Unless Israel chooses, against the reported wishes of its closest and most vital ally, the United States, to engage Iran in an escalated armed confrontation, the missile and drone attack launched by Iran against Israel is likely more to end a chapter of rising tensions in the Middle East, following Israel’s unacknowledged attack on an Iranian consular building in Damascus, the capital of Syria, earlier this month, rather than open a new one. Iran has now salvaged its honour, by having carried out a retaliatory attack.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations said the action was a “legitimate” defensive response to the strike in Damascus, which Israel hasn’t acknowledged carrying out, reports Bloomberg. “The matter can be deemed concluded,” it said in a social media post. “However, should the Israeli regime make another mistake, Iran’s response will be considerably more severe.”
What it Means for The US
Nor has Israel put its citizens on any higher alert than what is customary in that country, suggesting that Israel also does not propose to escalate matters, at least for the time being. It is vital for the Biden administration to avoid any large-scale conflagration that would send oil prices shooting up and rekindling the cost-of-living fire the US Fed has managed to put out, for the most part. Any resurgence in domestic inflation would damage President Biden’s re-election prospects.
This does not mean that Israel has meekly caved in to US pressure. Rather, Israel’s prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu has scored a victory of sorts, by provoking an Iranian retaliation for the Israeli attack that killed senior officials of the elite Kutz force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Iranian attack has forced Israel’s allies to close ranks in support of Israel, setting aside, for the moment, their criticism of the wanton killing of Palestinian civilians Israel has been carrying out in Gaza. Netanyahu has been under increasing pressure from his domestic critics, relatives of the hostages remaining in Hamas captivity and even his right-wing, ultra-orthodox, jingoistic allies what want Jewish settlers to overrun even the West Bank. The Israeli attack gives him respite from all this.
Who does it Benefit the Most?
However, the biggest beneficiary of the Iranian honour strike could be Ukraine. With Israel having come under attack from Iran, the House Republicans, who have been blocking a $70 billion defence bill to send aid to Israel and Ukraine, would come under immense pressure to lift their objections and pass the bill. And it is unlikely that there would be sufficient time to go through the laborious process of unbundling the defence aid bill into separate segments for Israel and Ukraine before urgently needed aid to Israel is disbursed. If the bill is passed, Ukraine’s war effort would get the boost, without which it would be forced to enter into peace negotiations with Moscow later this year.
As things stand, the heightened perception of risk would cause the risk premium in the pricing of oil to go up, adversely affecting inflation and growth across the world, more damagingly in developing countries, including India. But if the Iran-Israel standoff does not spiral out of control, that risk would stabilize to the level already calibrated to the Gaza war. The prolongation of the war in Ukraine would mean the negation of a possible source of reduction of global tensions.
As things stand now, the Iranian strike signals return to the normal level of crazy in the deranged geopolitics of the Middle East.
(TK Arun is a senior journalist.)
Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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