Given the rapid acceleration of military events, the date of 16 September has now receded into the distant background, even though barely two weeks have passed. Yet, that day remains vitally important for understanding the nature of contemporary Western strategy, and marks the beginning of its collapse.
The strategy of doing nothing
On that mid-September day, the Biden administration’s envoy Amos Hochstein visited Israel to reiterate some simple, and rather tired, ideas. Specifically, hitting Hezbollah harder would not help Israel, and it would increase the danger of a large war, so the administration sought a diplomatic solution. All of that was declared on what was then the 345 day since Hezbollah began firing on Israel on 8 October last year.
What Hochstein conveyed to Israel is the essence of what passes for the West’s strategy in autumn 2024. A strategy of not rocking the boat, not making the situation worse than it already is, by doing very little, preferably nothing at all. The goal is to preserve the status quo, the still fairly comfortable and safe present enjoyed by the West, if not by Israel, Ukraine and other countries.
The concomitant, unavoidable, obsession is that with diplomacy. If the task at hand is to maintain safety in the immediate term by eliminating almost all risk, it inevitably becomes grossly inappropriate to contemplate war. After all, even a fool knows that wars are not risk-free. Therefore, the fool reaches for that magic wand, diplomacy.
Diplomacy as a delusion
What the fool knows not, being a fool, is that the achievements of Western diplomacy over the past many decades are prominent by their absence. In my previous article on this sad topic, I discussed the catastrophe that has overtaken the Korean peninsula as a result of decades of American-led diplomacy. The Stalinist Kim regime is in power, equipped with intercontinental missiles and nuclear weapons, and under no effective pressure.
Everywhere else in the world, diplomacy has been similarly distant from triumph. Take the case of Iran. More than 22 years ago, on 14 August 2002, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an opposition group, accused Iran of developing nuclear weapons in secret, including by building a uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. It was later suggested that U.S. intelligence had discovered this some months earlier, but in either case it took another 16 months for the first of several failed diplomatic arrangements with Iran.
On 21 October 2003, not by coincidence a mere six months after the fall of Baghdad to coalition forces, Iran agreed with Britain, France and Germany that it would answer outstanding questions about its nuclear program and suspend uranium enrichment. This supposed diplomatic achievement lasted slightly longer than two years, after which Iran resumed enrichment at Natanz in January 2006.
This is the general pattern of Western diplomacy with hostile states. Even to initiate diplomacy, a combination of difficult intelligence work and military pressure, at least of the indirect kind, is needed. Then, once negotiations begin, the hostile state eventually agrees to unenforceable concessions, in order to renege on them at the appropriate time. The West, determined to avoid that unpleasant outcome, war, sidles gradually towards the worst possible outcome, a larger war at a later date.
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Amos Hochstein with Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati
(Photo: Dalati Nohra/ Reuters)
In substance, the West’s diplomacy only gives its enemies the time and peace of mind needed to become more dangerous. So it has been with Iran. After wasting another eight years, the West was led by the utterly irresponsible Obama administration into a vile nuclear agreement with Iran. This was the Joint Plan of Action of 24 November 2013, which enabled Iran to continue to enrich uranium, and to test more advanced centrifuges for enriching uranium in the future.
President Obama and his Secretary of State, John Kerry, possessed the necessary combination of immorality and stupidity to persist until, on 20 July 2015, they turned the awful 2013 deal into the catastrophic Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This formally permitted Iran to operate 5,060 enrichment centrifuges, and conduct research with uranium on more advanced centrifuges. On the day when the deal was signed, then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter shamelessly promised Israel that “we will be watching Iran very closely.”
All the interminable years of diplomacy, all the long-winded promises were shown to be worth nothing in April 2018. Then, Israel, and not the United States or any other signatory of the repugnant Iran deal, made public that its intelligence service had extracted from a secret archive in Tehran the plans of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Project Amad. The administration of President Trump explicitly referred to the concealment of these plans by Iran as proof of Iran’s bad faith in signing the deal and failure to keep its terms, and so the U.S. withdrew from the deal on 8 May 2018.
Neither Trump, nor his successor President Biden, nor any other leader of any other Western signatory of the catastrophic 2015 agreement, ever found the strength to draw the conclusion that must be drawn. Diplomacy with hostile states in general, and with Iran in particular, is a road to disaster.
If Iran’s nuclear program is to be dismantled, war is the only way. Yet, since the very purpose of Western strategy is to preserve the status quo and avoid war, futile and repulsive attempts to pursue diplomacy with Iran continue to this day. As they go on, Donald Trump nonsensically compares Iran’s attack on Israel to “two kids fighting in the schoolyard,” while his election opponent Kamala Harris speaks of continuing to “work with our allies ... to disrupt Iran’s aggressive behavior.” Neither of the two non-entities understands how irrelevant their talk has become.
The West has lost control of events
Western rhetoric became inconsequential in February 2022, when Russia, one of the two non-Western signatories of the deal with Iran along with China, invaded all of Ukraine. Russia has been openly engaging in nuclear blackmail of the West ever since. Already in June of that year, China and Russia jointly opposed the West’s feeble criticism of Iran’s insufficient cooperation with nuclear inspectors. Almost 20 years after the diplomacy around Iran’s nuclear program began, it publicly imploded. Over those two decades, the West had comprehensively lost control of events, while Iran came within reach of nuclear warheads.
