The Crisis in the Middle East
Diplomacy on the Precipice
The war in Gaza could send shock waves around the world. A deep rift already runs between the West and the axis of dictatorships led by Russia's Putin and China's Xi. And both stand to profit from the chaos in the Middle East.
By Francesco Collini, Christian Esch, Susanne Koelbl, René Pfister, Christoph Reuter und Bernhard Zand
Few events have made the world’s divisions as clear as the trips taken this week by Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin.
While the American president arrived in Israel on Wednesday to assure the country it would have the assistance of the United States in the wake of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, the Kremlin leader met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
It was a meeting of the like-minded – and a welcome opportunity to demonstrate how united they are.
The rift between the West, on the one hand, and Russia and China, on the other, had already begun widening as a consequence of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The two countries are seeking to build a new axis of autocracies stretching from Tehran to Pyongyang in North Korea and including as many countries from the Global South as possible.
It’s a project that many countries are happy to be a part of because Putin has cheap oil and gas to sell, while Xi is head of the world’s second largest economy.
Now, the war in Gaza appears not only to be deepening this rift, there is also a risk that it could lead to military confrontation.
Russian President Putin in China this week during his visit with Xi in Beijing: The architects of a new axis of autocracies. Foto: Sputnik / ReutersFew theories have been more popular in recent years than that which posits the end of globalization.
Now it turns out that a single spark in the Middle East could quickly expand into a much larger blaze.
Biden has already sent two aircraft carriers formations to the eastern Mediterranean – not only as a symbol of solidarity with Israel, but also as warning to Iran and its allied Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon.
It doesn't take much imagination to envision a worst-case scenario in which this conflict escalates into a global conflagration.
What if Hezbollah fires missiles at Israel on Tehran’s behalf and U.S. bombers respond by taking out militia positions in southern Lebanon?
Or if Israel flies air strikes on Tehran in retaliation for Hezbollah’s missiles?
Will Russia keep quiet if its ally Iran, which so generously supplies drones for the Ukraine war, is attacked?
The U.S. aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford in the eastern Mediterranean Sea Foto: Navy Office of Information / dpaThese are still just horror scenarios.
But in Washington, Paris and Berlin, analysts have learned in recent years that they would be well advised to assume the worst possible outcomes.
Eighty-year-old Biden, who prefers to avoid long trips, boarded the plane to the Middle East in part because he is fully aware of how much is at stake.
"Putin is already the big winner of this crisis," says Vali Nasr, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University in Washington.
For the axis of dictatorships, the attack by Hamas was a gift.
Biden was already struggling to handle the burden of the war in Ukraine, and now he has to deal with a crisis in the Middle East as well.
The U.S. president must not only provide weapons to Israel, he also has to do what he can to ensure that the war is confined to the Gaza Strip.
He must back Israel while at the same time avoiding upsetting his Arab partners in the Middle East – Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the latter of which was on the verge of striking a Washington-brokered peace deal with Israel.
It was to be Biden’s foreign policy masterstroke in his re-election campaign.
Now, the deal is on hold, and it may never be finalized at all.
Israel’s government has compared the Hamas assault to the September 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S. Biden should know all too well just how dangerous that parallel is.
On Wednesday in Tel Aviv, Biden said the U.S. made mistakes after 9/11.
"I caution this,” he said during his visit to Israel.
"While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it.”
As a U.S. senator, Biden himself voted in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and saw the horrific consequences of a country going into battle in anger but without a strategy.
The "endless wars" in Afghanistan and Iraq not only strained U.S. resources and fueled the rise of Donald Trump – they also ruined the image much of the planet had of the Americans as the guardian of a "rules-based world order."
In the Middle East, many consider that term to be a bad joke, especially if it comes out of the mouth of a U.S. president.
Biden has declared that Israel not only has the right but also a duty to defend itself.
Yet the aims of the war in Gaza are hazy at best, which is what makes it so dangerous: The Netanyahu government wants to destroy Hamas, which brought such terrible suffering to Israeli citizens.
