It could have been a golden diplomatic opportunity for Washington. Its clout in the Middle East has been waning for some years now. A long quagmire in Iraq and a decade of inconsistent policies across the region had eroded US credibility with its Gulf allies.
In the meantime, these same Gulf nations, Saudi Arabia in particular, re-evaluated their own approaches towards the challenges they faced. As China made inroads in the region, the void the US left behind allowed them to shift away from security-focused paradigms and explore diplomatic solutions.
Until the end last year, the Middle East appeared to be holding its course, even as situations elsewhere deteriorated. While anxieties worsened in Europe over Russia's actions in Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iran achieved a groundbreaking agreement with China’s help to restore relations. This pivotal move was followed by both countries' admission in BRICS, alongside two other key Middle East nations, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
That was until Israel launched one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in recent history in retaliation to a brazen attack by Hamas. The brutal offensive, which has killed nearly 25,000 Palestinians and displaced more than 80 per cent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people, lit a tinderbox of chaos throughout the region. Multiple warnings from all Middle East stakeholders fell own deaf ears as other ‘Axis of Resistance’ groups, including Yemen’s Houthis and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, opened new fronts in support of Palestine.
While Israeli retaliation was always expected, much of the world has recoiled in horror at the sheer scale of destruction. Global South nations in particular raised their voice against impending genocide in Gaza, urging Israel’s traditional allies and benefactors to rein in its aggression.
The United States could have pursued a markedly different path—one that could have reinstated its status and credibility in the Middle East and, for once, aligned with the image of a human rights champion it often portrays. It could have opted for diplomacy over militarism, using its leverage over Israel to prevent the suffering of ordinary people in Gaza. It could have nudged Tel Aviv towards a final settlement of the longstanding Palestine question, which remains the root of much anguish and frustration in the entire Muslim world.
Instead, Washington chose to remain a steadfast defender of Israel and its actions, providing both moral support and arms to its forces. When the conflict expanded to the Red Sea, threatening global trade and economy, it chose a military-first approach that still finds little takers and promises little in terms of practical results.
A change of tune
To be fair to Washington, it has shown some signs that it might be changing its tune. At Davos this week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Israel could not achieve ‘genuine security’ without a ‘pathway to a Palestinian state’. The White House also announced that it was the ‘right time’ for Israel to lower the intensity of its military offensive. US President Joe Biden and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu discussed Palestinian statehood in a phone call later in the week as well, a White House spokesperson said.
But although Biden claimed Netanyahu had signalled to him that he was open to possible solutions for an independent Palestinian state, publically the latter has sounded far from it. In a nationally televised news conference, Netanyahu objected to any Palestinian statehood that did not guarantee Israel's security. "Israel must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River. That's a necessary condition," he said.
The Israeli premier also showed no signs of remorse towards the people of Gaza, vowing to press ahead with the brutal offensive for many months. “We will not settle for anything short of an absolute victory,” he said.
The US president, meanwhile, has been evasive on the idea of reconsidering conditions on Israel aid given Netanyahu's comments. "I think we'll be able to work something out ... I think there's ways in which this could work," he told reporters.
Bloodbath in the Red Sea and beyond
Last week, in response to persistent Houthi attacks against international shipping in the Red Sea, the US and United Kingdom launched a series of air strikes against the group in Yemen. The Houthis, who till then claimed they were only targeting ships headed to and coming from Israel in support for Palestine, were less than deterred. Following a warning that all American and British targets would be fair game, the Houthis hit a US navy destroyer and a US-owned ship. “It is an honor for our people to be in such a confrontation with these evil forces,” Abdul Malik al-Houthi, the head of the militant group, said in a speech on Thursday, referring to the US, the UK and Israel.
Regional governments, meanwhile, reacted with severe concern at the escalation. “It is as if they [the US and the UK] aspire to turn the Red Sea into a bloodbath,” said Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan while holding up the air strikes as ‘disproportionate use of force’.
Saudi Arabia feared the US and UK approach would destabilise the plans it has authored and passed to the UN to create a new national government in Yemen. The plans in question would legitimise the Houthis, providing Riyadh an out from a nine-year conflict the two sides have been engaged in.
