Israel’s ferocious assault on Hezbollah, its most violent exchange with the Lebanese militant group since 2006, is not only a major widening of the war but also a significant widening of the breach between President Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
For a year now, Mr. Biden has warned publicly and privately about the need to avoid a regional war, one that could easily escalate into direct conflict between Israel and Iran. His caution was a major topic of conversation when he traveled to Israel days after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, both to promise Israel that America would stand by it, and to caution against making the same mistakes the United States made after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Mr. Biden even held on to hope for the transformative peace deal for the Middle East that he thought was within grasp a year ago, believing it could survive even as the war between Hamas and Israel tore at its foundations.
Now, Mr. Biden’s aides say, the president is beginning to acknowledge that he is simply running out of time. With only four months left in office, the chances of a cease-fire and hostage deal with Hamas look dimmer than at any time since Mr. Biden laid out a plan at the beginning of the summer. And the risk of a wider war has never looked greater.
In public, at least, administration officials insist they have not given up. They say they simply cannot move ahead while missiles are bringing death and destruction to northern Israel and southern Lebanon. And they are clinging to the hope that even this level of missile and rocket exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah will not turn into the regional war they have been trying to stave off.
“We could pick any moment, any set of rockets launched by Hezbollah, any set of strikes by Israel, and say, ‘Is this an escalation? Is that an escalation?’” Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, insisted over the weekend. He spoke just hours after Israel killed a Hezbollah leader wanted for his role in two 1983 bombings in Beirut that killed over 350 people, most of them U.S. service members.
“I think it’s not a particularly useful exercise,” Mr. Sullivan continued. “For us, the most useful exercise is to try to drive both parties to a place where we get an agreed and durable outcome that can end the cycle and keep us from ending up in the larger war.”
In many ways, Mr. Sullivan cannot afford to take a different view, at least in public. There is no utility in declaring that Mr. Biden’s plans are shattered for now. While Mr. Sullivan insisted on Saturday that “I do still believe there is a path to get there,” a “winding path, a frustrating path,” many around him think the clock is running out on the president’s plan. In fact, they note, the United States has not even been able to present the “bridging plan” to a final cease-fire — something it said three weeks ago was imminent — because there is no chance either Mr. Netanyahu or Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, will consider it at this time.
“Well, at the moment, we don’t feel like we are in a position, if we put something down today, to get both sides to say yes to it,” Mr. Sullivan said — an understatement, to say the least.
Mr. Biden’s best hope now, in his final months in office, is that his successor will embrace a transformative deal in which Saudi Arabia recognizes Israel, and Israel agrees to the two-state solution that would give Palestinians a true home and a place in the international community.
In private, though, many members of Mr. Biden’s national security team make little effort these days to hide their exasperation with the prime minister. They talk more openly now about the president’s shouting matches in phone calls with Mr. Netanyahu, or Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s frustrating visits to Jerusalem in which he got private assurances from the prime minister, only to watch Mr. Netanyahu contradict them hours later.
They now wonder aloud whether the prime minister kept throwing new conditions into cease-fire negotiations in hopes of keeping his fragile coalition together, or to stay in office and out of court.
And while they say he has every right to attack Hezbollah, which has become a “state within a state” in Lebanon, they also say it was telling that the White House announced no phone calls between the president and the prime minister as beepers exploded in the pockets of Hezbollah members and missiles flew. It seemed a sign of how little they had to say to each other.
Dennis B. Ross, the longtime Middle East negotiator, said in an interview on Monday that part of the problem was that Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu had never seen eye-to-eye about their ultimate goals — Mr. Netanyahu’s certainty that he can eradicate every existential threat to his country and Mr. Biden’s determination to bring about the peace deal that has eluded every American president since Richard Nixon.
“Statecraft is all about aligning objectives and means,” said Mr. Ross, now a distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute. “And I don’t see the objectives or the means to achieve them in what Israel is doing now.” Mr. Ross said that Israel’s calculation was that it could force Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and his Iranian backers to recognize they will pay a huge price for continuing to attack northern Israel until there is an accommodation with Hamas in Gaza.
Israeli officials counter that their objectives are straightforward: to mount a missile campaign that will wipe out Hezbollah’s command-and-control operations and its stores of weapons. And since last week, when Israel announced that the center of the conflict was moving north, to Lebanon, that process has been a methodical one.
The explosion of pagers and walkie-talkies last week was a start, aimed at not only maiming members of Hezbollah, which the United States designated as a foreign terrorist organization decades ago, but also at making them fearful of communicating with one another. It was a plan that was years in the making, involving front companies that got deeply into Hezbollah’s supply chain. The fact that Israel’s leadership chose to execute it last week was a sign that its broader campaign was about to begin. (Israel has neither confirmed nor denied any role in the explosions.)
Now that campaign has begun. Israeli special forces dropped into Syria, blowing up a facility that is believed to be manufacturing missiles — and supplying Hezbollah. And in Lebanon, Israeli missiles appear to be directed at underground storage tunnels, basements, anyplace where Israeli intelligence believes that tens or hundreds of thousands of weapons are hidden. The number of secondary explosions visible in some video of the attacks suggests that at least some of that intelligence was accurate, American and Israeli officials say.
The scope and scale of the operation suggest that Mr. Netanyahu is no longer satisfied with carrying out periodic brush-backs of Hezbollah’s power. In his view, Oct. 7 changed everything and the time has come to solve the problem once and for all — both in Gaza and in Lebanon.
But it is hard to imagine that Mr. Netanyahu will be able to eliminate Hezbollah, just as he has been unable to eliminate Hamas. And it is harder still to imagine that Mr. Netanyahu will spend much time worrying about crossing Mr. Biden. He knows that if former President Donald J. Trump is elected, he will have a far freer hand to prosecute the war against Hamas and Hezbollah the way he sees fit.
“Israelis, especially the right wing of Netanyahu’s coalition, are determined to solve this, and they think they left this all to fester too long,” said Steven A. Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations, who just returned from a trip to talk with Israeli officials. “And they think they got bad advice from the U.S.”
Mr. Biden, for his part, he noted, “never really used his leverage over Netanyahu,” a reference to the president’s power to cut off specific kinds of military aid if the prime minister ignored his counsel. “And you don’t have leverage unless you are willing to use it.”
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