WASHINGTON — A few weeks before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, a senior White House official visited eastern Lebanon for a sightseeing trip that doubled as a dramatic political statement.

Hochstein Tours Ruins of Baalbek

The official, Amos Hochstein, one of President Joe Biden’s most trusted national security advisers, toured the ancient ruins of Baalbek in an area well known as a stronghold of Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist group sponsored by Iran.

Wearing white pants and a golf shirt, and with no security entourage, Hochstein marveled at the artifacts and snapped photos of the onetime Roman city’s crumbling stone walls and columns. Keeping watch from a distance were several muscular men in black T-shirts — presumed Hezbollah militiamen.

The trip caused a minor sensation in Lebanese news media, which wondered how a top U.S. official — one born in Israel, no less — was able to move so freely on Hezbollah turf.

The trip demonstrated the surprising way Hochstein has become one of the few Americans trusted, however grudgingly, by Hezbollah’s leadership. And that trust is crucial today, now that Biden has designated Hochstein as his diplomatic point man for preventing clashes across the Israel-Lebanon border from exploding into a war that could be even more devastating than the conflict in the Gaza Strip.

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Biden’s Top Aide for Global Energy and Infrastructure

Officially, Hochstein, 51, is Biden’s top aide for global energy and infrastructure. But his wonky title does not capture the ever-broadening portfolio bestowed upon him by a president whose close confidence he has earned over more than a decade and who is said to view his adviser as a results-getting “doer.”

Hochstein has made at least five trips to Israel and Lebanon since the war in Gaza prompted Hezbollah to launch rocket attacks on northern Israel in solidarity with Hamas. He speaks constantly with Lebanese officials as well as top Israeli officials, sometimes including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“He’s a very close adviser of the president,” said Edward M. Gabriel, the president of the American Task Force on Lebanon, a nonprofit organization in Washington that seeks better relations between the United States and Lebanon. “As a consequence, I think he can speak with a lot of authority when he’s in the field.”

Last week, Hochstein, who cuts a dashing profile in his slim-fitting suits and slicked-back hair, was in Paris coordinating U.S. and French efforts to bring calm to the Israel-Lebanon border. In mid-June, he saw officials in both countries, and a week later met twice in Washington with Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, with whom he speaks on a regular basis.

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Hochstein’s Main Envoy to Saudi Arabia

In addition to his work on the Israel-Hezbollah file, Hochstein has also been one of Biden’s main envoys to Saudi Arabia. He was among the U.S. officials who helped convince Biden that the United States should not ostracize Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman despite revulsion over the murder of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

Working in tandem with a White House colleague, Brett McGurk, the top National Security Council official for Middle East affairs, he has led quiet diplomacy in pursuit of an ambitious grand bargain that would include a U.S.-Saudi security agreement and normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Hochstein has met with Crown Prince Mohammed more than a dozen times, talks that have also included Saudi oil production plans. (Hochstein reports to and works closely with the president’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan.)

A former lobbyist, congressional aide and executive at the natural gas firm Tellurian, Hochstein is passionate about renewable energy, and has trumpeted his purchase of an all-electric Ford Mustang with rooftop solar panels, although some environmental activists have complained about his background in the fossil fuel industry.

He joined the Biden administration as the State Department’s top energy official, helping to manage oil and gas market disruptions after Russia invaded Ukraine. He was reassigned to Biden’s White House staff early last year, reflecting the trust he has built with Biden over many years, including during numerous foreign trips he joined when Biden was vice president and Hochstein was a State Department energy policy official.

“President Biden likes and admires him,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who recently hosted Hochstein for an online conversation. “Anyone who can help convince President Biden that MBS should move from being a pariah to a partner — that takes a lot of lifting,” he added, referring to Crown Prince Mohammed by his initials.

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In the Middle of a Simmering Crisis

Hochstein is now in the daily thick of a simmering crisis that has become one of the Biden administration’s greatest worries: that low-grade fighting between Israel and Hezbollah could escalate into a nightmare scenario that draws Iran and the United States into the conflict more directly.

Based in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah was formed in the 1980s to resist Israel’s invasion of the country. It has developed a huge arsenal of rockets and missiles capable of inflicting enormous damage on Israel’s cities.

“There is a very active mini-war going on between Israel and Lebanon,” Hochstein said during his Carnegie Endowment talk. “Thousands of rockets have been fired from Lebanon into Israel, and thousands of rounds have been shot by Israel into Lebanon.” (The White House declined to make Hochstein available for an interview.)

The fighting has driven some 60,000 Israelis from the border area and displaced 90,000 Lebanese. In remarks on July 1, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Israel had “effectively lost sovereignty” in its north because of Hezbollah’s attacks.

In addition to striking Hezbollah positions over the past several months, Israel has also targeted some of its top commanders. A July 3 drone strike on one commander prompted a retaliatory barrage of more than 100 rockets into Israel. On Tuesday, Hezbollah said an Israeli strike in Syria killed a former bodyguard of the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah; a retaliatory attack killed two Israeli parents.

Casualties on both sides have been low relative to the fighting, Hochstein said at Carnegie. But every day without a diplomatic solution carries risk, he warned, such as an errant missile mistakenly striking a “bus full of children.”

That, he said, could lead to retaliation that triggers all-out conflict “even though both sides probably understand that a fuller or deeper-scale war is in neither side’s interest.”

Netanyahu has faced growing pressure to restore security so that displaced Israelis can return home safe from Hezbollah rockets, not to mention the now-vivid fear of an Oct. 7-style assault. U.S. officials say that as Israel scales down its campaign against a weakened Hamas in Gaza, it may turn its sights toward a possible war against Hezbollah.

Hochstein’s mission is to find a diplomatic alternative. U.S. officials say the best hope is a cease-fire in Gaza, which Hezbollah leaders say would cause them to stop their attacks. But even then, Israel would still insist that its northern border be made more secure.

So in addition to trying to restrain the two sides from major escalation, Hochstein has been negotiating a plan under which Hezbollah would pull back its forces several miles from Israel’s border — possibly in return for U.S. economic aid for southern Lebanon and changes to Israeli military positions.

During his mid-June trip, Hochstein delivered a particularly sensitive message to Hezbollah. Fearing a miscalculation, he warned its leaders not to assume that the United States could restrain Israel from launching a full-scale attack on the group, according to people familiar with the exchange.

Hochstein’s background — he is not a trained foreign service officer — has raised some eyebrows among diplomats who note that he is carrying out the sort of sensitive work typically handled by State Department regional experts.

Analysts say that the foreign officials Hochstein speaks with respect his closeness with Biden.

And as Biden’s political standing has wavered amid doubts about his viability as the Democratic presidential nominee, Hochstein has made his own opinion clear.

After The New York Times editorial board on June 28 called on Biden to leave the race, Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., used a profanity in dismissing the editorial on social media.

Hochstein promptly reposted the message on his personal account.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Michael Crowley/Haiyun Jiang
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