Is Biden administration seeking deescalation – or driving Middle East war?

Washington, DC – Holding an ice cream cone, United States President Joe Biden declared in February that a ceasefire in Gaza is so “close” that it may materialise within days.

More than seven months later, not only has Israel’s war on Gaza continued but it has expanded, with Israeli troops invading and bombing Lebanon as tensions and violence boil over across the Middle East.

The Biden administration has continued to verbally call for de-escalation while also providing Israel with political support and a steady supply of bombs to sustain its wars.

Washington has welcomed nearly every escalatory step Israel has taken this year: the killing of Hamas leaders in Beirut and Tehran, the assassination of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and the invasion of south Lebanon.

More than a year since the outbreak of war in Gaza, Israel is pushing on with its devastating offensive in the besieged Palestinian territory, which has killed nearly 42,000 people, while bombing Beirut daily and preparing for an attack against Iran.

As the conflict in Gaza intensifies and spreads across the region, the gap between US rhetoric and policy is widening.

So, is the Biden administration simply failing to rein in Israel – as many liberal commentators have suggested? Or is it actually responsible for the escalation, exploiting the chaos to advance a hawkish agenda against Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah?

The short answer: With its continuing military and diplomatic support for Israel, the US remains a key driver of the violence in the region despite its statements about restraint and calls for a ceasefire, analysts say. While it is difficult to speculate about the administration’s motives or true intentions, there is a growing body of evidence showing that the Biden administration is in lockstep with Israel, not merely a passive ally which is being defied.

What has the US said and done so far?

After a months-long public push for a ceasefire in Gaza, the US has shifted focus to supporting the Israeli offensive in Lebanon.

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin endorsed an Israeli ground campaign in south Lebanon last week which risks becoming a full-scale invasion of the country.

“I made it clear that the United States supports Israel’s right to defend itself,” Austin said in a statement on September 30 after a call with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant.

“We agreed on the necessity of dismantling attack infrastructure along the border to ensure that Lebanese Hezbollah cannot conduct October 7-style attacks on Israel’s northern communities,” Austin said, referring to the attack by the Palestinian group Hamas on southern Israel during which at least 1,139 people were killed.

The Lebanese group had started attacking Israeli military positions in October last year in what it said was an effort to pressure the Israeli government to end its war on Gaza, which it launched after the Hamas attack.

For months, the near-daily clashes were largely contained to the border area. The violence pushed tens of thousands of people from both sides of the border to flee. Hezbollah argued that the residents of Israel’s north can return only when the country ends its war on Gaza.

After an assassination campaign against Hezbollah’s top military officials, Israel launched an enormous bombing campaign across Lebanon, destroying civilian homes across hundreds of villages and towns late on September 23.

Since then, the Israeli violence has displaced more than 1 million people in Lebanon.

Before this Israeli escalation, the White House had been saying for months that it was working towards a diplomatic solution to the crisis at the Lebanon-Israel border. US envoy Amos Hochstein made repeated visits to the region, ostensibly to warn against escalation.

With the low-level hostilities rapidly turning into an all-out war in Lebanon, the Biden administration rallied Arab and European countries and proposed on September 25 an “immediate” 21-day ceasefire to stop the fighting.

Yet, two days later, when Israel assassinated Nasrallah in a huge bomb attack that levelled several residential buildings in Beirut and effectively killed any prospect of an imminent ceasefire, the White House lauded the attack as a “measure of justice”. Nasrallah’s killing was ordered by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from US soil, where he was attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Osamah Khalil, a history professor at Syracuse University, questioned the sincerity of Biden’s diplomatic efforts, raising doubt over media reports that Hochstein urged restraint from Israel.

Khalil stressed that the US had been a direct participant and backer of Israel’s actions in Gaza and the rest of the region, but that the Biden administration used ceasefire talks as a “domestic politics” ploy to shield itself from criticism at home.

“All this was negotiations for the sake of negotiations, particularly as the war became increasingly unpopular,” Khalil told Al Jazeera last month.

‘Reshape the Middle East’

Two recent US media reports appear to validate Khalil’s assertion.

