Netanyahu built his career on promising to be a bulwark against Iran, but instead his failures are contributing to the escalation across the Middle East.
Clever wheezes in the Middle East have the tendency to not look very smart for very long. A case in point, as has become sharply evident this week, is the much-vaunted “deconfliction” arrangement between Russia and Israel after the former entered the war in Syria on the side of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.
Negotiated between Vladimir Putin and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, it was held up at first as evidence of the latter’s diplomatic skills – an arrangement that allowed Israel a free hand against weapons transfers from Iran to Hezbollah and maintained Israeli deterrence on its northern border.
If that arrangement has for long looked very shaky, the reaction of Russia and Iran to Israeli strikes this week on an airbase in Syria, killing seven Iranian advisers, has brutally exposed the assumptions that underlie it, not least Moscow’s tolerance for Israel’s assumption of its freedom of action.
The reality is that Israel – and Netanyahu in particular – has badly misread the trajectory of Russia’s re-engagement in the Middle East, which has created in the very kindest interpretation the context for Iran’s projection of its influence ever further west and ever closer to Israel’s borders.
Why all this matters in the current febrile context following the latest alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria, is that Israel’s misjudgments sit at one corner of a dangerous matrix of unpredictability, perhaps unseen – as James Hohmann argued in the Washington Post – since the secretary of state Dean Acheson suggested in 1950 that Korea was outside the core defence perimeter of the US.
On the American side that uncertainty around intentions has seen Donald Trumpflip-flop so dramatically that in a handful of days he has somersaulted from suggesting first that his country was rushing for the exit on Syria to a situation where military strikes seem likely.
In Israel, a wounded Netanyahu – who has built an entire political career on promising to be a bulwark against Iran – is now being confronted with his rhetoric and the consequence of his actions, not least his bloody public pricking of Iran in a way that Tehran may now find hard to discount.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
