Inside the Frantic U.S. Efforts to Contain a Mideast Disaster

As Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken flew to Mongolia on July 31, his mind was on events far away, in the Middle East. Hours earlier, Israel had assassinated a top Hamas leader in Tehran, and Iranian officials were vowing retaliation for the murder of a close ally on their soil.

Using a secure phone in his private compartment of the plane, Mr. Blinken spoke to several foreign officials in the hours after the killing, asking them to urge Iran against taking any action that could lead to all-out war with Israel.

Days later, one of the officials, the foreign minister of Jordan, Ayman Safadi, visited Tehran and called for “peace, stability and security.”

President Biden also quickly persuaded the leaders of Egypt and Qatar to schedule a new round of talks aiming to secure a cease-fire in Gaza. Those meetings had an unstated purpose as well: discouraging Iran from mounting an attack that could derail the talks and make Tehran look like a spoiler.

In the month since Israel’s assassination of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, U.S. officials have worked almost nonstop to contain the latest tit for tat, with Israel on one side and Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah on the other. They are desperate to avert a regional war that they fear could pull the United States into the fighting.

So far, that kind of disaster has been avoided, however narrowly.

Biden officials believe they have played an important role in staving off the worst, though they concede that other factors have kept a precarious lid on the fast-boiling pot. And while they have managed to contain the wider war for now, they have not secured a cease-fire in Gaza, a failure that could ultimately undermine their work.

Reinforcing the point, U.S. diplomacy has sprung into action again this week, in an effort to prevent a major Israeli military operation in the West Bank from triggering new waves of violence in the region.

The U.S. diplomatic scramble, combined with displays of military force, shows that the United States is determined to prevent a wider conflagration — and prepared to strike powerfully in support of Israel, if necessary.

It is becoming an all-too-familiar drill: A similar diplomatic scramble helped to contain a direct exchange of fire between Israel and Iran in April, after Israel killed a senior Iranian commander in Lebanon.

The messages have been sent not just to Iran but to Israel. Last week, amid signs that Israel was preparing to strike Iran’s ally in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah, Mr. Blinken flew to Tel Aviv. There, he delivered a different message to Israeli officials: Washington will support a pre-emptive Israeli strike against Hezbollah equipment or forces poised to launch any imminent attack, according to a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.

But, again hoping to head off a dangerous escalation, Mr. Blinken added that Israel should not use the opportunity to mount a broader offensive against the Lebanese group.

Israel struck hard but narrowly on Sunday, destroying Hezbollah weapons preparing to strike Israel, in presumed retaliation for Israel’s killing of one of the group’s senior commanders in Beirut weeks before. A Hezbollah rocket salvo fired in response — after the Biden White House passed messages to the Iran-backed group urging restraint — inflicted limited damage. Both sides claimed victory, and senior Biden officials heaved a collective sigh of relief.

“I think the U.S. diplomatic efforts have played a central role in keeping the pressure and keeping the conflict between Lebanon and Israel from expanding more than it has so far and from turning it into an all-out war,” said Maha Yahya, the director of the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

Factors that have little to do with the United States have also helped avert a wider war, officials and analysts say. Iran and Hezbollah fear that they could suffer badly from an all-out conflict. (Hamas, by contrast, may have staged the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel with the hope of forcing the region into such a war.) None of the parties want to be blamed for derailing talks to stop the fighting in Gaza. Iran has a newly elected moderate president who is interested in better relations with the United States, and a wider war with tremendous costs could also threaten the leading clerics’ grip on power.

The nation with the most to lose could be Lebanon, with its economy in crisis, a reality that leaders of Hezbollah, a prominent political and military group there, recognize.

“They know if they were to strike Israel with the capacity they have, Israel will hit back and hit back with everything they have,” said Nader Hashemi, a professor of Middle East politics at Georgetown University. “Lebanon is currently a fragile state.”

Nevertheless, he said, the region will not see calm unless a Gaza cease-fire can be reached between Israel and Hamas, which have negotiated fruitlessly for months. “We’re approaching the one-year anniversary of this war; so what does that say about U.S. diplomacy?” Mr. Hashemi said. He noted that Mr. Biden had yet to use an important source of leverage — threatening to cut off weapons aid to Israel.

