President-elect Biden will no doubt seek to return to some of the policies of President Obama when it comes to the Middle East, and to much else. But Haviv Rettig Gur notes that Obama, who came to office well-liked by Israelis and Middle Easterners in general, quickly squandered that good will—and sees some lessons in this for the former vice-president:

To show how profoundly he was not George W. Bush, [Obama] visited Istanbul and Cairo in his first visit to the region, but avoided Israel. He delivered a speech “to the Muslim world” from Cairo in the belief that what the Middle East was yearning for in 2009 was an American leader who sounded different.

Two years later, when the Arab Spring drove the region’s deeper undercurrents out into the open, the same Obama administration was caught flat-footed. Democrats . . . suddenly had to contend with the possibility that more was going on in the Middle East than was dreamed of in Washington think-tanks and on cable news programs.

[Obama also] pressured Israel into a settlement freeze in 2010 as a show of “good faith,” and never understood why the intense year-long pressure on Jerusalem did not bring the Palestinians to the negotiating table. His advisers did not realize that a Palestinian president could not be seen to be demanding fewer preconditions for negotiations than the Americans. By drawing from the Israelis an unprecedented settlement freeze before negotiations began, Obama pushed Mahmoud Abbas up a tree just when he thought he was bringing him down from one. The more Obama tilted toward the Palestinians, the further he pushed Palestinian politics away from a compromising center.

There is little doubt that if Hizballah had participated more intensively in Saturday’s attack, Israeli air defenses would have been pushed past their limits, and far more damage would have been done. Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack, trying to look at things from Tehran’s perspective, see this as an important sign of caution—but caution that shouldn’t be exaggerated:

Iran is well aware of the extent and capability of Israel’s air defenses. The scale of the strike was almost certainly designed to enable at least some of the attacking munitions to penetrate those defenses and cause some degree of damage. Their inability to do so was doubtless a disappointment to Tehran, but the Iranians can probably still console themselves that the attack was frightening for the Israeli people and alarming to their government. Iran probably hopes that it was unpleasant enough to give Israeli leaders pause the next time they consider an operation like the embassy strike.

Hizballah is Iran’s ace in the hole. With more than 150,000 rockets and missiles, the Lebanese militant group could overwhelm Israeli air defenses. . . . All of this reinforces the strategic assessment that Iran is not looking to escalate with Israel and is, in fact, working very hard to avoid escalation. . . . Still, Iran has crossed a Rubicon, although it may not recognize it. Iran had never struck Israel directly from its own territory before Saturday.

Byman and Pollack see here an important lesson for America:

What Saturday’s fireworks hopefully also illustrated is the danger of U.S. disengagement from the Middle East. . . . The latest round of violence shows why it is important for the United States to take the lead on pushing back on Iran and its proxies and bolstering U.S. allies.