After a hiatus from involvement in the Middle East that began in 1991, Russia has reasserted itself in the region through its intervention in the Syrian civil war. Jakub Grygiel explains how America made this return possible through empty rhetoric, passivity, and shortsightedness:

[T]he Obama administration sought to weaken Bashar al-Assad on the cheap, by arming groups like the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). This [decision] created deep and lasting tensions between the U.S. and Turkey as Ankara considers this particular Kurdish entity too close to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a terrorist organization that has battled Turkish forces since the early 1980s. The resulting strain in U.S.-Turkish relations further enticed Russia to return to the region, forcing [Turkey’s] Recep Tayyip Erdogan to accept Vladimir Putin’s influence in Damascus and to seek some sort of understanding with Moscow.

Thus, argues Grygiel, the U.S. inadvertently pushed Erdogan into Putin’s open arms. And, contrary to what some experts would argue, no amount of diplomatic maneuvering will turn the Kremlin into an American partner in efforts to restore order to the Levant:

Russia . . . is not eager to rebuild Syria or to ameliorate the humanitarian disaster caused by Bashar al-Assad and the Islamist terrorist groups; it merely seeks bases from which it can exercise some influence over the eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, Vladimir Putin’s approach is to destabilize a region, creating a problem to which he can then offer a solution.

This is a time-tested strategy that Russia has employed since its rise in the early 18th century: sowing instability in order then to be able to reorder the area according to its interests. Thus, Russia has presented itself to European leaders as a staunch defender of Christians against the depredations of Islamist terrorists and, to the more secular politicians in Western Europe, as a force to limit the flow of refugees—while at the same time doing little to fight Islamic State and aiding Assad in his gruesome suppression of the opposition.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.