was near the end of the Obama administration, where a deal was struck around nuclear build out that had the potential to bring Iran back into the fold of high functioning countries with access to the global economy. Trump torpedoed that deal.

His reasons for doing so have never made sense, but speak to the very real issue that the Religious Right in the US is inherently distrustful of the Religious Right in other countries, because they expect them to be exactly as conniving and devious as they are themselves. This is (like much here) an oversimplification, but it’s not wrong.

But the inability of the Biden administration to reestablish reasonable relations isn’t exactly a huge endorsement of their abilities either. To be fair, Iran is justifiably skittish about buying in to another agreement, knowing that the next administration might just as well torpedo it too. Here US political instability is bleeding over to the world.

But at the end of the day, a few things remain true. Putin wants this escalation. Trump wants this escalation. Netanyahu wants this escalation. Iran doesn’t want it but is geopolitically locked into responding. And the only people who are positioned to deny the escalation are incidentally also trying to defeat Putin and Trump on different other battlefields.

The Biden administration must take action to deescalate this situation, and as far as I can tell, they’re the only ones who can.

(Thanks to rysiek and Tomasino for reviewing drafts of this and fixing some errors. Remaining errors, omissions, etc are mine alone.)