Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep.
Here’s what’s on tap for the day: Israel’s “seven-front war” with Iran, Kamala Harris and the definition of a “combat zone,” and White House plans to allow Ukraine to hit more targets on Russian soil.
What War Is Israel Fighting?
Is Gaza the war, or just the opening battle in a wider confrontation between Israel and Iran? The answer to that question depends on whom you ask.
In Washington, officials see diplomacy as the answer to de-escalation. Over the past several months, the Biden administration has pursued a three-front diplomatic offensive that aims to strike a cease-fire deal in Gaza; restore quiet to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, which has seen near-daily exchanges of fire with Hezbollah; and broker a historic normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia in the hopes of bringing about a permanent shift in the restive regional dynamics.
“Once a cease-fire and hostage deal is concluded, it unlocks the possibility of a great deal more progress, including—including calm along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon,” President Joe Biden said in a speech on May 31.
Israeli officials and analysts, meanwhile, have adopted a more expansive concept of the country’s security in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks. They often talk of the war in Gaza as just one front in a wider regional confrontation with Iran and its proxies that they now believe must be addressed.
“Iran is fighting us on a seven-front war,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a visiting delegation of retired U.S. military leaders in June. That war involves Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza; Hezbollah in Lebanon; the Houthis in Yemen; various Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria; Tehran’s efforts to arm Palestinian militants in the West Bank; and Iran itself, which directly attacked Israel for the first time in April.
This view of a multifront war was underscored on Sunday when Benny Gantz, a centrist Israeli politician and former member of Israel’s now-dissolved war cabinet, told an exclusive gathering of top U.S. and Israeli officials at the inaugural Middle East-America Dialogue (MEAD) conference in Washington, D.C., that it was time for Israel to shift its focus to Hezbollah.
“The time for action in the north has come—if we do not reach a deal for the hostages within days or a few weeks, we will have to go to war in the north,” he said in the only on-the-record session at the gathering. “We must ensure that residents can return to their homes. We can achieve this goal, even if it means damaging Lebanon itself. Unfortunately, I don’t see another way,” he said. Gantz resigned from the war cabinet in June over long-standing disagreements with Netanyahu’s handling of the war.
That perspective is one of several points of difference between the Biden administration and its Israeli counterparts. As we explored in last week’s SitRep, Washington has been puzzlingly upbeat in its rhetoric about the prospects for securing a cease-fire deal.
“I don’t think I’d call it a conceptual mismatch,” Yuli Edelstein, the chairman of the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, told Amy on the sidelines of the MEAD conference. “It’s just that looking from the other side of the ocean, you want to, I guess, finish with the conflict that you kind of perceive as a local conflict in Gaza, get to the cease-fire and hostage deal,” he said.
Hezbollah and Israel have been locked in conflict for decades and even fought an all-out war in 2006; but the day after the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, the group began firing on Israel in solidarity with Hamas, while fellow Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen began firing on commercial ships in the Red Sea, also claiming solidarity with the Palestinians. Biden’s approach assumes that if calm can be restored to Gaza, it will deprive Hezbollah and the Houthis of their immediate cause and encourage them to stand down.
But experts are skeptical that a cease-fire in Gaza will stop those groups from targeting Israel. “That is thinking like a Green Room pundit, not a Houthi leader,” writes FP columnist Steven Cook. “Having discovered that they can fire on Israel with virtual impunity, there is little reason to believe that the Houthis will stop.”
Who is right? So is the crisis in the Middle East nearing its end, or is it just one of the early phases of a wider regional conflagration?
U.S. officials continue to sound upbeat about the prospects of a cease-fire and even the possibility of brokering a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia before the end of this administration. Work on the latter deal—which was close to completion this time last year—is still underway behind the scenes. A major sticking point, however, is the Saudis’ demand that any deal include some form of pathway toward Palestinian statehood, though the exact specifics of what they would accept remain vague.
“I think if we can get the cease-fire in Gaza, there remains an opportunity through the balance of this administration to move forward on normalization,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters in Haiti last week.
But how the administration is going to square plans for a “credible pathway” to Palestinian statehood under the deal—as Blinken put it—with the current Israeli government, which is firmly opposed to such an option, remains to be seen.
“We tend to discount the reality of the situation for our own fantasy of how things should work,” Cook said in an interview with SitRep. “The Israelis will often exaggerate things,” he said. “They think they know the region better. But on this one, I think they’re right. This is a bigger thing than Gaza.”