Meanwhile, the catastrophic 2015 agreement continues to bear poisoned fruit. On 18 October 2023, eleven days after Hamas massacred Israeli civilians, United Nations restrictions on Iran’s missile and drone programs expired. Iran, which was already supplying drones to Russia in breach of those restrictions, can now do so in the knowledge that there are few if any restraints on its actions, and that it is free to use the proceeds of its sales to Russia to further develop its own arsenal.
The only virtue of the 2015 deal, the West’s ability to ‘snapback’ all sanctions previously imposed on Iran, has naturally proved a hollow one. Busy attempting to ‘de-escalate tensions,’ a miserable euphemism for pretending that the collapsing status quo can still be upheld, Western European states remain parties to the deal and refuse to contemplate ‘snapping back’ sanctions. Nothing remains of Western diplomacy but desperation.
Sixteen days of desperation
Desperation, mixed with complete moral bankruptcy, was the guiding star of what passed for Western diplomacy between Hochstein’s visit on 16 September, and Iran’s missile attack on Israel on 1 October.
Hochstein’s predictably worthless visit to Israel was rapidly followed by various successful Israeli offensive actions against Hezbollah, up to and including the killing of the commander of its rocket branch, Ibrahim Qubaisi, on the afternoon of 24 September. Instead of prompting some sobriety in Western thought and action, this led to a grotesque demonstration of desperation, faintly disguised as diplomacy.
The joint statement of 25 September issued by 38 countries, including the 27 members of the European Union and also the United States, is one of the most obscene documents in the many centuries of international diplomacy. As Israel was inflicting substantial damage on Hezbollah, this statement called for “an immediate 21 day ceasefire,” which would have given the terrorists in Lebanon vital relief from Israeli pressure.
This same text did not even mention the word ‘terrorism,’ or any derivative thereof. It also omitted all mention of Hezbollah. It did call for a “diplomatic settlement” in Lebanon, and also a ceasefire in Gaza. It was nothing less than an attempt to force Israel to capitulate, to allow the terrorists on its borders to survive, to reorganize, and to prepare to murder Israelis more effectively on an even greater scale.
The Biden administration was sufficiently desperate to force this on America’s closest ally that it anonymously briefed multiple members of the press that “we’re expecting the deal in the coming hours.” Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet deserve the utmost credit for treating these histrionics with contempt, and standing up to a form of diplomatic extortion which is not less than criminal, because of the threat that it poses to Israel’s survival.
Two days after the statement, on Friday 27 September, State Department Counselor Tom Sullivan was still attempting to press on with a ‘diplomatic solution,’ and insistently failing to acknowledge that no such solution is in fact possible now, or was possible in the past. It was most appropriate that Israel closed out that day by killing Hassan Nasrallah.
Nasrallah’s killing was not only an important success against terrorism, it also forced the Biden administration further into a self-created corner. On 29 September, National Security Spokesman John Kirby had to concede that the deaths of Nasrallah and others were “good for the region, good for the world.” Kirby did not elaborate that this meant that the administration had desperately attempted to prevent these good developments by imposing a ceasefire on Israel.
The administration is not alone in its desperation. The spokesman of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called “on all sides to show restraint, to step back from the brink and avoid any further escalation” the day after Kirby’s television appearance. Even after Iran’s missile attack on 1 October, the same spokesman was still calling for ‘de-escalation’, while issuing a routine condemnation of Iran. Israel is meant to stop fighting for its survival, simply because Britain does not know, and does not want to know, how to stop Iran.
The West’s practical response to Iran’s attack has been of very limited value. Two U.S. Navy destroyers, the USS Bulkeley (DDG-84) and USS Cole (DDG-67), did fire a dozen interceptors, but this was a fraction of the overall effort needed to defeat an attack in which approximately 200 Iranian missiles were launched. A Navy which has 237 combat ships in service, including dozens of destroyers, could have done much more, but was neither organized nor ordered to do so.
The rest of the West did not intercept a single ballistic missile, and Britain contributed nothing more than two Typhoon fighters which are ludicrously claimed to have provided deterrence, without attacking any targets. British and other Allied aircraft cannot in fact attack any ballistic targets, because what was called the Air-Launched Hit-to-Kill (ALHTK) initiative, involving the launch of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missiles from aircraft against ballistic missiles, which was advertised in 2007, never came to anything. A natural consequence of the West’s inability to seriously contemplate, and to prepare for, war.
With their direct military contribution to Israel’s defense minimal, the leading nations of the West are stuck in a loop, in which they continue to highlight their own irrelevance and impotence. On 24 September, the G7 called “for a stop to the current destructive cycle.” On 2 October, it was still insisting, with no evidence and no attempt at original thought, that a non-specific “diplomatic solution is still possible.” The message is clear. Israel’s survival is Israel’s problem, and the West has no answer to anything, no desire other than to keep rolling forward in neutral gear. This cannot and will not continue for long.
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Dan Zamansky is a British-Israeli independent historian and author of The New World Crisis, a Substack analyzing the problems of today.