By Kelly Sloan | Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
The headline in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal was more poignant than probably the editors realized at deadline: “U.S. Sway Slips As Israel Looks To Strike Iran.” That rather understated assessment serves as a metaphor, not only for the Biden administration’s policy in the region, but it’s foreign policy in general.
The hulking monster in the background of all the strife in the Middle East is Iran, upon which any discussions of pressing strategic concern land. They land most squarely on the topic of Iran having nuclear weapons. Were Iran to get the bomb, the whole landscape of strategic relationships changes, and not only in the Middle East. Obviously, a nuclear-armed Iran is an existential threat to Israel, and it would also trigger a new arms race in the region, with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey all suddenly panicking to join the nuclear club. But Iran does not operate in an isolated bubble. The world is aligning itself alongside two disparate camps, one predicated on (to some extent at least) the ideals of Western Civilization, and one resentfully contemptuous of them. In this second camp Iran is joined by Russia, China, North Korea, and a handful of others. The global diffusion into the two camps is unmistakable, as is its threat to the West, a threat made exponentially graver if Iran becomes a nuclear power in the Middle East.
Iran is at the most vulnerable it has been in many years, thanks to it’s own disastrous miscalculations in attacking Israel, both directly and through its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, and the Jewish state’s skillful response. Israel’s successes are truly extraordinary: virtually eliminating Hamas in Gaza, neutering Hezbollah’s communications and decapitating it’s leadership, swatting down wave after wave of missiles fired at her, and striking down terrorist leaders in the heart of Iran’s capital. Israel has effectively neutralized Iran’s greatest trump card, it’s proxy terrorist armies of Hamas and Hezbollah, which it used as insurance against any Israeli strike on its most treasured asset – its nuclear program.
That insurance is now either dead or hiding, proving Israel and the West with a unique opportunity to contain Iran’s ambitions. The focus is rapidly shifting from the proxies to the puppet master.
Standing in the way of success is the Biden administration. The contrast between Israel’s deadly effectiveness and the response of the U.S. inspires despair. Every step of the way, since the initial attacks on Israel one year ago, Biden has offered ostensible support on one hand, while simultaneously berating, cajoling and pleading with Israel in a desperate-looking effort to arrest Israels effectiveness. Biden has spent more time and energy deterring Israel from defending itself than he ever has deterring Iran from its aggressiveness. The contrails from Iran’s ballistic missiles that it fired into Israel last week (mostly to get shot down) had hardly dispersed before the President was telling Netanyahu not to do anything he wouldn’t do. What Biden would not do is a pretty big catalogue.
The cost of this has been a diminution of American credibility and influence, a diminution which is aggregate to that already leaked out by Biden’s other strategic blunders – the Afghanistan withdrawal mess, the degradation of American Military capability, the suicidal restrictions placed on Ukraine’s use of weapons, and so on.
So what should happen now? What should happen is that the West ought to be pressing the advantage that Israel has opened up. This includes, of course, the low-hanging fruit as it were, of enforcing economic sanctions. Iran can finance the rebuilding of its Hamas/Hezbollah/Houthi terror network with one day’s pumping of oil. But economic sanctions have their limits, and take time to be effective. The West, under American leadership, could undertake to support internal dissent within Iran, something that our failure to do in the past is as much a moral blemish as a strategic one.
Ultimately, it will come down to some form of military action, whether it be naval enforcement of Iranian breaches of non-proliferation agreements, or direct strikes on suspected nuclear sites, or something else altogether. Ideally, this would be a concerted international effort, as a nuclear Iran is a more direct threat to regional allies and Europe than it is to us, and Israel’s capabilities, for all their skill, courage, and savvy, are not limitless.
But in all likelihood the responsibility will fall on the United States, to act again like the ultimate deterrent power we used to be and must be; leaving us to face the question, Do we still possess the ability to do what’s needed? More importantly, do we still possess the will?