Let’s Get Personnel
Over on Pennsylvania Avenue, Jacob Levine is now the senior director for climate and energy on the National Security Council. Luis Guerrero Lopez is now the chief of staff at the White House’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. Andy Volosky is now the deputy director of platforms at the White House’s Office of Digital Strategy.
Meanwhile, Starla Santana has joined the National Space Council as a special assistant.
Tarja Jaakola is now NATO’s assistant secretary-general for defense investment. The former Finnish Defense Ministry official is the alliance’s first Finnish assistant secretary general. Meanwhile, Mircea Geoana has departed his role as NATO’s deputy secretary-general.
The Center for a New American Security think tank has brought on David McKenzie, a former CNN international correspondent, to be its director of communications.
Patrick Turner arrived in Kyiv this week to take up the newly created role as NATO’s senior representative in Ukraine.
On the Button
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
Define “combat zone.” During the U.S. presidential debate on Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris said that “there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world.” That’s a bit of a fudge. U.S. troops are still taking part in counterterrorism raids and getting injured in Syria and Iraq, and according to the White House’s own War Powers report that was sent to Congress in June, the United States is still conducting airstrikes in Somalia and Yemen.
But Harris is right if you go by the U.S. Defense Department’s definition of U.S. troops serving in combat, the Pentagon told SitRep in an email. “An aspect of military service includes serving in locations where hostile actions may occur. Those locations are designated by executive order and/or the Secretary of Defense,” a defense official said. “However, it’s important to note that just because a service member is in one of these locations does not mean they are engaged in war. The U.S. is not currently engaged in a war and does not have troops fighting in active war zones anywhere in the world.”
Getting smart on cyber. The United Nations’ top tech agency—often referred to as “the most important agency you’ve never heard of”—has an encouraging cybersecurity update. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) released the fifth edition of its Global Cybersecurity Index, which measures countries on their readiness to defend against cyberattacks. The report found that most of the 193 ITU member states (plus Palestine) surveyed had markedly improved their cyber defense capabilities since the last index was published in 2021, with an average score improvement of 27 percent.
“The progress seen in the Global Cybersecurity Index is a sign that we must continue to focus efforts to ensure that everyone, everywhere can safely and securely manage cyberthreats in today’s increasingly complex digital landscape,” ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin said in a statement. (For your calendars: Bogdan-Martin will be speaking at the FP Tech Forum on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York City later this month.)
— Rishi Iyengar
Permission granted. The White House is finalizing plans to allow Ukraine to hit an expanded set of targets on Russian soil with U.S.-provided weapons, Politico reports. Officials all the way up to Biden have hinted in recent days at an easing of possible restrictions. The move comes just days after the Biden administration said that Iran was providing ballistic missiles to Russia to use in Ukraine, which Tehran has denied.
Even members of the president’s own party are trying to nudge the decision along. “Greater flexibility to target Russian military assets will degrade Moscow’s ability to harm the Ukrainian people,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Ben Cardin said in a statement on Wednesday. “The United States must act swiftly to grant these permissions.”
Indo-Pacific Facetime. U.S and Chinese military commanders in the Indo-Pacific held their first-ever call on Tuesday, the Financial Times reports, as part of a wider effort to reestablish lines of communications between the two countries’ militaries that were severed by Beijing in the wake of then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan two years ago.
Snapshot
People visit the National September 11 Memorial & Museum as the “Tribute in Light” is illuminated on the skyline of lower Manhattan in New York City on the 23rd anniversary of the attacks, seen on Sept. 11. Leonardo Munoz/AFP via Getty Images
Put on Your Radar
Friday, Sept. 13: The NATO chiefs of defense begin a three-day meeting in Brussels.
Quote of the Week
“Don’t hire assholes.”
— U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk, sharing his mantra for how different government departments can effectively work together while speaking at the Supply Chain Summit hosted by the Commerce Department and the Council on Foreign Relations.
This Week’s Most Read
- Letters to the Next President by FP Contributors
- Top Foreign-Policy Moments From the Harris-Trump Debate by Christina Lu and Amy Mackinnon
- Why America Should Drop Its Obsession With Being No. 1 by Danny Quah
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Secret satellite. Then-U.S. Navy Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero, a senior enlisted leader on the littoral combat ship Manchester, was demoted in late 2023 after repeatedly lying about sailors installing a Starlink Wi-Fi dish to watch movies and text home during a Western Pacific deployment, the Navy Times reports.