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Vladimir Putin’s regular threats about his nuclear arsenal have focused minds on the existential threat his nuclear weapons still represent. But it’s the volatility of the situation in the Middle East that has added a worrying degree of uncertainty to the international situation.
A year after the brutal Hamas attack on Israel – and after months of tit-for-tat missile attacks between Israel and Iran – Israel has commenced a ground invasion of Lebanon which pits the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) directly against Iranian proxy Hezbollah.
At the same time, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu is pursuing an ever more drastic campaign against Hamas in Gaza. It is now reportedly planning to expel all residents from the north of the enclave in order to establish a military zone there. Meanwhile it has ramped up its attacks on the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen and against Iranian proxies in Syria.
All-out war between Israel and Iran remains unthinkable, even as questions are raised about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. And yet, as any historian will tell you, the wrong combination of miscalculation, errors of strategic judgement and failures of diplomacy to cause things to escalate with alarming rapidity.
In 1997, Austrian economist Friedrich Glasl published a model of conflict escalation which is generally accepted as the best study of how disagreements can develop into disastrous warfare. It maps, in nine stages, how a conflict can develop from tension between antagonists to a situation into which the warring parties plunge “together into the abyss”.
Matthew Powell, a historian of warfare, compares Glasl’s model to the situation between Israel and Iran. He assesses the two antagonists have have reached stage seven, “where they are launching limited blows against each other while avoiding direct confrontation. Both want to make their adversary consider whether the cost of continuing is worth the potential rewards that can be gained”.
Powell believes that both sides presently seem keen to remain at arms length for fear that a direct conflict could plunge them – and their allies – into the aforementioned abyss.
Read more: Israel-Iran and the nine stages of how conflicts can escalate and get out of control
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For longtime Middle East analyst Paul Rogers, one of the key issues governing the likely future of the conflict is likely to be the domestic politics of Israel. He has watched the country move steadily to the right over more than 50 years, to the extent that the Netanyahu government is now heavily influenced by religious nationalists. Netanyahu has depended for two years on the support of some of the more extreme elements on Israel’s political fringe in order to stay in power.
These hardliners, Rogers writes, are willing to subvert Israeli democracy itself in order to realise their dream of “Messianic Judaism”. A byproduct of this dream would be to push the Palestinian population out of Gaza, which would be a disaster for regional stability. The irony is that by making war on Lebanon, Netanyahu has managed to improve his standing with the Israeli people and is no longer as dependent on political hawks.
Read more: Israel: what hardliners in Netanyahu’s government want from the war
Campaign in Lebanon
Of course, what may be good for Netanyahu is a disaster for Lebanon, where the death toll is rising daily and more than one-quarter of the population has been displaced.
While Israel’s air force has launched 140 airstrikes across the country, most of the activity has focused on the border areas in the south of the country, where the IDF is reported to be clearing villages, perhaps in anticipation for setting up a buffer zone there.
Over the past fortnight there have been repeated incidents where the IDF have – apparently deliberately – targeted units of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil). This peacekeeping force was set up in 1978 and has the mandate to enforce the UN’s resolution to prevent clashes between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Netanyahu has demanded that Unifil move its peacekeepers out of the conflict zone, but so far the UN troops, led by France and Spain, have refused to leave their posts.
Vanessa Newby and Chiara Ruffa, with input and advice from former senior Unifil political and civil affairs officer John Molloy, (formerly of the Irish Defence Forces) have been tracking the incidents. Most recently they involved an IDF tank firing on a Unifil watchtower and has resulted in a growing number of casualties among the peacekeepers.
Newby and Ruffa believe that Israel wants to remove Unifil from southern Lebanon because it wants to carry out its operations without the scrutiny of an international observer. They also speculate that the sheer number of forces being moved by the IDF into south Lebanon indicates that Israel may be planning to occupy a swath of territory beyond what its military has described as a “limited, localised, and targeted” operation.
Meanwhile tensions are rising between Hezbollah and other sections of Lebanese society. We’ve seen this before, and it has never gone well, writes Mohamad El Kari, who has witnessed the challenges to security in Lebanon firsthand as a translator.
He fears that Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah will kick off a bout of factional infighting that could seriously destabilise a country that is already showing signs of serious social and political instability. In some areas, Kari writes, people were dancing in the streets at the news of Nasrallah’s death. Not a good sign for Lebanon’s fragile stability.
90 seconds to midnight
All this talk of escalation had me reflecting on history. I grew up during the cold war under the shadow of the nuclear threat. As a schoolboy in the 1970s, I was taken to a nuclear bunker where, in the event of a nuclear attack on the UK, key personnel would have sheltered as they ran secure communications.
As a student in the 1980s, I shared a house with several women who would spend weekends at Greenham Common airbase where they protested against the presence of nuclear weapons there. I remember the gallows humour with which we greeted the government’s Protect and Survive campaign, which encouraged building makeshift nuclear shelters under the stairs.
The peace movement of the day adapted the campaign into the slogan “protest and survive” and the Raymond Briggs graphic novel When the Wind Blows darkly lampooned the government’s advice with its portrayal of an elderly couple following the government’s instructions with predictably tragic results.
In 1984, Britain was horrified by the BBC film, Threads, a docudrama based on the idea of a nuclear attack on Sheffield. The premise called for a confrontation between Nato and the Warsaw Pact after a US-sponsored coup in Iran. It showed how quickly an international crisis could degenerate into global nuclear conflict and, in turn, how quickly societal collapse was likely to follow.
Then in the 1990s the nuclear threat seemed to diminish. The collapse of the Soviet Union and treaties to limit the spread of nuclear weapons and decommission existing stockpiles meant that, for most of us anyway, the idea of a nuclear holocaust receded to almost nothing.
The BBC recently screened the film again, to mark its 40th anniversary, and has made it available for streaming on iPlayer. The Independent’s preview of the screening noted that the Doomsday Clock, which atomic scientists use to indicate how close the world is to nuclear disaster, is set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. The scientists said that conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, with the prospect the latter might spread across the Middle East had made the world a much more dangerous place in 2024. And so it has come to pass.
Philosopher Mark Lacy was shown the film as a schoolboy and doesn’t intend to watch it again. But he’s an expert in the changing nature of warfare and he has seen how conflicts can explode out of “accidents, miscalculations and errors of strategic judgement”.
He is concerned that, unlike in the cold war where events were largely controlled by “rational actors” who were all too aware of the potential for “mutually assured destruction” and made their calculations accordingly, today’s leaders may not act with the same circumspection. And this is what makes the world a much more dangerous place.
The latest edition of our podcast, The Conversation Weekly, focuses on the the Middle East question. Podcast host Gemma Ware speaks with two academic experts in Middle East politics, Amnon Aran and Mireille Rebeiz, to get a sense of what’s at stake for the region.
Read more: What Israel and its neighbours want now as all-out war looms in the Middle East – podcast
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