WASHINGTON, DC - The winds off the Potomac reached gusts of 30 knots over the weekend. It was a transition from a relatively warm series of march days to drizzle and then biting wind and cold. Nevertheless, spring is in the air. At the Waldorf Astoria in the atrium, the cherry tree is in bloom.
The transition to spring brings with it the nagging concerns of what comes next in this town and on the global stage. The two are connected. An election campaign is coming. US President Joe Biden will be facing former US President Donald Trump, barring some unforeseen event.
October 7, the Hamas massacre and attack on Israel, is not the first issue on everyone’s mind. But it is present. It’s present because the ongoing war in Gaza is a central feature of media focus and there have been protests against Israel and signs calling for ceasefire or graffiti about Gaza. Outside the Israeli embassy, for instance, the sidewalk is festooned with Palestinian flags.
I spent several days in Washington and discussed both October 7 and other regional and global issues with a variety of people. The overall sense I got is that there is some desire for normality after years of crisis. It’s important to remember that the Covid crisis was only a few years ago. The possible return of Donald Trump conjures up memories of that era between 2016 and 2020. It’s getting harder to recall now how, every day during those years, there was endless news coverage of every event of the US president, feeding a news cycle of endless consumption for the chaos of the time.
October 7 wasn’t supposed to happen
October 7 wasn’t supposed to happen. Hamas wasn’t supposed to be able to be able to carry out a massive and unprecedented terrorist attack that would then be leveraged by Iran and other Hamas backers to spread war across the Middle East. However, now we are five months into this war and many adversaries of the West are seeking to take advantage of it. That means that Russia, China, Turkey, and Qatar, which hosts Hamas, are all using this for their agenda. Biden’s State of the Union had to focus on Gaza rather than issues that the administration probably would have preferred back on October 6.
The US may be only at the early stage of increased involvement in Gaza. The decision to conduct airdrops and also construct a floating pier off the coast of Gaza will mean that US involvement has a potential to increase dramatically. This is in contrast to the US global strategy that has sought to pivot away from the Middle East to confront “near peer” rivals such as Russia and China. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine provided an opportunity to confront Moscow more openly and to try to ramp up defense production alongside European allies. Sweden, for instance, joined NATO recently.
However, the war in Ukraine also illustrated how interconnected the Middle East is to global trends. Iran is now a close partner of China. Iran exports drone technology that has been used in Yemen since 2015, where Yemen became a kind of test-bed for Iranian drones, and those drones are now being exported to Moscow for use against Ukraine. Moscow and China appear to have supported or excused the Hamas attack on Israel in part due to their view that Israel is linked to the US and, therefore, can be seen as a proxy of the West.
Would China and Russia have had the same view of this massive attack ten years ago? Perhaps not.
October 7: An opening shot in a new world order
Therefore, October 7 may be seen as an opening shot in a new world order. This is the world order that many countries have wanted. Russia, Turkey, China, and Iran want a “multi-polar” world where the US and the West are weaker. Towards that end, they sought to expand partnerships such as BRICS or the SCO. They sought to draw many countries in the Gulf closer. Those countries also went willingly because they want to hedge their bets in a changing world order. China brokered the Saudi-Iran reconciliation. Syria’s regime, backed by Iran, has also returned to the Arab League. All of this made countries in the region less likely to condemn the Hamas attack because they took a “wait and see” approach.
Those I spoke to in Washington are generally pessimistic about where this all leads.
Wherever we look in the world, there are no longer the “thousand points of light” that George H.W. Bush identified back during the end of the Cold War and the transition to a US-led World order. October 7 is part of this trend. Hamas felt emboldened because of the changes. It was likely advised by its hosts and patrons that it could get away with this massive attack. Other countries are following suit. Turkey is threatening a new wave of attacks in Iraq and Syria. Russia is pressing ahead in Ukraine. Venezuela is threatening its neighbor. Haiti has fallen into deadly anarchy. Iran has spread chaos across thousands of miles of the frontline in the Middle East via its proxies. The Iranian-backed Houthis and Hezbollah, for instance, have ramped up attacks over the last week.
Support for Israel is still strong in the US. However, the concerns about what comes next are clear. How does this all play out in the next months and the next year amid a US election? The US can only concentrate on so many foreign crises at a time. This is the goal of Russia, China, Iran and others. They want to create an endless number of crises and hope to overwhelm the West. So far, they are pushing forward, and there is no clear path to deterrence.