How Serious Is the Risk of a ‘Wider War’ Breaking Out in the Middle East?
And how prepared is the United States?
EXPLODING PAGERS, THE STRIKES THAT KILLED Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, raids into southern Lebanon, Iranian retaliatory missile attacks: To many eyes, it appears that the greater Middle East is being sucked up in a cycle of escalation. “The long-feared ‘wider war,’” declares New York Times reporter David Sanger, “is here.”
In the narrow sense, this is undeniably true. But focusing on recent battles obscures that a big, wide war has been here for decades. Conflict in the Middle East—and elsewhere—is more like climate than weather.
Those who live in the Middle East grasp this and have in many ways adapted to it. Even after October 7th, Israelis have been sanguine about how much damage they could inflict upon Hamas and how much effort they could afford to expend to that purpose. As Will Selber points out, the Lebanon front was a higher priority, as is the direct Iranian threat.
The Iranians likewise have a long-war outlook. Theirs is a classic Fabian strategy, employing irregular and indirect means to make up for more fundamental weaknesses. Tehran is trying to make time its ally. They are more than willing to throw away hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles at a pop, knowing that such strikes will have little military effect and praying that they don’t accidently hit something or someone that provokes a larger Israeli retaliation.
For this reason, the Iranians also struggle to keep their proxies on a leash. The Houthis of Yemen are the prime example of this challenge—although the Hamas assault of October 7th is the more spectacular. Tehran also has to prop up its militias in Iraq and the Assad regime in Syria, while also keeping the Great American Satan at arm’s length. The Islamic Republic doesn’t have a lot of excess capacity to spend on a direct war with Israel.
Egypt and the oil princes of the Persian Gulf are similarly mostly keeping calm and carrying on and avoiding deeper engagement. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is not about to let the “Palestinian cause” get in the way of his plans to modernize the monarchy. Qatar has similar development plans and would rather host World Cups than Hamas, if forced to choose. And if the petro-sheiks wanted to finance a wider war, it would be against Iran and its proxies.
Russia’s and China’s abilities to effect the course of conflict in the Middle East are also limited. Vladimir Putin got a quick profit on his very small—thirty planes and a few thousand troops—investment in Syria, but is straining his power to its limits in Ukraine and is hoping Donald Trump can save his bacon there. Indeed, he needs Iran’s help to keep his drone inventory up. China, like other East Asian nations, needs to keep Gulf oil flowing and cheap to keep its economy going. Xi Jinping can only dread a wider Middle East war, but he can live with the current situation.
IT IS IN AMERICA (AND WESTERN EUROPE) that wider-war anxieties are greatest. The Biden administration has been a case study in half-measures and self-deterrence, not only in the Middle East but in Ukraine. Yet the delusion that, as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan infelicitously wrote just prior to October 7th, the Middle East is “quieter than it has been for decades,” was one shared by the Trump and Obama administrations. Even greater was the delusion, driven by Iraq War fatigue and the “fracking” surge in domestic U.S. energy production, that the Middle East was no longer geopolitically important. And now, per vice presidential candidate JD Vance, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and other MAGA-prone thinkers, the United States must “prioritize” a response to China, leaving the Middle East—and Europe—to fend for itself. This impulse, which would animate a second Trump administration, is an even greater expression of self-deterrence.
Indeed, it is hard to escape the conclusion that our fears of escalation come from a creeping awareness of our own inability to sustain a wide or long war. The U.S. “military-industrial complex” is a ghost of its former self—from ground combat vehicles to ships to aircraft, the majority of our weaponry is of Reagan-era vintage. We have not been able, for example, to provide the Ukrainian army with sufficient numbers of the simplest artillery shells. The size of the American armed services remains at its post-Cold War low level. The people and their equipment are wearing out. The Navy and Marine task forces sent to the Middle East over the past year have been repeatedly ordered to extend their deployments; the USS Abraham Lincoln battlegroup has been held over and a second carrier, USS Harry S. Truman, is plowing the Atlantic along with its escorts on the way to the eastern Mediterranean. Four additional guided missile destroyers are joining those already patrolling the Red Sea. An eleven-carrier Navy cannot keep this up.
Even a cursory study of human history shows that peace—not to mention widespread prosperity and the growth of liberty—is the exception to the rule. More common is a cessation of hostilities during which the antagonists prepare for the next round. Predicting events in the Middle East is a fool’s game, but it may well be that we’re due for a break in the weather rather than repeated hurricanes.
The Axis of Resistance could use a period of calm. In recent months, Israel has landed a series of heavy blows on Iran and Iranian proxies on multiple fronts. Senior Iranian, Hezbollah, and Hamas leaders have been killed; Hamas battalions have been decimated and the group’s infrastructure is being ravaged; most missiles and drones shot at Israel have either been intercepted or allowed to fall harmlessly. There is particular reason to doubt whether the Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon will provoke the feared widening of conflict. Conventional wisdom in the West is that the IDF’s month-long incursion into southern Lebanon in 2006, in reprisal for Hezbollah hostage-taking, was a big mistake. It is true that the IDF suffered tactical surprises and greater-then-expected losses, but Nasrallah delivered the lasting strategic verdict: In an interview shortly after the 2006 war, he admitted that if he had thought there was even a “one percent possibility” of a large-scale Israeli response, “we would not have done that. We would not have done any capturing.”
Israel appears to have recovered at least some of its political balance and strategic self-confidence. Benjamin Netanyahu remains an unpopular and unpleasant prime minister, but the Israeli security state has reestablished a good deal of its deterrent reputation and, more important, has likely regained the trust of many Israelis lost last October 7th.
The United States, by contrast, still seems disoriented. What the next administration would make of a narrowing of the Middle East war is open to question. An America First isolationism has taken root in one party, while the other trusts almost entirely to diplomacy, economic sanctions, and dreams of “soft power.” Both operate on the assumption that “every war must end,” the sooner the better. Neither seems courageous enough to propose the kind of costly and longer-term investments (and accompanying tax increases or cuts to social benefits) in hard, military power that long wars demand. Like Donald Trump’s erstwhile Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Vice President Harris has promised to maintain the “lethality” of the U.S. military. Lethality is good, but quantity has a quality of its own—particularly in wide wars.
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