Israel Hezbollah ‘open-end battle’ US diplomatic helplessness ‘October Surprise’
Ahead of the US presidential election in November, Israel and Hezbollah are confirming the helplessness of US foreign policy in the ‘endless battle’, and an ‘October Surprise’ is expected with the military conflict in October escalating.
Hezbollah’s deputy leader Naim Qassem said the rocket attack on the 22nd was only the beginning of the “open-end battle” with Israel, saying, “We admit that we are suffering. We are human. But just as we are suffering, you will suffer too,” at the funeral of Commander Aqil.
He declared that Hezbollah would continue military operations against Israel to support the Gaza Strip, and that it would stop its attacks on Israel only after the Gaza Strip attacks ended, and declared that the attacks would continue before the ‘Gaza ceasefire’.
Late on the night of the 22nd, Hezbollah fired missiles and artillery at a military base in northern Israel, and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu announced continued fighting, saying “Israel will take all necessary measures to restore security in the north and allow people to return to their homes.” The Biden administration has been more hands-off than usual during a week of dramatic escalation between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militants, and senior U.S. officials are hesitant to engage in “full-scale crisis diplomacy” for fear of escalating the situation, the Associated Press reported on the 22nd. The AP diagnosed that the lack of “public deterrence” in response to the repeated explosions of the militant group’s pagers and radios aimed at assassinating a senior Hezbollah member and the Israeli airstrikes “risks triggering an all-out war between Israel and its Middle Eastern enemies and derailing the already shaky ceasefire negotiations in the Hamas conflict in the Gaza Strip.”
President Biden told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House that day that he was “concerned” when asked about the escalating tensions in the Middle East, but that “we will do everything we can to prevent a bigger war from breaking out,” the New York Times reported on the 22nd.
The escalation of the attacks came as two Biden administration officials were deployed to the Middle East that week to appeal for “calm” and “calm.”
The “ceasefire” brokered by U.S. diplomacy has already heightened the practice of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s hard-line right-wing government increasingly ignoring mediation efforts by key allies despite its reliance on the United States for weapons and military support, and has heightened pressure from the United States just before the U.S. presidential election. The disarmament has become blatant.
“The United States is now looking like a deer in the headlights,” Brian Katulis, a senior fellow for American foreign policy at the Middle East Institute in Washington, told the New York Times. “In words, actions, and behaviors, the United States is reacting to events rather than leading them.”
“We are no closer to that goal than we were a week ago,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters on the 20th, acknowledging the difficulty of blocking the escalation.
When asked about the pager bomb attack in Egypt, Secretary of State Blinken said, “There are incidents that threaten to make negotiations more difficult, to slow them down, to stop them, to derail them.” Biden’s officials had pinned some hopes on high-level contacts when Netanyahu visits New York next week to attend the UN General Assembly, but the Middle East is already so volatile that a Biden-style “firmly supportive of Israel” or a public statement of criticism as the election approaches would “do more harm than good,” the AP said.
When asked whether the Biden administration’s months-long visits to the Middle East without a ceasefire agreement had made Secretary Blinken and other officials look like “furniture” in regional capitals, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller reiterated his previous response, signaling a decline in the diplomacy-first strategy: “So far, we have succeeded in preventing this war from escalating into a full-scale local war.” Miller continued, “At times, the United States has sent messages to Iran, to allied militias in the region, and to Israel through intermediaries,” he said, repeating his previous response that day.
The AP said, “Critics say the Biden administration has pushed for negotiations on Gaza, but has repeatedly failed to get the warring parties to agree and has stalled amid the escalation of the conflict.” The Trump administration could do more diplomatically, including by working harder to bring Middle Eastern nations together and putting more pressure on Israel, Iran and their puppets to stop the war, said Katulis, an analyst at the Middle East Institute who has identified the Republican advantage in pressuring the Middle East.
On the 23rd, National Security Office Director Shin Won-sik appeared on Yonhap TV and said, regarding the possibility of North Korea's 7th nuclear test, "It is possible, including around the time of the US presidential election."
President Yoon Seok-yeol, who is cooperating with the Trump Republican Party's military buildup, met with the Czech president and prime minister on the 20th, just before the Czech local council election on the 22nd, in which the pro-Trump right wing won, and attempted to negotiate a contract for the Czech nuclear power plant.