What Israel’s ground operation into Lebanon drives home about America

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

(CNN) — Israel’s expected ground incursion into Lebanon will drive home a new strategic reality of a year of war — the once-mighty US is powerless to rein in its ally or to influence other major belligerents in a fast-worsening regional crisis.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government on Monday launched the next stage of its onslaught against Hezbollah with what the Israel Defense Forces called a “limited ground operation” into Lebanon — despite weeks of requests from Washington for restraint and familiar (and spurned) calls for de-escalation.

This came just hours after President Joe Biden said “we should have a ceasefire now,” when asked what he knew about Israeli special forces’ previous raids into southern Lebanon. “I’m comfortable with them stopping,” the president said.

His comments only underscored the chasm between the US and Israeli governments on a day when Netanyahu told Iranians in a broadcast, “There is nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach.”

The disconnect is widening as it coincides with the endgame of a cliffhanger US election. Biden’s room for maneuver is limited if he is to avoid exacerbating the domestic political impact of war in the Middle East — a factor Netanyahu, a consummate operator in US politics, surely understands. The Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, has largely stuck to the administration line — despite earlier comments that suggested she might take a slightly harder rhetorical stance toward Netanyahu while emphasizing the plight of Palestinian civilians.

A humiliating pattern for the US on repeat

The pattern of American impotency and Israeli defiance has played repeatedly since the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, which prompted the Israeli pounding of Gaza and the more recent attempt to destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Netanyahu often acts first and consults the US later, even when his actions are certain to buckle American diplomatic efforts and compound fears the US will get dragged into a disastrous regional war. The US was not informed in advance, for example, about the Israeli airstrike Friday that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah even though its global shockwaves were bound to be severe.

This Israeli approach has often made the Biden administration appear a spectator rather than an active player in events, as should befit a superpower. Months of grueling shuttle diplomacy by Secretary of State Antony Blinken have mostly drawn a blank. And the US has incessantly pushed for a Gaza ceasefire that neither Netanyahu nor Hamas seems to want.

This is not just a diplomatic embarrassment. Any time an American president is publicly spurned, there is a cost to their personal prestige and perceptions of US global power. And the likelihood is growing that Biden, who came to office professing to be a foreign policy expert, will leave the White House in a few months with a raging Middle East war set to stain his legacy.

But the Israeli leader’s bet that, for all its reservations, the Biden administration will remain the guarantor of the Jewish state’s security has paid off. For instance, the US and its allies helped repel a massive Iranian missile and drone attack against Israel in April. The strikes followed an Israeli strike that the US didn’t know about in advance on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus that killed eight senior Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers.

And so far, Biden, who has long prided himself on being one of the most pro-Israeli politicians in US history, has been loath to use the leverage he does have — for instance, permanently cutting off US military supplies for Israel, a step that would have huge political reverberations ahead of the election and leave him accused of deserting an ally fighting terror.

Netanyahu often seems to be taking conscious advantage of Biden’s instincts, reasoning he’ll swallow any level of provocation.

A deep symbolic irony encapsulates the duality of the US position in the conflict: a CNN analysis found that American-manufactured 2,000-pound bombs were likely used in the attack on Nasrallah, which threatens to ignite the regional conflagration that would be so ruinous to US interests and diplomatic goals.

The price of US-Israeli tensions

But the months of Israeli disregard for the administration’s political and strategic concerns have come at a stiff cost. Relations between Biden and Netanyahu are very tense. And growing antagonism often bursts into the open — most recently when US officials were furious the Israeli leader dissed an Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire proposal by a groups of nations led by the US. Washington demanded the Israelis put out a statement to remedy the diplomatic embarrassment, CNN’s MJ Lee, Kylie Atwood and Jennifer Hansler reported last week.

Ret. Col. Cedric Leighton, a CNN military analyst, said on “CNN This Morning” that conversations between Israeli and US officials ahead of the expected Israeli move into southern Lebanon were “pretty tense … especially at the upper levels.” He added: “The key thing to keep in mind is that Israel has basically deliberately kept the US uninformed when it came to the details of their operations.”

On the one side, Leighton said, “The US is trying to restrain the Israelis; they’re trying to limit the scope of military action that the Israelis are conducting. The Israelis are looking at this from a military standpoint right now, and they’re seeing the capability and the possibility of going and basically eliminating Hezbollah as a threat to northern Israel and potentially as a threat at all.”

Why has the US-Israeli split widened?

The last year’s events have forced the United States and Israel into a situation in which the critical national interests of each state as perceived by its elected leaders are in direct conflict.

The Netanyahu government interpreted the October 7 attacks as a graphic manifestation of an existential threat to the state of Israel and Jews in the Middle East. With that mindset, even intense ill feeling with the White House can be tolerated. And the sense that Israel is waging a battle for its survival makes it easier for leaders to justify to themselves the massive Palestinian civilian casualties from Israeli actions against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, even if the rest of the world sees the carnage as heinously disproportionate.

