No way out? Biden latest U.S. president trapped by Mideast mayhem

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President Biden came to power aiming to do the impossible: Dramatically shrink America’s military footprint in the Middle East and redirect Washington’s focus away from a volatile corner of the world that has consumed U.S. foreign policy for more than two decades.

Instead, Mr. Biden will spend his final few months in office presiding over yet another surge of troops to the theater, joining his two immediate predecessors — Barack Obama and Donald Trump — as commanders in chief who were drawn deeper into a region that more than ever looks inescapable.

The Pentagon announced this week that it would send another small detachment of U.S. forces to the Middle East as a war between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah rapidly widens. It is the kind of regional escalation that the Biden administration has desperately tried to prevent since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Mr. Biden addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday and pleaded with both sides to avoid a “full-scale war.”

Meanwhile, Israel and Hezbollah traded another round of military strikes, including an Israeli airstrike on Beirut.

The president remained optimistic but conceded that the situation was worsening.

“Full-scale war is not in anyone’s interest. Even as the situation has escalated, a diplomatic solution is still possible. In fact, it remains the only path to lasting security to allow the residents from both countries to return to their homes on the border safely,” Mr. Biden said.

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, told reporters that Israel does not want to launch a full ground invasion of Lebanon but will do what is necessary to stop Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel.

“We prefer a diplomatic solution. But if it’s not working, we are using other methods to show the other side that we mean business,” Mr. Danon said.

Top American diplomats and military officials have spoken for years about the need to reorient U.S. foreign policy, in particular, to meet the challenge of a rising China in East Asia, the globe’s most dynamic economic region. With allies bogged down in wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the U.S. focus on power and resources has been drawn back to old, familiar grounds.

U.S. and Israeli meetings in New York signaled the depths to which the U.S. has been pulled into the Middle East conflict. Navy officials said the service replenishment oiler USNS Big Horn was damaged overnight after resupplying an aircraft carrier strike group in the region. The details of the incident were not immediately clear.

Days earlier, the Defense Department said Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen had shot down two American MQ-9 Reaper drones in less than a week, the latest direct assault on the U.S. military forces tasked with stopping the Houthis’ coordinated attacks on commercial ship traffic in and around the Red Sea.

Those are just two of the most recent examples of the direct dangers to U.S. personnel and military assets in the Middle East. Earlier this year, three Army soldiers were killed at an outpost in Jordan after a drone attack, which was thought to have been carried out by Iran-backed militias in the region. That incident sparked U.S. airstrikes against those militias, which operate in Iraq and Syria. In January, two Navy SEALs were lost at sea during a daring operation to intercept Iranian-made missile components destined for the Houthis.

The U.S. also has directly engaged Iranian military assets, helping Israel shoot down an Iranian missile and drone attack in April.

Since Oct. 7, the Pentagon has sent waves of military personnel and equipment to the region — some pulled away from duty in the Indo-Pacific — as a show of support for Israel, even as the administration has publicly pushed for a cease-fire deal to end the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.

History repeats itself

The complex web of conflicts unfolding across the Middle East has once again seemingly boxed in the U.S. and, this time, Mr. Biden personally.

Although he fulfilled his promise to pull all U.S. forces from Afghanistan, Mr. Biden had a broader goal to de-emphasize the region. In many ways, it collides with the same reality that upended Mr. Obama’s desire to “pivot to Asia” a decade ago. The Islamic State terrorist group’s rapid ascent to power during Mr. Obama’s second term forced the U.S. to launch a multinational campaign. The fight against ISIS continues today and is the ostensible purpose for the continued American troop presence in Syria and Iraq.

After vowing to end “forever wars” in the Middle East, Mr. Trump sent more troops to the region during his tenure as U.S.-Iran tensions neared the boiling point in early 2020.

Analysts say the U.S. has more than 40,000 troops stationed in the theater with seemingly no chance for any significant drawdowns in the foreseeable future.

“The story of U.S. foreign policy in recent years is a story of abortive pivots away from the Middle East,” Hal Brands, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in an analysis this year.

Key U.S. military figures familiar with the region say there is nothing wrong with shifting America’s focus to the Indo-Pacific and toward an increasingly powerful rival in China. Still, they argue that multiple administrations have made grave errors by publicly announcing such intentions. Washington’s desire to exit the Middle East may have only fueled conflict and raised new questions about America’s security commitment to its partners.

“We’re a global power and you have to think globally, so you have to move stuff around. I think our fault was we trumpeted the movement,” retired Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, who headed U.S. Central Command from March 2019 to April 2022, said in a recent exclusive interview with The Washington Times.

“Our messaging, our policy-level messaging, was sophomoric on this,” he said. “And what it did was it gave energy to our opponents and unsettled our friends. So, I think our policy messaging about it was as bad as any decision to actually move stuff.”

Some top Republicans in Congress were especially pointed Tuesday in their criticism of Mr. Biden. They said the administration has all too often appeared willing to give up American influence in the region and allowed U.S. adversaries to fill the vacuum.

“Democrats and Republicans alike should recognize that America’s enduring security interests in the Middle East are not served by abandoning the region to Iran, Russia and China,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, said during a speech on the chamber floor. “But what the Biden-Harris administration is grappling with right now is a problem of its own making. It is the combination of a weak and ineffectual response to Iran-backed aggression.”