• United States
• Middle East and North Africa

As we mark the first year of the Israel-Hamas war and the escalating crisis on another front between Israel and Hezbollah, nowhere is the United States’ “out here, you’re not so big” problem more stunningly and tragically apparent. The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has not been a potted plant. While the flow of assistance to the suffering population of Gaza has been galactically insufficient, not a scintilla of aid would have gotten through without U.S. pressure. Nor would negotiations to secure the release of 105 out of roughly 252 hostages during the temporary cease-fire in late 2023 have succeeded without a central U.S. role. The Biden administration has also been successful through deterrence, pressure, and diplomacy in preventing the escalation of the Israel-Hamas war into a broader regional war—until now, that is.

Nonetheless, it should be painfully obvious that, despite its tireless efforts, Washington has been unable to negotiate a cease-fire to de-escalate the Israel-Hamas war, let alone end it. Indeed, over the past year, Washington has failed to fundamentally alter the strategic calculations of the conflict’s two principal decision-makers, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While Washington and other allied stakeholders have attempted to pressure and persuade, they have yet to succeed in reshaping the two decision-makers’ convictions that continuing the conflict held greater benefits than de-escalating it. (Israel’s ground operation in Lebanon and Iran’s missile strikes on Israel this week also demonstrate the way the administration has been unable to control events in the region).

Some view the U.S. failure with moral outrage given the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians and the humanitarian catastrophe imposed upon the people of Gaza. Others just shake their heads, wondering why the world’s most powerful nation—with great leverage over Israel and allies who had significant sway with Hamas—couldn’t do much more to end the conflict. Why not, indeed.

That the United States could not have its way through force or diplomacy in response to perhaps the most complex Middle East crisis in decades should have surprised no one. CIA Director William Burns, one of the most astute analysts of Middle East politics, couldn’t have said it better. In his four decades of involvement in the Middle East, Burns said in January that he’d “rarely seen it more tangled or explosive.”

Indeed, the complexity of the conflict has only highlighted the limitations of outside powers. In a conflict where the stakes are perceived to be existential—involving the political or physical survival of key decision-makers and the traumas to their respective publics—the ability of outside powers to exert significant influence diminishes. At the same time, local resistance to external pressure grows.

The attack on Oct. 7, 2023, was a unique and unprecedented crisis that only magnified the “out here, you’re not so big” problem, leaving the United States in the role of a modern-day Gulliver, wandering around the region, tied up by the interests of smaller powers that were not its own and driven to try well-intentioned diplomacy that had little chance of succeeding.

The Oct. 7 Problem

Oct. 7 presented the Biden administration with a veritable mission impossible. Hamas’s indiscriminate killing, raping, torture of civilians, and hostage-taking was followed by Israel’s punishing airstrikes, which seemed to put a focus on damage rather than accuracy. The invasion that followed guaranteed thousands of civilian deaths, given Hamas’s decision to collocate its military assets in, around, and below civilian populations and structures, and virtually guaranteed that U.S. influence would be limited.

Indeed, through most of the last year, it was Netanyahu and Sinwar who controlled the trajectory of the conflict, leaving the United States to react to the table they set. Israel’s goals were maximalist: to destroy Hamas as a military organization and end its control of Gaza. And Netanyahu’s politics—his constant looking into the rearview mirror to ensure that his extremist ministers wouldn’t bolt from the governing coalition—hovered over his security decisions, making it impossible to do any postwar planning and facilitate a steady flow of badly needed assistance to Gaza.

Sinwar’s goals focused on restoring the centrality of Palestinian rights on the international and regional agenda; blocking normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia; and demonstrating that it was Hamas, not Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, that was to be the agent of Palestinian redemption. He also hoped to incite a broader war between Israel and regional countries. In any case, reconciling what Sinwar sought and what Netanyahu wanted was impossible. These were hardly the kind of positions that would lend themselves to a negotiation that the United States could broker.

The Biden administration’s influence was further constrained by the nature of a conflict between a close U.S. ally and a group that, by statute and force of law, the United States considers a foreign terror organization. Biden’s emotional statement in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre and his early visit to Israel reflected his deep and abiding support for the country. These served to tether Washington to Israel’s war aims almost from the outset and left little incentive to pressure Israel, let alone break with the Netanyahu government over disagreements with Israeli tactics and how to achieve those aims. Toughness with Israel was invariably interpreted as being weak on Hamas—an unsustainable position in light of Hamas’s taking, abusing, and murdering hostages, including Americans.