The United States might warn against the threat of a regional war, but Israel believes it’s been embroiled in such a conflict for years against proxy groups taking direction or inspiration from its enemies in Iran’s clerical leadership.

But events look different through Washington’s wider strategic and historic lens amid worries that Israel’s short-term victories are not sustainable and may simply be laying the predicate for decades more insecurity and warfare.

America’s national interests do not just lie in the preservation of Israel. The White House is desperate to avoid being sucked into another bitter conflict in the Middle East, given the two decades it took to extract American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Outposts of US soldiers still in the region, including in Syria and Iraq, also remain highly vulnerable to attacks by Iranian proxies as the deaths of three US service personnel in a drone attack on Jordan in January showed.

The global and political implications of the year of rage in the region are also huge. For instance, months of attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea have seen US and allied naval forces often under fire and intercepting missiles from Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Cascading economic impacts from slowed supply chains, as shipping lines send cargo on a longer route around Africa, are also considerable. The clashes are unlikely to end while Israel blasts Gaza and Lebanon.

Israeli thinks it’s winning, fueling its reluctance to stop

There are also contrasting military perceptions between Israel and the US.

Israel has wiped out many of its most dangerous enemies in stunning intelligence and military actions. In addition to the elimination of Nasrallah, who built Hezbollah into a grave threat to Israel in 30 years, Hamas has also accused Israel of killing Ismail Haniyeh, one of its top leaders, in Tehran. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement. It has also killed other senior members of the two groups in strikes in Syria, Lebanon, Iran and in Gaza. Israeli-detonated attacks on pagers and walkie-talkies injured or killed thousands of Hezbollah operatives.

So why would Netanyahu not press ahead with the greatest Israeli strategic success in decades whatever Biden says?

But Washington has much wider concerns. They include the horrendous civilian casualties and humanitarian disasters in Gaza and Lebanon, a state that has enjoyed a few decades of comparative stability after a murderous civil war, which raged between 1975 and 1990, and caused considerable US bloodshed. The deaths of thousands of civilians is not just a tragedy in itself, it creates severe pressure on the US from its allies and tarnishes America’s image by association.

The longer the war goes on, the greater the threat that conflicts intensifying across the region could all join into one perilous multi-front war and that a direct conflict could break out between the US and its arch enemy Iran. A regional war would have disastrous economic consequences and could further deflect from the US goal of mobilizing for its new superpower showdown with China.

Venomous politics are changing long-held truths about the US-Israel relationship

There are also intractable political factors pulling the governments apart.

For most of Israel’s existence, it would have been politically and strategically ruinous for a prime minister to show such contempt for a US president.

But Netanyahu’s own march to the far right and the reliance of his coalition on ultra-orthodox parties means that his priority is appeasing the most extreme domestic elements to stay in power.

The weakness of centrist and left-wing parties in Israel means a dearth of alternative leaders like late prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin or Shimon Peres, who were ideologically and temperamentally in tune with US presidents. The rise of incendiary and radical leaders like Nasrallah and Hamas officials also means there are no partners on the other side open to traditional US peacemaking.

Even legendary US secretary of state and peace-shuttler James Baker would have struggled with this regional cast of characters.

American calls for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict may ultimately reflect the only possible route to an ending of a generationslong confrontation — but they also seem utterly divorced from the realities of the blood-soaked Middle East in 2024.

And many observers in Washington have long suspected that Netanyahu has a strong personal interest in perpetually waging war to redeem his own failure to stop the October 7 attacks and to keep postponing his legal reckoning as he faces serious criminal charges.

America’s own venomous political reality is also eroding US power in the Middle East. Support for Israel was once an unshakable principle that united Republicans and Democrats. But Netanyahu’s meddling in US politics for years — over the Iranian nuclear issue, for instance — has alienated many Democrats and their party’s move to the left has further tempered backing for Israel.

Ex-President Donald Trump indulged and encouraged the most radical of Netanyahu’s policies — further politicizing the US-Israel relationship. And pro-Trump Republicans are goading him to go further — at least partly to weaken Biden and his chosen successor, Harris.

Biden and Harris are in a dicey political spot a month before the election. Biden’s failure to rein in Israel in Gaza and now Lebanon – and the consequential human carnage – has split the Democratic Party and threatens to drive down turnout among progressives and Arab American voters, especially in swing states like Michigan. But any move to punish Israel could damage Harris among moderate and swing state voters, who are being barraged with negative Trump ads claiming she and Biden are weak and leading the United States into World War III.

This is just one of many reasons why Netanyahu is incentivized to expand his war no matter how powerless it makes America look.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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