The Middle East is still in a state of volatile uncertainty after the latest exchange of missiles between Israel and Iran.
Last weekend, Israel destroyed much of Iran’s air-defense system, as well as a major Iranian missile plant. Yesterday, two top Iranian officials threatened to continue the cycle of retaliation.
“We have never left an aggression unanswered in 40 years,” said Gen. Ali Fadavi, the deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, according to Iranian media.
In my column several weeks ago, I looked at how the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas, the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and the widening war between Israel, Iran and Iranian-backed militant groups have destabilized the equilibrium of power in the Middle East. The new mix of uncertainty and aggression threatens to spiral into all-out war.
Even with dual-track peace talks underway to resolve conflicts between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the region is far from stable. Add in the uncertainty of the U.S. election next week, and the prospect of re-establishing an equilibrium seems even more remote.
I talked to experts on game theory and international relations about how they see the situation, and what they expect in the coming weeks and months.
An old equilibrium shattered
For years, Israel and Iran was in a state of stable but occasionally violent equilibrium.
The two countries were engaged in what amounted to a shadow war, but neither wanted all-out conflict. Each side had the ability to harm the other, and enough interest in avoiding that harm, to maintain a rough balance of mutual deterrence.
Israel had the more powerful army — and the support of an even stronger ally, the United States — while Iran cultivated a group of proxy militias that surrounded Israel. It made clear that any attack on Iran would be met with devastating retaliation.
That equilibrium began to crumble on Oct. 7, 2023, when militants from Hamas, an Iran-backed group, attacked Israel, massacring civilians and taking some 250 hostages. Hamas clearly hoped its attack would be the opening salvo of a broader war against Israel. Hezbollah fired rockets and missiles at Israel in support of Hamas, but both Iran and Hezbollah signaled that they did not want to escalate. Israel, for its part, engaged in heavy warfare against Hamas in Gaza, but initially avoided escalation with Iran or Hezbollah.
In recent months, the equilibrium began to disintegrate.
In April, Israel and Iran traded direct strikes on each other’s territory following an Israeli airstrike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria.
In mid-September, Israel sharply escalated its actions against Hezbollah with a heavy bombing campaign in Lebanon along with targeted attacks that have killed much of Hezbollah’s senior leadership, before launching a ground incursion on Oct. 1.
In early October, Iran fired more than 180 ballistic missiles at Israeli soil, a significant escalation in direct hostilities.
And on Saturday, Israel delivered its long-awaited response to Iran’s attack: a series of airstrikes that destroyed much of Iran’s air-defense system.
Achieving ‘strategic stability’
There is little doubt that Israel is in a better strategic position today than it was before the Oct. 7 attacks, though they left deep scars on the country’s psyche. The Iranian “axis of resistance” — including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the Houthi rebels in Yemen — has been dramatically weakened.
“Hamas is still out there, but it has been disabled in various ways. Hezbollah’s entire leadership has been decapitated, and the Israelis have done a lot of damage to Hezbollah,” said Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Israeli attack on Iran on Oct. 26 seems to have severely damaged Iranian air defenses, impeding Iran’s ability to defend itself against future strikes. The Israelis, Cook said, “now kind of rule the Iranian sky.”
However, it is not yet clear whether Israel’s new advantage will lead to a new equilibrium.
There are two primary ways of achieving “strategic stability,” according to Daniel Sobelman, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the author of a forthcoming book, “Axis of Resistance: Asymmetric Deterrence and Rules of the Game in Contemporary Middle East Conflicts.”
The first is hegemony, in which one party defeats the other so decisively that it can enforce its will. That’s how World War II ended, for instance, with the Allies’ defeat of the Axis powers. The other is equilibrium, in which there is a relatively symmetrical balance of power, so that all parties are deterred from escalation. That roughly describes the Middle East before the Oct. 7 attacks
Israel’s new advantage, while significant, falls far short of the kind of victory needed for a stable hegemony. Its strategic gains have been enough to destabilize the previous equilibrium — but a new one has not yet emerged. That is a combustible state of affairs, Sobelman said.
Drawing new red lines
A new equilibrium “will typically be achieved, sadly, through mutual exhaustion and through a stalemate,” Sobelman said. “Both parties have to be able to counterbalance each other, to be seen as a force to be reckoned with.”
They must also develop a “mutually intelligible language,” he said, that communicates what type of action will maintain the status quo, and what will be treated as a red line that, if crossed, would dramatically escalate hostilities.
In the weeks leading up to Israel’s counter-strike, U.S. diplomats lobbied Israel not to hit Iran’s nuclear or oil facilities. And Iranian diplomats held high-profile talks with Gulf States like the United Arab Emirates, making the implicit point that Gulf oil facilities were vulnerable to an attack by Iran if Israel hit Iran’s own oil sites.
“What we saw over the past several weeks was that Israel, Iran, and the U.S. were kind of bargaining over what would count as acceptable, what would count as an egregious violation of an Iranian red line,” Sobelman said.
“We’ve moved to a higher level of exchange between the Israelis and the Iranians,” added Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan research institute that studies peace and security.
However, it’s not yet clear whether the tit-for-tat exchange between them has ended, as Iran’s recent comments made clear.
Another major factor in that uncertainty is Israel’s relationship with the United States, and how the results of next week’s election might affect the complex dynamics of the Middle East.
“At this point, I suspect the equilibrium in the Middle East is actually somewhere in Pennsylvania — or at least another swing state,” Ashford said, half-jokingly. “It’s just a bit too early to call this, I’m afraid.”
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