Once the United States developed the idea of an Israel-Hamas cease-fire as a mechanism to de-escalate the war, Washington was forced to work within the parameters of the two leaders, neither of whom saw much value or utility in closing a deal. The United States was played by both sides. And neither Qatar nor Egypt, the primary go-betweens for Hamas, had the power, incentive, or inclination to appear to be pressing Hamas while Israelis were carrying on a war against the group—and in the process wreaking misery on the Palestinian population.

The Netanyahu Problem

Netanyahu addresses a joint meeting of Congress at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on July 24.Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

Perhaps nowhere is the “out here, you’re not so big” challenge more acutely demonstrated than in the dynamic between the Biden administration and Netanyahu, the longest-governing prime minister in the history of Israel. Long mistrustful of the United States, Netanyahu has played the president and the administration, at times crudely, at times like a finely tuned violin.

Let’s be clear: Hamas leader Sinwar also played the Americans. But Sinwar heads a militant organization that executes Americans and is inimically opposed to U.S. interests. He’s not the leader of a country closely aligned with the United States and its president, whose support for Israel seemed to have no limit. No reciprocity or cooperation is to be expected from Hamas. In Netanyahu’s case, the image of a close ally seemingly exploiting the largess of another highlights the perennial problem of the small power taking advantage of the big. And when it becomes a pattern of behavior, it reflects the paradox of the small power demonstrating focus and strength and the dominant power exhibiting weakness and indecision.

U.S.-Israel relations have had their ups and downs in the past. And former U.S. presidents and Israeli prime ministers have argued over policy. But what made the current Biden-Netanyahu dynamic even worse and diminished U.S. credibility even further was the perception—grounded in reality—that the divide wasn’t so much driven by Israel’s national interests but by Netanyahu’s political interests.

What this meant in practice was that on many issues—facilitating international assistance into Gaza,  prioritizing the return of hostages, planning for postwar Gaza, and avoiding an explosive situation on the West Bank—Netanyahu’s decision-making was shaped by the demands and requirements of his right-wing government, particularly his two extremist ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir.

This dynamic was most clearly on display when it came to negotiations over an Israel-Hamas cease-fire, highlighting the humiliation and embarrassment of the big power at the hands of the small. Time and again, the prime minister would say yes, then maybe, and then no. Netanyahu would send his negotiators but with limited mandates.

Sinwar was clearly as much responsible—perhaps even more, in the wake of Hamas’s execution of six hostages—for the impasse as Netanyahu. But Sinwar wasn’t conveying commitments directly to the president and senior administration officials. Indeed, just last week, Netanyahu committed himself to a U.S.-French proposal for a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon only to walk that commitment back, temporarily seeming to endorse its aims while knowing full well that he had set into motion the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

The Leverage Problem

An Israeli couple carries a national flag past graffiti in Jerusalem on Nov. 18, 2023, calling for the release of Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip.Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images

So if the great power is being taken advantage of by smaller ones, then why doesn’t the Biden administration—or the vaunted international community, for that matter—impose a single cost or consequence on Israel or Hamas that would alter the trajectory of the conflict?

Let’s do the easy ones first. We have no answer to the question of how to alter the behavior of a Palestinian decision-maker safely ensconced in tunnels that have not been made accessible to the thousands of Palestinian civilians exposed and killed by Israeli bombs. Having spent two decades in Israeli prisons, Sinwar surely knew how Israel would respond to Oct. 7, how many Palestinians would die, and how he would at some point meet his end at the hands of Israel. Whether any single Arab state or collection of states could force Sinwar to end the conflict or agree to de-escalate it will have to remain a thought experiment. None was likely able or willing to try.

