Oh Oh! .... The Obama-Biden blueprint after Gaza

 

The Ottoman American Empire

byTony Badran

According to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Israel has “effectively lost sovereignty” over the north of its own country thanks to Hezbollah rocket attacks that have sent 80,000 Israelis fleeing from their homes and set at least 20,000 acres of Israeli land on fire. 

Blinken made his comments before the Hezbollah rocket attack that killed 12 children in the Israeli Golan Heights community of Majdal Shams, in the wake of which Washington signaled that it would be working to “contain the fallout” from the attack.

 In both cases, the Biden White House was closely following its existing blueprint for how it expects the eastern Mediterranean will work following the cease-fire it is attempting to enforce on Israel in Gaza, leaving Hamas in charge of the strip as the prelude to formally establishing a U.S.-recognized Palestinian state.

There is nothing secret about the administration’s plan for how it will administer the Levant, which it first unveiled in October 2022 in the form of the Israel-Lebanon maritime border deal brokered by White House emissary Amos Hochstein and signed by the then caretaker prime minister, Yair Lapid, in the waning days of his government. 

According to the U.S. blueprint, the United States and Iran will jointly administer a set of Levantine provinces, including Israel; a future Palestinian state; and Lebanon. Jordan, which is also part of the local geography, is configured as an American protectorate to balance out Syria, which was recognized by Barack Obama, publicly in 2015 and privately in his letters to Ali Khamenei, as an Iranian regional “equity” and will therefore apparently be administered solely by Iran. 

Whatever problems may arise between the three Levantine provinces and their local subdivisions are to be adjudicated jointly by the U.S.-Iran condominium, with local governing entities being free to plead their cases in Washington but powerless to take independent action without taking on both the global superpower and its regional partner.

The U.S.-Iranian understanding has governed and constrained Israeli action since the beginning of the Oct. 7 war. By ruling out any major military action against either Hezbollah or Iran and declaring the establishment of a Palestinian state to be a necessary outcome of the end of the Gaza war, it has bound the Israeli war effort in a straitjacket of strategic futility that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have tried their best to wriggle out of. 

While the tactical successes of the past few days—in which Israel targeted the upper echelons of the Iranian network in successive strikes in Beirut and Tehran—smartly turned the power vacuum in the White House to Israel’s advantage, it is unclear what, if any, strategic significance they will have past November.

In the last two days of May, the Obama-Biden team again put forward its vision for the joint U.S.-Iranian administration of the region in two back-to-back announcements laying out how the Gaza endgame will work.

 Front and center in these announcements was the U.S. plan for Gaza and the Palestinians, which came with the public imprimatur of Barack Obama himself, the leader of the ruling party in Washington. 

The Obama plan, which begins with ending Israel’s military operation against Hamas, includes international engagement and investment in Gaza, and the formalization of the status of the Palestinian Territories as a proto-state under American management.

The day before the proclamation on the Palestinians, Team Obama-Biden rolled out its plan for Israel’s northern neighbor, Lebanon. The president’s senior adviser, Hochstein, laid out a parallel multiphase plan for the Hezbollah-run country, which likewise features increased international engagement and cover, supplementing the United States’ substantial existing investments in so-called Lebanese state institutions, whose job is to run cover and provide support for Hezbollah.

What was original in the May announcements was the explicit connection that was made between the two plans, by both Washington and Hezbollah, the Iranian-led militia that rules Lebanon and acts as Iran’s local regent. The Lebanese plan would go into effect along with the Gaza plan, i.e., once Israel agrees to a cease-fire, with the Gaza plan being patterned on the Lebanese model. 

Biden and his team asserted that Israel has already agreed to the framework of the U.S. plan, signaling that Jerusalem, like Hezbollah, has signed on to Washington’s demands, just as it signed on to the Lebanese maritime deal—though, to be fair, it’s hard to see how the Israelis could turn Washington down in the middle of a war.

Hamas has not yet agreed to a cease-fire, though. Here, the United States appears to be faced by something of a logical conundrum. By granting Hamas victory in its war with Israel in the form of a cease-fire, followed by continuing control of the Gaza Strip, followed by a U.S.-backed state, the United States has in fact removed the motivation for Hamas to make any reciprocal concessions whatsoever. Why should it? Which is likely why the United States has engaged in only muted criticism of Israel’s military maneuvers in Rafah, which are the only form of leverage the United States has left to get the ball rolling on its regional blueprint.

So what does that blueprint consist of? 

It starts with U.S. investment and government grants to both countries that dwarf anything that the United States put into Gaza before the war. For Tehran, such investment is a subsidy; for the United States, it is a way of “containing the fallout” from any pesky rocket attacks, since Israel will be naturally constrained from bombing anything built with U.S. money or housing U.S. personnel. Then, there is active U.S. training and equipment for Lebanese and Palestinian armed forces, which in turn serve as shields and auxiliaries for much larger and more powerful terrorist armies that dominate both societies. Funding these (fictional) entities is like creating a large, heavily armed version of UNRWA, the supposed U.N. “relief agency” that funded Hamas and its tunnels before Oct. 7. Except the human shields these entities deploy will now be American military trainers.

What gives the Lebanon model its legs though, is not just that it joins the U.S. interest to the interests of the most powerful groups in Lebanese and Palestinian societies—namely, terrorist armies controlled by Iran. It extends beyond the shared particulars of international investment and engagement to a much older regional template with deep historical and geographical underpinnings. Perhaps the most relevant iteration of this template dates back to the mid-19th century. To understand the dynamics of the American-Iranian blueprint for Israel-Palestine-Lebanon, we therefore need to look to the late Ottoman Empire and its relationships with the Great Powers of Europe.