US needs more strategic ambiguity on Israel

Sometimes, superpowers have a hard time getting smaller allies to do what they want with the assistance they provide. Often, it is to the detriment of the larger power’s interests.

The United States has faced a fair bit of this in recent decades. In Africa, US partners Chad, Niger and Burkina Faso have diverted US security assistance and training intended for counterterrorism toward suppression of political opponents, or for military coups that undermined human rights and only increased the risk of terrorism.

Similarly, Saudi Arabia in the 2010s used US military support meant to shore up Saudi security against Iran to enter and expand a brutal war in Yemen that ended up strengthening the same Houthi rebels who are today attacking US warships in the Red Sea.

Political scientists have a term that covers this phenomenon: moral hazard. It defines a dynamic whereby a great power’s commitment to protect an ally with a revisionist streak – that is, a wayward ally seeking to alter the status quo or shake up the settled order– insulates the ally from the risks of its own behavior, thus encouraging reckless actions.

And nowhere is moral hazard causing Washington more of a headache than in the Middle East. Enabled by the massive security umbrella and ironclad support offered by the United States, Israel has over the past year ignored or undermined US pressure to moderate the war in Gaza – and now, Lebanon.

As an expert on alliances and the Middle East region, I know the costs to the United States have already been high, and will almost certainly go higher if Israel continues to escalate hostilities – potentially bringing Iran into a hot war from its position largely on the sidelines.

What appears to be lacking in the US’s