But Hamas is also an organization that has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007.
Who will take their place if the militia leadership is dead and its infrastructure destroyed?
Some countries of the Global South have long felt that Israel is running a brutal occupation regime – just like the Western colonial states in Asia and Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries.
For Putin and Xi, the crisis in the Middle East is a welcome opportunity to present themselves as leaders of a new world that will not let the arrogant West dictate the rules.
It’s not without irony that Putin, of all people – a leader who is trying to subjugate the entire nation of Ukraine – is trying to pose as an anti-colonial resistance fighter.
But it is a pose that some are willing to fall for.
"Russia is using aggressive rhetoric to try to discredit the West," says Alexander Gubuyev, the head of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.
He says the war in Gaza is taking attention away from Russia’s war against Ukraine while at the same time providing an opportunity to accuse the West of hypocrisy.
"Russia says: You accuse us of killing civilians in Ukraine while this is happening in broad daylight in Gaza with your support," Gubuyev says.
"This is a very successful strategy, especially in the Arab and Muslim world and in the Global South."
Moscow's Middle East policy is predicated on not blocking any channel of communication if at all possible.
Putin repeatedly allowed Israel to bomb Iranian positions in Syria.
At the same time, though, he works closely with the regime in Tehran, which supplies drones for the Kremlin's war against Ukraine.
But the greater the tension grows, the more difficult Moscow’s balancing act has become.
And a major war between Hezbollah and Israel is not in Moscow’s interest.
It would threaten the supply of Iranian-made weapons that Russia has come to rely on.
Is Iran Benefiting from the Crisis?
Iran could also benefit from the crisis.
Might the Iranians actually be behind the Hamas terror attack?
So far, there is no watertight evidence of Tehran's involvement, but it is hard to imagine Hamas striking without the knowledge of Iran's leadership.
The militia is partially financed by Iran, and it receives weapons and logistics from the country. Amichai Magen, a political scientist at Stanford University, says he doesn’t believe that Hamas coordinates every single decision with Tehran.
Frequently, though, he says, Hamas attacks match up closely with Iranian interests.
A military drone drill in Iran: The role played by Tehran in the Hamas attack on Israel is so far unclear. Foto: Iranian Army Office / IMAGOEven under Donald Trump, rapprochement had begun between Israel and a number of Arab states, including Bahrain and Morocco.
Biden had been hoping to expand the Abraham Accords, as the series of bilateral agreements aimed at normalizing relations between the Jewish state and a host of Arab-Muslim states is called, to include Saudi Arabia.
It is one of the most powerful countries in the Middle East and a deal between the Saudi royal family and Israel would have profoundly changed the political map of the Middle East.
The major worry now is that Hezbollah, which is closely tied to Iran, will launch a massive attack on Israel from the north.
Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian has already blatantly threatened to attack.
In a meeting with Hamas leaders in Qatar last Saturday, Iran’s chief diplomat warned Israel that "other fronts" could be opened if it continues to bomb Gaza despite all diplomatic efforts.
Shiite Hezbollah is significantly better equipped than Hamas, and its civilian arm is part of Lebanon’s government.
Experts estimate that it possesses around 150,000 Iranian-designed missiles, including many GPS-guided precision rockets that could wreak havoc in Israel.
Will that happen, though?
"There is a serious risk of escalation," says Nasr, one of the leading experts on Shiite Islam.
He says that Hezbollah believes Israel will attack sooner or later, anyway.
Why not take advantage of the enemy’s weakness now?
Moreover, he says, the regime in Tehran feels that the mood in the Muslim world is clearly on the side of Hamas and the Palestinians.
At the same time, the regime in Tehran also knows full well that the two U.S. aircraft carriers in the eastern Mediterranean are also there to send a message that is directed at Iran.
If it comes to a major conflict with Hezbollah, then Netanyahu might be able to convince Biden to take out Iran’s nuclear program militarily.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in Tehran: Is the mood in the Muslim world clearly on the side of the Palestinians? Foto: Sobhan Farajvan / IMAGOBut perhaps the most sobering realization about the current situation is that it may ultimately be based on a miscalculation.
