How Long Are We Going to Do This?

By Noah Rothman

Friday, January 05, 2024

 

On Thursday night, Politico revealed that the Biden White House is preparing for a “wider, protracted regional conflict” to emerge from the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. But that’s not much of a revelation. The more surprising discovery Politico inadvertently exposed is that the White House is beginning to reluctantly acknowledge the existence of that very “wider, protracted regional conflict,” which has been both active and observable since the 10/7 massacre.  

 

Really, what gave it away? Was it the upwards of 118 separate attacks on U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Syria by Iran-backed militias? Was it the multiple retaliatory airstrikes Biden approved on positions occupied by Iranian proxies and Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps-linked facilities in the region, the latest of which occurred only yesterday afternoon? Maybe it was the campaign of terror and armed piracy in the Gulf of Aden by the Iran-backed Houthi militia group, which has all but closed the Suez Canal to international commerce. Who’s to say?

 

That wasn’t the most shocking revelation in Politico’s latest report. Indeed, even the humiliating discovery that the Biden White House has “for months behind the scenes urged Tehran to persuade the proxies to scale back their attacks,” only to be rebuffed, somehow fails to shock. What was most unnerving in this Politico dispatch is that the outlet forecast Biden’s “plans to hit back at Iran-backed Houthi militants” as though that was news.

 

Observers of this conflict have been following the administration’s plans to restore deterrence in the Red Sea and once again guarantee the maritime transit of global commerce for nearly a month. On December 6, Politico revealed that U.S. military officials had “drafted options to hit back against the Houthis, though they are not actively pushing those plans at this time” in the fear that Biden might execute one of those options. Ten days later, Politico informed the public that the White House had reached the “actively weighing” stage of deliberations over the prospect of a retaliatory response against Houthi targets. As of the most recent reporting, the White House was still “drawing up plans to intervene directly against the” terror group.

 

All this drawing and weighing is no longer news. It hasn’t been for some time. What is news is the Biden administration’s inexplicable reluctance to execute any of the options the Pentagon has presented to him.

 

And it is inexplicable, if only because the rationale that supposedly explains the White House’s reluctance keeps changing. Sometimes Biden is afraid of sparking a broader conflict — one that, by all accounts, is already upon them. Sometimes, it’s because the administration doesn’t want to appear to be on the same side as the odious Saudis in their long-simmering conflict with the Houthis. Occasionally, we are told that Biden is actually seeing to the Saudis’ interests. After all, what Riyadh supposedly wants more than anything is a durable settlement to the civil war in Yemen, and acknowledging the existence of the Houthi’s terror campaign would throw a wrench in those works.

 

None of it adds up. Meanwhile, Western prestige erodes by the day, and the international trade regime maintained by the United States degrades further.

 

What is obvious is that the Biden administration is self-deterred. Its fear of sparking a broader conflict with Iran has given Iran a free hand to test its freedom of action, and it will continue to probe its parameters until it encounters a hard target. Unless the costs of this regional terror campaign outweigh the benefits, it will continue and, indeed, become more reckless. Already, those benefits include humiliating the United States, forcing it to move assets around the region and expend vast stores of defensive ordnance, and a clear demonstration that it can close the Gulf of Aden through proxies at a time of its choosing. From Tehran’s view, those are real, tangible gains. The costs required to outweigh them grow with every successful provocation. The longer Biden waits, the bigger the event necessary to arrest this tempo of operations.

 

What is staying Biden’s hand? That’s the story. The existence of plans, none of which the president seems inclined to act on, is not.