what the widening conflict in the Middle East might mean for the presidential campaign.

It’s not WWIII. But foreign conflicts may get uglier before the election

It’s not WWIII. But foreign conflicts may get uglier before the election

The New York Times

October 4, 2024

Good evening! Tonight, my colleague David Sanger, a White House and national security correspondent, has a look at what the widening conflict in the Middle East might mean for the presidential campaign. Plus, a Times photographer explains what she saw in Georgia this week with Vice President Harris. — Jess Bidgood

Debris in Beirut, Lebanon, after an Israeli airstrike earlier this week.

Debris in Beirut, Lebanon, after an Israeli airstrike earlier this week. Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

It’s not World War III. But foreign conflicts may get uglier before Election Day.

By David E. Sanger

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Former President Donald Trump has taken to making a somewhat disingenuous case that the world was peaceful when he was president, while the Biden administration has overseen nothing but chaos, explosions and death. And, he argues, Kamala Harris would be responsible for more of the same.

“You’re going to end up in World War III,” he has warned, including last month in Las Vegas.

Even by Trump’s hyperbolic standards, this is a bit much. Presidents can’t just turn most of the world’s conflicts on and off (See: World War I and World War II.) The world came a lot closer to general nuclear war in decades past — particularly during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — than it has lately, even amid Vladimir Putin’s many threats.

Nonetheless, the escalating clashes in the Middle East may mean that the next four weeks will see an intersection of foreign conflict and a presidential election unlike any in modern times. The remarkable collision of events could shape the final weeks of the presidential campaign, both by offering new fuel for Trump’s attacks and by putting Harris in both a diplomatic and a political bind.

An escalating conflict

Nearly a year into the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, there is suddenly a very real chance of a war between Israel and Iran.

And in that scenario, the chances the United States could get sucked in are very real.

Even if the most extreme attacks unfold — for example, if Israel takes out oil facilities or even nuclear sites in retaliation for this week’s largely failed Iranian missile attack — the escalation is highly unlikely to involve nuclear exchanges, or American troops on the ground.

Nonetheless, it could look very violent, and very scary, undergirding Trump’s warnings about global upheaval. A direct conflict with Iran, which is among the most powerful forces in the region, could easily inflame the long-running debate about why President Biden is sending thousands more American forces, along with aircraft carriers, squadrons of fighter jets and amphibious assault ships to the region.

To Pentagon planners, those deployments are what deterrence looks like. It is a lot easier to contain Iran and other actors in the region if they think they might be up against the most powerful military force in the world.

But to Trump, the timing, the images of carrier strike groups patrolling the region and talk of bunker-busters taking out Iranian nuclear sites could be politically advantageous. Never mind that in 2017, when brand new to office, Trump ordered an American airstrike on Syria while dining with President Xi Jinping of China at Mar-a-Lago, and boasted later about what a decisive show of force it was. In pursuit of his case, anything that looks like global chaos serves his purposes.

That may be particularly true if Israel takes aim at Natanz or Fordow, Iran’s primary nuclear enrichment sites, which it has long seen as prime targets. Those facilities make potential bomb fuel, but while Iran has episodically pursued and halted nuclear weapons projects, intelligence agencies and documents stolen by Israel from Iran’s archives make clear, there is no evidence it’s actually produced a weapon.

But in a campaign, details don’t matter as much as impressions, and news that Israel is taking out Iranian facilities, especially nuclear facilities, seems likely to have political impact. Trump may cheer the move. After all, the Iranians have tried to hire hit men to kill the Republican nominee, American officials say, and hacked into his campaign.

A dilemma for Harris

For her part, Harris has made only limited remarks about the widening conflict, which may reflect the fact that any attack by Israel against Iran raises a host of political complications for her as a member of the current administration.

It was Biden — not Harris — who declared this week that he opposed any plan by Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear sites. (It’s worth noting that Biden was deeply involved in planning the covert cyber attack program on Iran’s main plant at Natanz as vice president, 15 years ago. At the time, the hope was that the malicious computer code would stay secret; it didn’t.)

“The Israelis have not concluded how they, what they’re going to do in terms of a strike,” he said this afternoon in the White House briefing room, adding that if he were in the Israelis’ shoes, “I would be thinking about other alternatives.”

Harris’s dilemma is this: If she embraces a strike as a justifiable act of self-defense, it will run against the administration’s insistence — and her own — that it is time for the cycles of Mideast violence to end, and for all sides to step back. And she could well inflame anew the progressive side of her party, which suspects she is far too willing to let Israel use American weapons to escalate and escalate.

But if she criticizes any Israeli military action, Trump (and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying organization that has largely backed Netanyahu’s approach) will charge that she is weak on defending Israel, and weaker on Iran. In fact, Trump is already making similar charges.

And then there is the larger risk: that the wider war grows wider still.

“I worry that Israel’s determination to launch a significant retaliatory strike against Iran will not deter Tehran,’’ Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote on Friday in a newsletter published by his organization, “which may then order another round of (possibly larger) ballistic missile strikes on Israel. If that were to happen, it would be hard to control the spiral, and the Israel-Iran war that everyone has worried about will be upon us.”

“This would likely draw the United States and others into the conflict,’’ he wrote. Under that circumstance, Trump might find himself ordering American forces to help the Israelis, if he were president. But for now, it’s the ultimate nightmare for a sitting vice president running for election.

The New York Times