Will President Trump Stand Up to Iran in Syria?

Despite tough talk on the campaign trail, and despite reported discussions within the administration about jettisoning the nuclear deal, the White House has yet to formulate a coherent strategy for containing the Islamic Republic or for thwarting its plan to seize de-facto control of parts of Iraq and Syria. Surveying the president’s policies thus far, John Hannah determines that “we just don’t know” whether he will deter Iranian ambitions:

[O]n the handful of occasions this summer when Iran and its proxies have sought to challenge U.S.-backed positions in Syria (near Islamic State’s capital in Raqqa and on the Jordanian border), they’ve been met with a swift and forceful response—including the shoot-down of two Iranian drones as well as a Syrian Su-22 bomber. . . . But . . . the U.S. military has been at pains to stress that it will only confront pro-Assad elements for narrow force-protection purposes, with no mention of preventing Iran’s strategic land grab. . . .

In early July, the administration gave its blessing to a series of Russian-negotiated ceasefires in western Syria, including one near the border with Israel and Jordan that U.S. diplomats helped broker. Though hailed as a breakthrough that could advance an eventual end to the civil war, the ceasefires’ more immediate impact has been to help the Assad regime consolidate battlefield gains in western Syria while freeing up scarce manpower resources to support this summer’s offensive in the east. . . .

And just days later, in late July, the U.S. military announced that it had cut ties with one of its main Sunni Arab partners in southern Syria after the group . . . had launched operations to impede the eastward progress of pro-Assad forces. . . .

Anyone who has spent time with senior Israeli officials in the past year knows how deadly serious they have been about the emerging Iranian threat in Syria. They have left little doubt that an outright victory for Iran—defined in terms of any enduring Iranian ability to use Syria as a launching pad for military aggression against Israel—would be unacceptable. The consolidation of an Iran-controlled land corridor stretching from Tehran to the Golan Heights, replete with Iranian-backed forces and permanent military outposts, would see that nightmare realized on steroids. While Israel has strongly preferred that the United States take the lead in blocking such a dangerous deterioration in its geostrategic situation, there is every reason to believe that it will take matters into its own hands should America falter.

Read more at Foreign Policy

More about: Donald Trump, Iran, Israeli Security, Syrian civil war, U.S. Foreign policy

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF