A regional war in the Middle East is already here

For decades a low intensity regional war in the Middle East has been ongoing, but it took Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on to bring this conflict into sharper focus. For some time, a mostly shadowy “ ” contest for influence in Syria and Iraq has taken place. Occasionally, “ ” play out elsewhere in the Middle East.

But now, the conflict is coalescing into a full blown Iranian that’s been growing stronger for years. When I departed the National Security Council in 2018, I expressed serious that the U.S. was at risk of its counterterrorism policy attention and resources by pivoting too hard toward great power competition.

Policy critics from outside the Trump administration opined that 9/11 had disproportionally concluding that it would take years to correct. Oct. 7 validates how strategically risky pivoting away from the Middle East and undoing steady counterterrorism investments can be. To be fair, both the Trump and Biden administrations wanted to focus more on great power competition.

As a consequence, in the last few years, while the U.S. was realigning its foreign policy focus to counter Russia and China’s influence, Iran seized plenty of political space to fill the vacuum and wage a . Biden officials have been saying that it is premature to predict whether a would break out in the Middle East.

Yet in recent days, a suspected killed a in Lebanon. Israel reportedly killed a second militant commander from a few days later in southern Lebanon. In Iran, the Islamic State was responsible for a , killing scores of people during a memorial. In solidarity with Hamas, militants in Yemen are disrupting the free flow of commerce in the Red Sea; those Houthi disruptions triggered retaliatory .

All of this is happening while Israeli and Hezbollah skirmishing continues to ratchet up tensions on the . In , the Israel Defense Forces continues its punishing military campaign against Hamas. As a result of Oct. 7, Israel has also increased its security measures in the by restricting the freedom of movement of Palestinian residents.

If all of this is not convincing enough that a wider war is here, add a to the counterterrorism ledger. So, yes, there is indeed a regional war in the Middle East. But additional context is in order. Before Oct. 7, a Middle East war was on a slow boil for years. None of this came into focus for me until I was part of an official delegation to Israel in 2017 while serving in the Trump administration.

Just a few hours spent at the Golan Heights helps me contextualize the current Israel–Gaza war through a broader geo strategic lens. From there, I concluded that Syria is a metaphor for competition and conflict that goes well beyond U.S. led counterterrorism campaigning against the Islamic State In Syria, Russia supports Assad’s malign regime, a state that waged a against its own people, not to mention holding American hostage for over a decade.

Syria is also the same terrain where the U.S. and Kurds remain locked in a low level fight against and other militants. In the summer of 2017, even though the ongoing ISIS campaign and U.S. hostages were very much on my mind when our party was hosted by Israel, I saw few parallels between the U.S. driven ISIS campaign and how Israelis viewed the ever present threats from Hamas and Hezbollah.

Predictably, we met with the heads of Israel’s intelligence and security services and Mahmoud Abbas at his Palestinian Authority office in Ramallah. There was relative calm across Israel and the West Bank. This was illusory. In November, how quiet the Middle East seemed to be — deceptively so, as it turns out.

Hamas’s terrorist attacks have already opened a Pandora’s box for unifying an axis against Israel, which means that the Biden administration has to reboot a counterterrorism strategy that takes into account these regional dynamics to confront an that’s much more expansive than what I observed in 2017.

None of this is hype; since spring, Hezbollah, Hamas and Iranian leaders have come together to wage the against Israel. It seems that Iran has unified an array of jihadists and Shia fighters by offering what the welter of other factions could not: a violent antipathy toward Israel. In hindsight, I didn’t have time to reflect on lessons learned from a frenetic few days in 2017, until our itinerary concluded at the in Jerusalem; ironically, this was the scene of a horrific terrorist attack in a bygone era last century.

But I knew enough about terrorism to appreciate that the weight of history on Israelis and Palestinians cannot be understood without knowing the long arc of political violence in the region. So, events in Gaza and the West Bank have come full circle; even the ghosts of the are being resurrected in polarizing debates about this conflict.

In this wider war, that’s all to Iran’s advantage..