Throughout human history, empires have emerged, while others have disappeared. Many empires have often been unable to assimilate valuable lessons without first suffering a major humiliation. Today, and in this sense, the United States, the United Kingdom and certain Western countries cannot understand that occupying territories or bombing countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan or Yemen will have the opposite effect to that intended. After all, the U.S. should have learned, from its various Middle Eastern wars, from Israel’s wars, and from the Ukraine War, that there are limits to what technology and aviation can achieve. But this does not seem to register with American leaders and their British followers. Strangely, their hubris has only grown since Iraq and Afghanistan.
There has been an Anglosphere-Sunni Muslim alliance since the mid-1800s, when Britain first partnered with the Ottoman Empire against French and Russian influence. After World War I, this alliance morphed from Ottoman–British to Saudi–British, and then to Saudi–American. That partnership delivered the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, helping to win the Cold War. It also prevented the Arab world from revolting against its humiliation by Israel, ensuring that Arab resources would be controlled by “moderates”, that is, states not committed to the Islamic-Jewish conflict in Palestine. The British drew the borders of the Middle East, from the Gulf to Iraq, Jordan and Palestine. The British and the Jews imposed the state of Israel on the Arabs. This led to the series of wars — 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973; the Lebanon wars of 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006; and the endless Gaza wars.
The wars from 1948 to 1982 ended in decisive Israeli military victories. This discredited traditional, meek Arab monarchies such as those in Egypt, Libya and Iraq, leading to their replacement with secular strongmen. Eventually, after Israel’s lightning invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which successfully expelled the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Arab secular governments and movements were also discredited. Only the Gulf monarchies aligned with the U.S. thrived. The wars fought by the Shi’a in Lebanon and their Sunni allies in Gaza, on the other hand — the wars fought from 1982 onwards — were wars in which Israel failed to achieve its objectives. These wars involved movements, not states, which had a different strategy. Rather than promising victories, they sought to impose a high cost on Israel while working towards steadily building greater capabilities and a believing, religiously committed society, convinced that was the key to victory.
This strategy’s success is most evident in Lebanon. Israel’s forced withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 was historic. Israel abandoned land that it would have otherwise settled, and it did so without any security assurances. Israel’s withdrawal allowed Hezbollah to grow further. Now, Hezbollah is helping lead the confrontation with the U.S. in Yemen, Iraq and Syria. The spiritual awakening that Hezbollah led among Lebanese Shi’a has had obvious material effects, shown in Hezbollah’s ability to deter Israel, despite conducting attacks against it for few months. With the Biden administration ensuring that Israel faces no consequences for its killing sprees in the Middle East, Tel Aviv’s continual escalation can be taken for granted. There is no denying that the Biden team’s talk of seeking de-escalation in the region contradicts its actual policies. Put simply, the White House’s actions (and inactions) have been directly fuelling the regionalisation and internationalisation of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
It is a colossal foreign policy failure that’s still in the making which might be one of the worst foreign policy disasters in the post-Cold War era, which can be fundamentally attributes blame for the expansion of the Gaza and Lebanon conflicts to the White House. The White House’s unconditional embrace of the Israeli war on Gaza combined with the Biden team’s absolute refusal to condemn Israel’s systematic conduct of genocide in Palestine through restrictions on weapons of event statements have made the administration Tel Aviv’s partner in this carnage while leaving the Netanyahu government with the perception that its hands are completely free to wage these military campaigns. As months passed and the US refused to see anything wrong with Israel’s blatant violations of human rights, Netanyahu became more emboldened and more brazen in his carnage in Palestine and later in Lebanon also. By positioning itself squarely as Israel’s partner, the US lost any and all ability for manoeuvrability separately from the Israelis. The Biden administration has therefore rendered US foreign policy completely irrelevant and has made it an extension of Israel’s policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
In this sense, the Biden administration could be considered complicit in crimes against humanity and war crimes, in accordance with the arrest warrants issued on Thursday, November 21, 2024, by the International Criminal Court[1] against Netanyahu and Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed at least from October 8, 2023 to May 20, 2024. This decision is binding, and all States, all States party to the Statute of the Court, including all members of the European Union, are obliged to implement this decision of the Court. The Biden administration’s steadfast refusal or unwillingness to establish guardrails or redlines on Israel has led to the expansion of this war.
Read more on January 1st, 2025.
[1] The Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. It rejected the State of Israel’s objections to its jurisdiction. « The Chamber issued arrest warrants against two individuals, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr. Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed at least from October 8, 2023 until at least May 20, 2024, the day on which the Prosecution filed the applications for arrest warrants.” “The war crime of starving civilians as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts. The Chamber also found that there were reasonable grounds to believe that both Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant were criminally responsible as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population. »