Commenting on the bloody assault on the Syrian city of Idlib by Bashar al-Assad’s forces and their Russian allies, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien stated that he does not think that the U.S. will “intervene militarily.” While Washington ought not be in any rush to go to war with Russia over Syria, writes Frederic Hof, such declarations only serve to communicate weakness and undermine American deterrence. The mistakes of the Obama administration should be sufficient to make this clear:

Barack Obama, in erasing his own [2012] chemical-weapons red line, convinced Vladimir Putin that the United States would stand firm nowhere. Putin assaulted Ukraine . . . with a powerful sense of impunity. [Likewise], by assuring Iran that its Syrian client would be immune from U.S. military strikes, the Obama administration needlessly traded the lives of Syrian civilians for the 2015 nuclear deal.

Although the Trump administration retrieved a measure of American credibility by twice retaliating militarily for regime chemical attacks on civilians, it has all but declared that Assad may do as he wishes to civilians, provided he does so without chemicals. And now the national security advisor has gone out of his way to put Russian and Syrian regime minds at ease as a vicious campaign of civilian-centric state terror drives hundreds of thousands of terrified refugees in the direction of Turkey.

To minimize the possibility that Russians, Syrians, and Iranians will go too far in jeopardizing the security of its NATO ally Turkey by inflicting mass homicide on defenseless Syrian civilians—inadvertently provoking an American military defense of an ally—those who engage in mass murder must not be assured of American passivity.

[Instead], the Kremlin should be told privately that a point could be reached in Idlib province where Turkey would feel obligated to intervene militarily against regime forces on a massive scale. And, if that happens, the United States would help defend its ally from the air if such support is required. This must not be a red-line bluff. But if Washington truly wishes to minimize the possibility of military events in Idlib province spinning out of control, it will do the Kremlin the favor of allowing it—for a change—to worry about the potential consequences of conflict and escalation.

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.