"The operation had been carefully planned long ago,” a spokesman for Hamas in Lebanon told DER SPIEGEL, referring to the October 7 attack.
"But when the attack itself happened, everyone was surprised at how little resistance the Israeli soldiers offered and how far Hamas was able to advance.
No one had expected that."
In other words: Everything became much bigger than originally planned, meaning that the Israeli retaliation will also be far more drastic than Hamas had been expecting.
That means that it's not just the Western world and Israel that are facing a situation they didn’t expect and whose outcome is difficult to calculate, but also Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, despite all their bellicose language.
Sometimes, geopolitical developments are the product of chance.
It’s possible that no one really wants a war – but that a situation could arise in which no one can escape it.
That’s in part why Biden is trying to get a handle on the situation.
Three weeks ago, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said: "The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades."
Now, the U.S. president has even gotten involved in convincing Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi to allow trucks carrying humanitarian goods to enter Gaza through the Rafah checkpoint.
Micromanagement at its finest.
It’s a state of affairs that China’s President Xi can live with.
The new conflict ties up U.S. resources, which the country has been seeking to focus on the Pacific region since Barack Obama became president.
It’s a plan that was first thwarted by the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, later by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – and now by Hamas terror.
U.S. intelligence agencies are speculating that Xi has instructed his military to be ready to annex the island of Taiwan by 2027.
At the moment, nobody likely knows whether Xi will actually issue the order to attack – possibly not even the Chinese leader himself.
But many Republicans in Washington are urging Biden to focus U.S. resources on defending the island.
Now Biden not only has to supply Ukraine – he also has to help the Israeli army.
Might that be enough to overstretch even a superpower like the U.S.?
"We’re the United States of America, for God’s sake, the most powerful national in the history of the world!” Biden said when asked about it last week.
It sounded like he was trying a bit too hard to sound credible.
The U.S. is already struggling to guarantee short-term supplies of simple artillery shells for Ukraine.
From this perspective, it would be in China’s interest for the conflict in Gaza to continue to escalate – on the one hand.
On the other, though the Chinese government has always made a point not to antagonize anyone in the Middle East.
Recently, it even brokered a deal between arch-enemies Saudi Arabia and Iran, one that was sealed in Beijing. So what happens in the end?
Will people come to the conclusion that ever new provocations and violence are a game that knows no winners?
Israeli soldiers near the border to Gaza Strip prepare for the expected ground offensive. Foto: ABIR SULTAN / EPAThe alternative to people coming to their senses would be long and bloody, house-to-house combat in Gaza, which could in turn provoke an uprising by Palestinians in the West Bank and a broader attack by Hezbollah on northern Israel.
It wouldn’t take much for it to escalate from there to a point where Iran and the U.S. would be drawn into a war that could stretch across the Middle East.
But that’s not a foregone conclusion.
Israel already stood at the abyss once before.
In 1973, Syrian and Egyptian troops overran Israeli positions in a surprise attack.
For a brief moment, if seems as if the Jewish state was history.
Then the Israeli army regained the upper hand.
The Yom Kippur War, as it was later called, marked a turning point in Israeli-Arab relations.
Four years after the conflict, which cost the lives of as many as 22,000 people, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat appeared before parliament in Cairo and announced that he was "ready to travel to the ends of the earth" – even to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament – if that meant preventing the death of a single Egyptian solider.
Israel's then Prime Minister Menachem Begin took Sadat at his word.
Just over a week later, the Egyptian stood at the lectern of the Israeli parliament and delivered a speech that electrified his listeners in Israel as much as it did those in the Arab world.
"You want to live with us, in this part of the world," Sadat said.
"In all sincerity, I tell you we welcome you among us with full security and safety."
The speech kicked off a marathon of negotiations that led to the Camp David Accords in 1978 and the historic peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979, which remains in effect today.
Sadat received the Nobel Peace Prize together with Begin – because they had dared to do that which had seemed impossible.
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