“I don’t think war is inevitable,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Wednesday, after senior leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas were killed in pinpoint attacks in a suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, and Tehran. He was right; war is never inevitable until it breaks out. But suddenly the possibility of an all-in conflict of unpredictable breadth between Israel and its Iran-backed enemiesinplay, into which the United States would most likely be drawn, had become a dangerous possibility.
Israel acknowledged the first strike, which killed Fuad Shukr, a senior military commander of Hezbollah, on Tuesday, but said nothing about the second, the assassination of a top Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in the capital of Iran. He was killed by an explosive device planted in an Iranian guesthouse weeks earlier, and both Iran and Hamas accused Israel of doing it.
The war whoops sounded instantly and loudly. Even in the confusing and shifting enmities of the Middle East there are unspoken red lines, and two assassinations inside capital cities was a provocation that demands retaliation. For Iran, the killing of a senior Hamas leader while he was attending the inauguration of the new Iranian president was a humiliation that the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared it was “our duty” to avenge. Mr. Haniyeh, moreover, was a top Hamas negotiator in cease-fire talks, raising questions about whether those negotiations would be put on a long hold.
Nonetheless, Mr. Austin, who was on a visit to the Philippines, went on to suggest that there was still room for diplomacy. He and the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who was also traveling in Asia, both acknowledged that they had no advance warning of the attack on Mr. Haniyeh — a sobering testimony to the limits of American leverage over a conflict on which the United States has expended vast treasure and diplomatic capital over many decades.
Even as the administration counseled restraint, Mr. Austin acknowledged that in the event of war, the United States would do what it has always done: “We certainly will help defend Israel.”
This is “uncharted territory,” as David Horovitz, the founding editor of The Times of Israel, wrote. The war that began 10 months ago with Hamas’s attack on Israel seems likely to continue, but its path is far from clear.
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