Donald Trump’s feud with North Korea’s “Little Rocket Man” notwithstanding, the most likely major war on the horizon is one between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia that, thanks to years of experience and an increasingly lethal arsenal, has become part of the vanguard in Iran’s drive for hegemony in the Near East. Indeed, such a war would be a huge next step for Iran after its rescue of the Assad regime in Syria and its increasingly powerful posture in post-ISIS Iraq. For just such reasons, this war would be a potential tipping point in the Middle East balance of power, a frightfully violent prospect that is equally ripe with strategic opportunity for the United States.
As Willy Stern chronicled in these pages last year (“Missiles Everywhere,” June 20, 2016), an Israel-Hezbollah conflict would be nasty and brutish but not short. Ever since its 2006 clash with Israel, Hezbollah has been stockpiling hundreds of thousands of rockets, missiles, and mortars capable of reaching not just border areas but deep into Israel. This arsenal includes hundreds of ballistic missiles capable of carrying chemical warheads—some of Assad’s chemical weaponry no doubt made its way to Hezbollah—as well as substantial conventional explosives. More important is their improved accuracy; Hezbollah might actually hit something for a change, and not just large cities like Jerusalem and Tel Aviv but military bases and airports. Despite Israel’s successful development of missile defenses like the “Iron Dome,” “Arrow,” and “David’s Sling,” it’s unlikely that an all-out or sustained series of attacks could be fully blunted.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has been making increasingly warlike comments in recent months and claimed in June that his men would be reinforced in battle by “tens . . . or even hundreds of thousands” of Shiite fighters from Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Nasrallah may be boasting, but Israeli intelligence assessments put the likely strength of such forces at about 40,000. In addition to expanding the number of Hezbollah-like militias it commands, Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, has improved its ability to shuttle forces to decisive points. In the fight to evict ISIS from western Iraq, the Iranian proxy Popular Mobilization Units have played as critical a role as U.S. or Iraqi regular forces, not least in the recent clashes that drove Kurdish militias out of Kirkuk.
Jeffrey White of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy has long argued that the next Israel-Hezbollah conflict would be quite unlike the 2006 edition of this “forever” war or any of the recent Israeli campaigns against Hamas. The numbers of missiles, including anti-ship cruise missiles, would dwarf previous Hezbollah salvos and, including upgraded versions of the ubiquitous Scud, could be launched from deep within Lebanon at targets deep within Israel. And the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) could well confront its nightmare scenario—a two-front war in the form of simultaneous attacks launched from the Syrian part of the Golan Heights. As White and his colleague Michael Eisenstadt recently noted, an IRGC general was killed in a January 2015 IDF airstrike while he was touring the Syrian Golan with Hezbollah hosts.
Israel has not faced such a powerful threat since the 1973 war, and confronting the Iran-Hezbollah-Assad coalition will tax the IDF heavily. To begin with, even if its missile defenses live up to their advertising, they cannot obviate the need to conduct counterstrikes into Lebanon and Syria. While the Israeli air force has long ruled the local skies, the proliferation of advanced Russian-made air defenses calls into question how rapidly—and at what cost—the IDF can establish or sustain the kind of air supremacy it will need. The best way to remove the Hezbollah missile threat is to seek and destroy the launchers or to deny use of customary launch sites. The Israelis have worked very hard to improve their mobile-missile-hunting abilities, but this would be a risky mission.
Moreover, the best missile defense is a large-scale ground assault. Both sides know this, and Israel’s enemies have made strenuous preparations for the IDF counterattacks—again, simultaneously into Lebanon and Syria—that must come. The IDF has worked to improve the survivability of its mechanized infantry and armored forces and the responsiveness, lethality, and accuracy of its artillery. For its part, Hezbollah, which showed considerable tactical skill in defending southern Lebanon in 2006, has added advanced anti-armor weaponry and new layers of defenses. The terrain in southern Lebanon and on the Golan is well suited for such purposes; the IDF will have to pick its way forward cautiously, through ambush after ambush, and ultimately it may have to go farther north and east than in 2006.
These daunting tactical challenges also, as in the past, generate strategic and geopolitical problems. The perception of victory often counts more than the battlefield result, both in the region and in the larger international contest. Nasrallah excels at spinning defeat into victory. The 2006 war began when Hezbollah captured two IDF soldiers. In an unguarded moment shortly after the cessation of hostilities, he admitted that he did not anticipate, “even by 1 percent,” that the snatch “would result in such a wide-scale war, as such a war did not take place in the history of wars. Had we known” what would result, “we would not have carried it out at all.” But in short order, survival became triumph, a bit of propaganda that caught on in outlets such as the Economist, which declared, “Nasrallah wins the war.” By now even many Israelis, especially on the political left, concur; in an otherwise thoughtful analysis of the current situation, Ha’aretz concluded that the 2006 campaign “remains a resounding failure.” The standard of victory for Israel remains almost impossibly high.
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Despite the gloomy view of the past and the foreboding about the future, it is also the case that since 2006 Israel’s northern border has been remarkably quiet. That’s even more remarkable considering the chaos that’s ripped Iraq and Syria apart and catapulted Iran to the fore. This is a ceasefire worth preserving.
It particularly behooves the United States to try to do so, although Donald Trump finds himself in a far worse position than was George W. Bush in 2006; the ebbing of American power and influence across the Middle East since the withdrawal from Iraq has had incalculable consequences. At the same time, the looming war presents an important opportunity.
To begin with, this is a case where Trump’s bluster and bellicosity may be an asset. It’s a chilling thought, but if deterrence depends on creating an effect in the mind of an adversary, the president’s loose lips or slippery Twitter fingers—even his apparently serious bromance with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—might give Iran some pause. Many Iran-watchers have noted Tehran’s relative caution in regard to Israel. Further, Iran strategy is perhaps the one issue on which Trump and his senior advisers see eye-to-eye, especially in the case of Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who got himself fired by President Obama for being too focused on Iran. For once, the administration might enjoy credibility.
Should deterrence fail and conflict resume, it will be important for the United States to clearly and forcefully back the Israelis. The 1973 Yom Kippur war is worth recalling in this context. The Israelis were badly surprised when the Egyptian army crossed the Sinai and Syria attacked the Golan Heights. The IDF soon found itself in logistical as well as tactical trouble, and President Richard Nixon, against strong international pressure, ordered Operation Nickel Grass to help restore IDF losses. Beyond the material support, the gesture of political support was critical. While the Israelis have been planning and preparing for Hezbollah for years, their ability to sustain operations could well be stretched, and the international environment is every bit as hostile as in 1973.
Iran’s caution on Israel may owe something to a danger it senses, the flip side of which is an opportunity Washington may underestimate. A decisive Israeli victory against the Tehran-backed Hezbollah forces would be an unparalleled opportunity to stem the regional Iranian tide, thereby serving a prime U.S. national security interest. Such a victory would both reassure and relax America’s Arab allies, particularly in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Egypt—those most nervous about a flagging U.S. commitment in the Middle East. It would also remind the world that, despite Vladimir Putin’s meddling, the United States remains the most powerful external force in the region.
A renewal of war across Israel’s northern and eastern borders would be a savage thing, one that might escalate in unpredictable ways; if its proxies in Lebanon and Syria are in danger, one can expect Iran to react elsewhere, a mortal danger to U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just as Israelis have begun to prepare themselves for this prospect, so should we.
Thomas Donnelly is co-director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
