Biden’s Last-Minute Victory in the Middle East

The cease-fire in Lebanon finally forestalls the prospect of a region-wide war.Adnan Abidi / ReutersNovember 28, 2024, 7 AM ET Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (Noa) using AI narration. Listen to more stories on the Noa app.On Tuesday, Israel and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group in Lebanon, agreed to a cease-fire. The arrangement is a win for outgoing President Joe Biden, who has followed a hapless policy course through a calamitous year for the Middle East.Ever since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, the Biden administration’s goal in the Middle East has been to contain the conflict. That policy didn’t exactly succeed: The fighting spread to Lebanon and even led to exchanges of fire between Israel and Iran. In the meantime, Washington gave Israel virtual carte blanche in Gaza, particularly in the first few months of the war; in doing so, it implicated itself in a war that has exacted a heavy toll not just on Hamas but on the people of Gaza. Israel’s onslaught has killed more than 44,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and displaced nearly the entire population of 2.2 million, many of them multiple times. An estimated 66 percent of structures that once stood in the Strip have been damaged or destroyed. And at every step, Israel dictated the scope and nature of the conflict, not just to its adversaries but also to Washington, escalating to the brink of all-out war with Iran.Now Washington has helped broker a cease-fire, not in Gaza, but in Lebanon and northern Israel. If it holds, Biden may leave office able to say that he averted a regional war that could have drawn in the United States and others.Read: ‘The Iranian period is finished’The agreement likely will hold, because it serves the interests of all the parties directly involved. Hezbollah desperately needs the hiatus to regroup. Israel has assassinated most of its political leaders and battlefield commanders, including Hassan Nasrallah, and demolished much of its arsenal of rockets and missiles. The organization’s command-and-control capabilities are shattered, and many of its best fighters have been killed or badly wounded. Iran could use the pause to reconsider its national-security strategy: Hezbollah was the centerpiece of Iran’s forward defense, yet it turned out to be unable to deter or successfully combat Israel. The Lebanese militia either could not or would not fire large numbers of missiles on Israeli cities, such as Haifa, or strategic targets, such as the Dimona nuclear reactor.Israel likely welcomes the cease-fire because it, too, is near exhaustion. Its munitions are depleted and its military overstretched, even as the insurgency in Gaza appears to be intensifying, however gradually. Israel has achieved virtually all of its most ambitious goals in Lebanon and stands to gain very little by continuing the conflict. It may even have risked reinvigorating Hezbollah had it overstayed, in the same way that the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000 led to the establishment of  the organization in the first place.The negotiators, led by the Biden administration but also including France and others, were able to succeed because both sides had a clear interest in drawing down the conflict. The war in Gaza stands in stark relief. There, the two parties—the Israeli government and the remnants of Hamas’s leadership—both calculate that continuing to fight will further their political interests.Read: Israel and Hamas are kidding themselvesBy contrast, the Israeli military and public were eager to end the war with Hezbollah, especially on advantageous terms. Hezbollah has been so devastated that it was willing to agree to conditions it might once have deemed humiliating. The militia will withdraw its personnel and heavy equipment from southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, about 15 miles north of the border with Israel, as it was originally required to do by the United Nations resolution that ended the fighting in 2006. The Lebanese military and UN peacekeepers will fill the void, maintain order, and ensure that Hezbollah doesn’t return. Israel has agreed to a phased withdrawal from Lebanon, but the agreement stipulates that Israel and Lebanon can still exercise their “inherent right of self-defense,” which Israeli officials have signaled they see as a license to strike Hezbollah if they believe it is violating the terms of the cease-fire. That Hezbollah and Iran agreed to this imbalanced arrangement shows the extent of Israel’s military advantage and the decisiveness of its victory in this round of battle.The Biden administration will be handing Donald Trump a Middle East that is still smoldering but no longer on the verge of explosion. Trump’s minions are already trying to suggest—preposterously—that his reelection is the main reason for the cease-fire. Biden’s Gaza-war policy has been indefensible as well as inept, in that it failed to prevent the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. But the president will leave office able to count as a success a deal that forestalls any realistic prospect of a large-scale, multifront, regional war in the Middle East.