Gaza: Time for restraint

Biden gains breathing space but does the West have a strategy?

USS Carney downed Houthi-fired cruise missiles

“Don’t you feel that, at any time during the past ten years, you have been able to foretell events better than, say, the Cabinet?”

Those were Stephen Spender’s words to George Orwell in June 1940, as the British political elite reeled during the Dunkirk crisis. Orwell agreed:

"Where I feel that people like us understand the situation better than so-called experts is not in any power to foretell specific events, but in the power to grasp what kind of world we are living in."*

I've thought about these words a lot in the two weeks since 7 October. Because, for me, the Hamas terror attack came out of the blue.

I knew we were in a world where Russia would attack Ukraine; where China might send a ship to rip up internet cables in the Baltic; and where the remnants of French colonial power are crumbling across the Sahel.

But I did not expect Hamas to stage a grotesque pogrom across Israeli territory, backed by Iran. Nor did I expect to be facing the prospect of a regional war in the Middle East as a result.

I know who Hamas are: I’ve seen them up close during the 2014 war. But this sudden sequence-break forces me to revise my understanding of the dynamics of the "multipolar world" - and in a negative direction.

If you listen to the advocates of multipolarity, they describe it as a project of “nonalignment and peace” - a long, orderly process whereby geopolitics falls into line with the economic reality of rising Chinese power. Multilateralism and the rules-based order are replaced with formalised spheres of influence, in which all universal concepts - human rights, international law, the rule of law - are reduced to localised, culturally relative norms set by authoritarian elites. The West remains free to be universalist and follow the rules, but nobody else bothers. The only trouble that might arise is where America resists the inevitable.

I’ve never bought this rationalisation. But I tended to assume that the rising systemic competitors - Russia and China - were at least trying to impose their own version of order at the periphery.

Instead, we can be certain now that multipolarity equals chaos.

Instead of four tectonic geopolitical power blocs (the West, Russia, China, India) causing friction as they grate against each other at the edges, there is simply a chaotic void between them.

And in that rules-free space, authoritarians and reactionaries of all kinds are making reckless die-rolls on crazy projects, secure in the knowledge that American power is weak, American democracy is weak, and public opinion in the global south is highly susceptible to their messaging.

From Niger to Capitol Hill to Hamas, it is not that the Kremlin orders its proxies to disrupt the rules-based system: it is simply that the proxies understand the realm of the possible has expanded. That not only gives them agency, it gives them permission to dream of radically evil outcomes.

In the process, they are developing a common political style: opportunism, symbolic violence, disinformation, terror, rape as a weapon of war and the legitimisation of genocide.

As we watch Western politicians criss-cross the Middle East trying to stabilise an order that is no longer there, the danger of each crisis - Ukraine, the Sahel, the Balkans, the Middle East, Taiwan - starting to interact with the others is acute.

Danger of regional war

In the case of Hamas and Iran, we should be in no doubt of what the desired outcome of the aggressor is. Mohammed Deif, the Hamas commander in Gaza, spelled it out on 7 October: the destruction of Israel by a region-wide war.

The presence of two American aircraft carriers in the Eastern Mediterranean is testimony to how seriously the USA takes that threat. The shoot-down of cruise missiles launched by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, by USS Carney, signals the kind of alert status the US Navy must be on.

It is clear from Joe Biden's 60 Minutes interview that the USA believes it has both the economic depth and military firepower to handle, simultaneously, the war in Ukraine and any attack on Israel by Hezbollah and Iran - without losing the power to deter China over Taiwan. He said:"

“We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history — not in the world, in the history of the world. We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.”

What's not clear is whether US democracy could sustain support for such action, and whether social order in certain European countries would survive it.

Because though the defence of Israel against Hezbollah would be a war of necessity for those determined to uphold the rules-based order, it would look like a war of choice to populations already hard pressed by inflation and wage stagnation, and prey to Russian-backed disinformation.

Geopolitically I read the situation as follows:

• If Israel invades Gaza, Iran could order Hezbollah to launch an all-out war using its precision weaponry, deep stockpiles and regular troop formations.

• Biden refused to confirm that the USA would retaliate, but in reality it would be forced to, in order to give the IDF freedom of action.

• As my former colleague Mark Urban suggests, Iran - in turn - may be holding back Hezbollah as an insurance policy against the Israeli threat to attack Tehran’s nuclear weapons programme.

It is not hard to anticipate where this could all go wrong - because it's clearly expressed in the narratives being peddled on the influence networks run by Iran, Russia and the totalitarian segment of the far left. The West's systemic competitors believe they can:

• Expose Israeli military and security apparatus as a paper tiger, capable of air strikes but not of defending its own territory and fatally reliant on the USA for money and ammunition;

• Mobilise Muslim voters in Europe and the USA to oppose Western support for Israel, to the point where it becomes unsustainable;

• Destroy the Biden presidency in the process, allowing Trump back into the White House;

• Make Israel's democracy implode under its own acute political contradictions and the pressure of military failure; and thus

• Deter any future US resistance to the Chinese assertion of sea control over the South China Sea, and degrade US support for Ukraine at a critical moment.

It may be, as KCL’s Michael Clark argues in today’s Times, that Hamas blundered into this situation by overachieving its initial plan. But if you are not worrying about the above scenario, then - pace Orwell - you are “failing to grasp what kind of world we are living in”.

Restraint, geo-strategy and justice

In the face of this, there are three kinds of action democrats and progressives can take, two of them well understood in the corridors of power, a third barely addressed so far.