Biden administration officials argue the crisis could be much worse if not for their diplomacy.

Mr. Biden’s top aides have worked the phones and traveled to the Middle East — Mr. Blinken was backed up by Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein, two National Security Council aides who handle Middle East affairs, and William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, who has been the lead American negotiator in the cease-fire and hostage talks.

At the same time, the U.S. government has not been shy about backing up its diplomacy with the threat of devastating military force.

A U.S. Military Presence

On Aug. 2, two days after Mr. Haniyeh’s assassination and as Mr. Blinken and others furiously called foreign officials, the Pentagon began to flex American muscle.

The Defense Department announced that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had ordered the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to relieve the Theodore Roosevelt in the Gulf of Oman, ensuring no gap in major American naval presence in the region.

Mr. Austin also directed additional F-22 fighters to the region, and took the unusual step of announcing the deployment of the guided-missile submarine Georgia to the Middle East. The Pentagon rarely publicizes the movements of its submarine fleet.

The Georgia, a nuclear-powered submarine, can fire dozens of cruise missiles and carry teams of Navy SEAL commandos.

The message was clear to Iran: Do not escalate.

On Aug. 11, the Defense Department underscored that message, noting that Mr. Austin had ordered the Navy to accelerate the Lincoln’s arrival.

At about the same time, Dana Stroul, the Defense Department’s former top Middle East policy specialist, publicly urged the Biden administration to consider striking inside Iran itself.

“Tehran is most likely to stand down if its leaders perceive the regime’s own security is at risk,” she wrote in an opinion article in The New York Times. Ms. Stroul, who maintains close ties with her former colleagues, urged Mr. Biden to consider signaling that he was open to attacking not just Iranian-backed militias in places like Iraq and Syria, as the United States has done for years, but also sites in Iran, “such as weapons storage or production facilities.”

All the while, top Israeli and American officials and commanders kept in close contact, with Mr. Austin urging his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, to exercise restraint in its response to whatever attack Hezbollah and Iran might launch. In all, the two men spoke at least 10 times during the crisis.

Then on Saturday, a few days after Mr. Blinken departed Israel, having delivered his own message of restraint, Israeli officials warned the Americans that they had detected clear signs that Hezbollah was planning to launch a major drone and rocket attack early Sunday. Israeli jets conducted a pre-emptive strike to knock out many of the rocket launchers.

Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said on Monday that the Pentagon did not participate in the Israeli strikes, but that the United States did provide imagery and other intelligence to help Israel track and shoot down hundreds of rockets that Hezbollah eventually fired.

The Pentagon assesses that its buildup of American military force has at least for now deterred Iran and its proxies from carrying out a broader attack against Israel, General Ryder said on Monday.

“The Iranians got cold feet,” said Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the former head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, which oversees Middle East operations.

American intelligence and military officials say that Iran could still avenge the killing of Mr. Haniyeh.

On Monday, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the immediate risk of a regional war had eased but was not necessarily over.

“How Iran responds will dictate how Israel responds, which will dictate whether there is going to be a broader conflict or not,” General Brown told Reuters after wrapping up a weekend trip to Jordan, Egypt and Israel.

An Impasse Over Gaza

While U.S. officials are relieved that a wider war has so far been avoided, they have expressed frustration in private that they have failed to stop the fighting in Gaza. An estimated 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli strikes in the territory, where Hamas continues to hold scores of hostages seized in the Oct. 7 attacks, which killed about 1,200 people.

Mr. Blinken has repeatedly visited Israel and said publicly that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had assured him that he would accept cease-fire terms backed by the United States.

But Mr. Netanyahu has appeared to contradict that claim more than once. Just after Mr. Blinken’s visit last week, Israeli media reported that Mr. Netanyahu had told the families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza that he would never accept concessions demanded by Hamas, including the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza’s border with Israel.

“I can’t speak to what he’s quoted as saying,” Mr. Blinken told reporters soon after leaving Israel. “I can just speak to what I heard from him directly yesterday when we spent three hours together.”

Julian E. Barnes and Robert Jimison contributed reporting.