As for Israel, it should be quite clear by now that the Biden administration, like most of its predecessors, has been unwilling and unable to apply maximum pressure, let alone break with its Israeli ally over the conduct of Israel’s prosecution of its wars against Hamas or Hezbollah. Former presidents have been willing to use discrete pressure at times. The Nixon administration kept Israel from destroying Egypt’s third army to preserve prospects for a diplomatic breakthrough between Egypt and Israel. Former President Ronald Reagan suspended the delivery of advanced fighter aircraft over Israeli policies in Lebanon. The administration of George H.W. Bush denied housing loan guarantees because of Israel’s settlement construction as it was trying to put together the Madrid peace conference.

In fact, when I first heard the anecdote about the Israeli tailor, it was attributed to Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker. I asked Baker whether it was his yarn—he laughed and said he wished it was.

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But real pressure? You’d need to go back to the Eisenhower administration, when the president threatened to sanction Israel unless it withdrew its forces from Sinai during the failed British-French-Israeli campaign to seize the Suez Canal from President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt.

It’s not that the Biden administration lacks leverage on Israel. The president has many tools in his arsenal, such as conditioning or restricting U.S. military assistance to Israel; introducing or supporting a United Nations Security Council resolution that is critical of its policies in Gaza; demonstrating its displeasure by joining 140-plus countries—most recently Ireland, Spain, and Norway—in recognizing a Palestinian state, or joining near-international consensus in calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities, threatening consequences if neither side complied.

Biden chose none of these actions due to a confluence of factors: the president’s deep emotional commitment to the idea, security, and people of Israel honed over decades; the United States’ domestic political landscape, where the Republican Party has emerged as the “Israel-can-do-no-wrong” party, and a policy fixated on a cease-fire that required the agreement of both Israel and Hamas. Biden’s anger grew and slipped out from time to time. But with the exception of a delay in the shipment of some heavy bombs, that anger never translated into concrete or sustained changes in policy.

Would the application of pressure have worked? We’ll never know, though there’s reason to doubt it. Stephen M. Walt argued here in Foreign Policy that a patron’s leverage over a client diminishes when the matter at hand is of vital importance to the latter and when shared values as well as political and institutional constraints impose costs on the patron for exerting pressure. Add to that the often ignored but critically important reality that when it comes to its friends, partners, and allies, the United States rarely (if ever) uses sustained pressure or leverage on an issue that the latter considers vital to its own national or political interests. And if few U.S. presidents want to tangle with their friends that lack significant political resonance, why would a president want to break with an ally that has significant domestic support?

No U.S. administration has ever faced a situation with its Israeli ally quite like Oct. 7, where the unique nature of the conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah were seen in near existential terms; an Israeli prime minister was determined to do most anything to remain in power; and the absence of a realistic diplomatic pathway combined with a preternaturally pro-Israeli president and domestic politics, especially in an election year, to limit the United States’ options and influence.

It’s Not Our Neighborhood

The story of the secretary and the tailor makes a powerful point that U.S. diplomats and negotiators often forget: For all their military and political muscle, great powers are not always so great when they get mixed up in the affairs of smaller ones in a neighborhood owned by the latter.

The U.S. experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the standard for victory was never “could we win” but rather “when can we leave and what will we leave behind,” is perhaps the most tragic cautionary tale. And the set of U.S. diplomatic successes in helping to resolve the long-term Arab-Israeli conflict is stunningly small. The United States has had great success against the Islamic State and al Qaeda and has kept the homeland secure from foreign terrorist attacks. But the Middle East is littered with the remains of great powers who wrongly believed that they could impose their will, schemes, ambitions, dreams, and peace plans on smaller ones.

Indeed, this region is more often than not a place where American ideas go to wither or die. This is particularly the case in conflicts that have long histories where identity, trauma, memory, and religion play dominant roles.

As we mark the first year after Oct. 7, we should remind ourselves that ignoring the region, let alone leaving it to its own devices, isn’t an option. But neither is transformation. The United States has allies, interests, adversaries, and vital interests there. The locals will always have a greater stake; be more invested; and be willing to run greater risks for good or ill than the United States ever will.

U.S. leadership is important, but it isn’t the key. What matters more is having Israeli and Palestinian leaders who are masters of their politics, not prisoners of their ideologies—leaders who are not extractive and who care about the future of their own people and are willing to reach out to one another with a vision of a shared future.

Without that, we have nothing; with it, we at least have a chance to create a better pathway forward for Israelis and Palestinians alike.