Saudi fears were shared by Yemen’s neighbour Oman, which issued a statement condemning the military action. “Oman has warned several times about the risk of the extension of the conflict in the region due to the ongoing Israeli aggression against the Palestinian territories,” the statement reminded. Qatar’s Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani joined the chorus of concern, saying “Our biggest worry is to have consequences that will keep us in a loop that will never end and will create real tension in the entire region.”
Escalation loop
Alongside the emboldened Houthis, whose popularity has surged both domestically and among other resistance groups in the Middle East said to be backed by Iran, US and Israeli militarism has kicked-off a region-wide 'escalation loop.' While Hezbollah traded drone and rocket attacks with Israel, Iran-backed outfits in Iraq and Syria targeted US bases in the region, according to reports.
“It’s hard not to see wider regional escalation,” an Al Jazeera article quoted Yemen researcher Nicholas Brumfield as saying. “If the US and the UK respond to continued Houthi escalation with more air strikes on Yemen, then this will impact regional security, including in Saudi Arabia and the UAE,” it quoted another Yemen researcher, Hannah Porter, as adding.
Far from dissuading the Houthis, analysts have warned that the group could intensify its attacks in response to the US and UK air campaign. Speaking to Bloomberg, former American ambassador to Yemen Gerald Feierstein acknowledged that there was little optimism about the military initiative, even within Washington. “I think that they don’t have any great expectations that this is going to succeed in deterring or degrading or defeating the Houthis,” he was quoted as saying.
Biden himself betrayed that sentiment this week: “Are they [the airstrikes] stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes,” he told reporters on Thursday.
Regional disconnect
The Biden administration’s muddled approach to the latest conflict in the region has started to draw criticism at home as well. An article in The New Yorker summed up the sentiment, noting that “for all the American warships, troops, and diplomats deployed in the Middle East over the past hundred days, the US has produced little, if anything, beyond greater vulnerabilities.” Quoting Middle East expert Julien Barnes-Dacey, it acknowledged that Washington “appears pretty disconnected from regional realities.”
According to Barnes-Dacey, the ‘disconnect’ could be seen as an intentional approach to enable withdrawal from the region, based on America’s past experiences. “But now that Washington has been sucked back in by the Israel war, it’s looking pretty lost,” The New Yorker quoted the expert as saying, who admitted that it was “all but impossible for the U.S. to unilaterally impose its will upon the region.”
Highlighting the shifting realities in the Middle East, the article used Saudi Arabia as an example. “Ninety-six per cent of Saudis now believe that all Arab states should terminate ties to Israel, according to a poll last month by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Forty per cent supported Hamas, up from ten per cent in August,” it noted. It related the shift to comments by US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in December: “In this kind of a fight, the centre of gravity is the civilian population… if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”
The New Yorker also criticised the failure of the US foreign policy, which since 9/11 has been characterised by military rather than diplomatic response. “This is larger than the Gaza war or the Houthis firing missiles… Diplomacy has been thrown under the bus,” it quoted Dan Kurtzer, a former US envoy to Israel and Egypt, as saying. The result, the analysis noted, was that people across the region now see US involvement “through the barrel of a gun, with dwindling credibility for its diplomacy.”
But the disconnect extends beyond just the Middle East to the entire Global South. Noting the disparate reactions to Israel’s brutality in Gaza between the US and its Western allies, and the rest of the world, an analysis carried by Foreign Policy explored how the credibility of the former’s ‘rule-based order’ was at stake. “The fact that South Africa has brought the case—and that the United States has reflexively opposed it—has further diminished US credibility among Africans and shattered the notion that Washington stands for a rules-based order,” it noted. “Many nations in the so-called Global South perceive blatant hypocrisy in Europe and the United States’ condemnation of an illegal occupation in Ukraine while continuing to staunchly back Israel despite the rising death toll in Gaza and settler violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.”
Pertaining to the Middle East, a commentary carried by China’s Xinhua agency had advice for the US: “Washington must admit the true fact that the Middle East belongs to its people, and it is high time the United States quit its bullying and hegemonic acts in the long-suffering region.” It added that the “hegemonic mindset and confrontational logic embedded in US Middle East policy stand in stark contrast to the region's collective desire for peace, stability, and cooperative development.”