Politico reported on September 30, citing unidentified sources, that senior US officials – including Hochstein and Brett McGurk, the National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East – have privately backed an Israeli military push against Hezbollah.

“Behind the scenes, Hochstein, McGurk and other top U.S. national security officials are describing Israel’s Lebanon operations as a history-defining moment — one that will reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come,” the US publication reported.

Separately, Axios reported last week that the US is trying to take advantage of the blows Israel has dealt on Hezbollah by pushing for the election of a Lebanese president supported by Washington.

The Lebanese presidency has been vacant for nearly two years, with the parliament unable to find a consensus to choose a new leader.

On Tuesday, US Department of State spokesperson Matthew Miller described the war in Lebanon as an “opportunity” to change the country politically. He said Washington wanted the Lebanese people to have “the ability to elect a new president [and] the ability to break the stalemate that Hezbollah has had over the country”.

Hezbollah and its allies control dozens of seats in the Lebanese parliament as a result of free elections in the country.

Reshaping the region has always been a goal for the US neoconservative movement, which promotes support for Israel and elevating US-friendly governments through hawkish foreign policy and military interventions. That approach was most clearly visible under former US President George W Bush.

In fact, during the Bush tenure 18 years ago, when Israel had its last major war with Hezbollah, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke of the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”.

Khalil noted that many neoconservatives of the Bush era are now affiliated with the Democratic Party and backing Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency in the November election.

Harris has welcomed the endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the top architects of the so-called “war on terror” and the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

As the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden himself backed the war in Iraq. So did Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who served as a Democratic staffer on the panel at that time. McGurk was an adviser in the Bush White House and played a key role in the US occupation of Iraq, while Hochstein previously served in the Israeli military.

“You have a neoconservative agenda inside the Democratic administration,” Khalil said.

Gaza failures

As the war rages in Lebanon and the world watches for a possible escalation between Iran and Israel, many analysts say Biden’s failure to put an end to the war in Gaza is what has brought the region to this point.

Khalil Jahshan, the executive director of the Arab Center Washington DC, also said the Biden administration’s unconditional support for the Netanyahu government is taking the entire region to “the unknown”.

In the year since the Gaza war began, Jahshan told Al Jazeera that the US has shown “total blind support” for not only Israeli policies, but “for Israeli excesses”, as well.

“This is the result of a one-sided policy that refused to accept any element of rationality from the beginning of this conflict,” he said.

Almost immediately after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Biden voiced uncompromising support for the US ally.

He backed a “swift, decisive and overwhelming” Israeli response against Hamas. The White House also rushed to seek additional funds from Congress for military aid to Israel to help finance the war.

Washington resisted calls for a ceasefire despite the growing humanitarian crisis for months, arguing that Israel had a “right” to go after Hamas.

Recent reporting by ProPublica and the Reuters news agency showed that the Biden administration received and ignored internal warnings about possible Israeli war crimes in Gaza and pushed on with its arms transfers to Israel.

Biden embraces Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, October 18, 2023 [Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters]

As domestic and international discontent grew after Israel razed large parts of Gaza, displaced nearly all of the Palestinian territory’s 2.3 million inhabitants and brought them to the verge of famine, Biden began to soften his tone.

In recent months, the US adopted the term “ceasefire” to call for a deal that would see an end to the fighting in Gaza and the release of Israeli captives held by Palestinian groups in the besieged enclave.

But it has done little to pressure Netanyahu to accept an agreement.

Whether Biden and his aides truly wanted a ceasefire and failed to achieve it or they used the diplomatic push as a distraction from the horrors of Israel’s US-backed war, the result is the same – an expanding war and tens of thousands of innocent people getting killed.

“The evidence suggests that it’s politically advantageous for them to say they support a ceasefire, but not do anything to actually secure it,” said Ryan Costello, a policy director at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a US-based group that promotes US diplomacy with Tehran.

Jahshan also said that the Biden administration did not offer fair ceasefire proposals as it continued to arm Israel.

“What’s the value of a ceasefire if those who are offering it continue to offer the tools of war to one of the parties,” he said. “That’s not a ceasefire; that’s an invitation to continue the fight.”