Over almost a year of war in the Middle East, major powers have proved incapable of stopping or even significantly influencing the fighting, a failure that reflects a turbulent world of decentralized authority that seems likely to endure.

Stop-and-start negotiations between Israel and Hamas to end the fighting in the Gaza Strip, pushed by the United States, have repeatedly been described by the Biden administration as on the verge of a breakthrough, only to fail. The current Western-led attempt to avert a full-scale Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon amounts to a scramble to avert disaster. Its chances of success seem deeply uncertain after the Israeli killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, on Friday.

“There’s more capability in more hands in a world where centrifugal forces are far stronger than centralizing ones,” said Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Middle East is the primary case study of this dangerous fragmentation.”

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A Vacuum in Hezbollah

The killing of Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah over more than three decades and the man who built the Shiite organization into one of the most powerful nonstate armed forces in the world, leaves a vacuum Hezbollah will likely take a long time to fill. It is a major blow to Iran, the chief backer of Hezbollah, that may even destabilize the Islamic Republic. Whether full-scale war will come to Lebanon remains unclear.

“Nasrallah represented everything for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah was the advance arm of Iran,” said Gilles Kepel, a leading French expert on the Middle East and author of a book on the world’s upheaval since Oct. 7. “Now the Islamic Republic is weakened, perhaps mortally, and one wonders who can even give an order for Hezbollah today.”

For many years, the United States was the only country that could bring constructive pressure to bear on both Israel and Arab states. It engineered the 1978 Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt, and the Israel-Jordan peace of 1994. Just over three decades ago, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasser Arafat, the chair of the Palestine Liberation Organization, shook hands on the White House lawn in the name of peace, only for the fragile hope of that embrace to erode steadily.

The world, and Israel’s primary enemies, have since changed. America’s ability to influence Iran, its implacable foe for decades, and Iran’s proxies like Hezbollah, is marginal. Designated as terrorist organizations in Washington, Hamas and Hezbollah effectively exist beyond the reach of American diplomacy.

The United States does have enduring leverage over Israel, notably in the form of military aid that involved a $15 billion package signed this year by President Joe Biden. But an ironclad alliance with Israel built around strategic and domestic political considerations, as well as the shared values of two democracies, means Washington will almost certainly never threaten to cut — let alone cut off — the flow of arms.

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Mild Reprimands From Biden

The overwhelming Israeli military response in Gaza to the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis and its seizure of some 250 hostages has drawn mild reprimands from Biden. He has called Israel’s actions “over the top,” for example. But American support for its embattled ally has been resolute as Palestinian casualties in Gaza have risen into the tens of thousands, many of them civilians.

The United States, under any conceivable presidency, is not about to desert a Jewish state whose existence had been increasingly questioned over the past year, from American campuses to the streets of the very Europe that embarked on the annihilation of the Jewish people less than a century ago.

“If U.S. policy toward Israel ever changed, it would only be at the margins,” Haass said, despite the growing sympathy, especially among young Americans, for the Palestinian cause.

Other powers have essentially been onlookers as the bloodshed has spread. China, a major importer of Iranian oil and a major supporter of anything that might weaken the American-led world order that emerged from the ruins in 1945, has little interest in donning the mantle of peacemaker.

Russia also has scant inclination to be helpful, especially on the eve of the Nov. 5 election in the United States. Reliant on Iran for defense technology and drones in its intractable war in Ukraine, it is no less enthused than China over any signs of American decline or any opportunity to bog America down in a Middle Eastern mire.

Based on his past behavior, the potential return to the White House of former President Donald Trump is probably seen in Moscow as the return of a leader who would prove complaisant toward President Vladimir Putin.

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Among regional powers, none is strong enough or committed enough to the Palestinian cause to confront Israel militarily. In the end, Iran is cautious because it knows the cost of all-out war could be the end of the Islamic Republic; Egypt fears an enormous influx of Palestinian refugees; and Saudi Arabia seeks a Palestinian state, but would not put Saudi lives on the line for that cause.

As for Qatar, it funded Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars a year that went in part to the construction of a labyrinthine web of tunnels, some as deep as 250 feet, where Israeli hostages have been held. It enjoyed the complicity of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who saw Hamas as an effective way to undermine the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and so undercut any chance of peace.

The disaster of Oct. 7 was also the culmination of the cynical manipulation, by Arab and Israeli leaders, of the Palestinian quest for statehood. A year on, nobody knows how to pick up the pieces.

Absent any coherent and coordinated international response, Netanyahu and Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader and a mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack, face no consequences in pursuing a destructive course, whose endpoint is unclear but which will certainly involve the loss of more lives.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Roger Cohen/Diego Ibarra Sánchez
c. 2024 The New York Times Company