As Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken flew to Mongolia on July 31, his mind was on events far away, in the Middle East. Hours earlier, Israel had assassinated a top Hamas leader in Tehran, and Iranian officials were vowing retaliation for the murder of a close ally on their soil.
Using a secure phone in his private compartment of the plane, Blinken spoke to several foreign officials in the hours after the killing, asking them to urge Iran against taking any action that could lead to all-out war with Israel.
Days later, one of the officials, the foreign minister of Jordan, Ayman Safadi, visited Tehran and called for “peace, stability and security.”
President Biden also quickly persuaded the leaders of Egypt and Qatar to schedule a new round of talks aiming to secure a cease-fire in Gaza. Those meetings had an unstated purpose as well: discouraging Iran from mounting an attack that could derail the talks and make Tehran look like a spoiler.
In the month since Israel’s assassination of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, US officials have worked almost nonstop to contain the latest tit for tat, with Israel on one side and Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah on the other. They are desperate to avert a regional war that they fear could pull the United States into the fighting.
So far, that kind of disaster has been avoided, however narrowly.
Biden officials believe they have played an important role in staving off the worst, though they concede that other factors have kept a precarious lid on the fast-boiling pot. And while they have managed to contain the wider war for now, they have not secured a cease-fire in Gaza, a failure that could ultimately undermine their work.
Reinforcing the point, US diplomacy has sprung into action again this week, in an effort to prevent a major Israeli military operation in the West Bank from triggering new waves of violence in the region.
The US diplomatic scramble, combined with displays of military force, shows that the United States is determined to prevent a wider conflagration — and prepared to strike powerfully in support of Israel, if necessary.
The messages have been sent not just to Iran but to Israel. Last week, amid signs that Israel was preparing to strike Iran’s ally in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah, Blinken flew to Tel Aviv. There, he delivered a different message to Israeli officials: Washington will support a pre-emptive Israeli strike against Hezbollah equipment or forces poised to launch any imminent attack, according to a senior US official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
But, again hoping to head off a dangerous escalation, Blinken added that Israel should not use the opportunity to mount a broader offensive against the Lebanese group.
Israel struck hard but narrowly on Sunday, destroying Hezbollah weapons preparing to strike Israel, in presumed retaliation for Israel’s killing of one of the group’s senior commanders in Beirut weeks before. A Hezbollah rocket salvo fired in response — after the Biden White House passed messages to the Iran-backed group urging restraint — inflicted limited damage. Both sides claimed victory, and senior Biden officials heaved a collective sigh of relief.
Factors that have little to do with the United States have also helped avert a wider war, officials and analysts say. Iran and Hezbollah fear that they could suffer badly from an all-out conflict. (Hamas, by contrast, may have staged the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel with the hope of forcing the region into such a war.) None of the parties want to be blamed for derailing talks to stop the fighting in Gaza. Iran has a newly elected moderate president who is interested in better relations with the United States, and a wider war with tremendous costs could also threaten the leading clerics’ grip on power.
The nation with the most to lose could be Lebanon, with its economy in crisis, a reality that leaders of Hezbollah, a prominent political and military group there, recognize.
Biden administration officials argue the crisis could be much worse if not for their diplomacy.
Biden’s top aides have worked the phones and traveled to the Middle East — Blinken was backed up by Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein, two National Security Council aides who handle Middle East affairs, and William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, who has been the lead American negotiator in the cease-fire and hostage talks.
At the same time, the US government has not been shy about backing up its diplomacy with the threat of devastating military force.
On Aug. 2, two days after Haniyeh’s assassination and as Blinken and others furiously called foreign officials, the Pentagon began to flex American muscle.
The Defense Department announced that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had ordered the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln to relieve the Theodore Roosevelt in the Gulf of Oman, ensuring no gap in major American naval presence in the region.
Austin also directed additional F-22 fighters to the region, and took the unusual step of announcing the deployment of the guided-missile submarine Georgia to the Middle East. The Pentagon rarely publicizes the movements of its submarine fleet.
At about the same time, Dana Stroul, the Defense Department’s former top Middle East policy specialist, publicly urged the Biden administration to consider striking inside Iran itself.
The New York Times
