Official and unofficial US-Iran back channel diplomacy since the Damascus strike on April 1 helped to prevent this crisis from spiraling out of control.

Consistent messaging across multiple channels clarified each side’s thinking, spelling out intentions and redlines.

Early on the US made clear that it was not involved in the strike. Iran informed the US that retaliatory measures were inevitable, relaying the nature and scope of the response over time.

While urging restraint, a clear redline for the US was no targeting of US forces or facilities. For Iran, a redline was no direct US involvement in any response by Israel. Biden telling Netanyahu the US will not participate in any offensive operations against Iran is notable.

Greg Brew, an analysist at the Eurasia Group, had a parallel assessment. He noted that back channels were also used to avoid escalation after Iran responded to the Trump administration’s assassination of their military commander Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Brew notes, “As with the Soleimani counterstrike, Iran may have used Iraq to alert US of a coming strike. Helps explain why US had specific (and accurate) intel re: what Iran was planning to do, and was able to get defense assets in place in time.”

Biden deserves credit for his administration’s deft back channel diplomacy and also for rallying the G7 nations to release a measured statement that, while rebuking Iran, emphasized the need for de-escalation and also included a pointed push for a cease-fire in Gaza along with more humanitarian aid. The subtext of the G7 message was that the United States and its major allies do not want to be dragged into a large Middle Eastern war.

The United States and Iran set up back channels so Iran could perform retaliation while minimizing the risk of retaliation. Both the United States and Iran are clearly interested in avoiding a larger war. The same cannot be said of Israel—at least under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The worrying truth is that Netanyahu, and perhaps other senior Israeli officials, have every incentive to keep pushing for a regional war. For Netanyahu, as long as the war continues, he can stay in office and avoid the inevitable backlash for his political corruption and for the intelligence failures that led to the October 7 attack.

Writing in Responsible Statecraft on April 5, Paul R. Pillar spelled out the strategic logic of Israeli escalation:

Escalation as an intended way for Israel to work its way out of the Gaza dead end has two elements. The main one is to provoke Iran to hit back, which can enable Israel to present itself as defending rather than offending and to push debate away from the destruction it is wreaking on Gaza and toward the need to protect itself against foreign enemies. The other element is to increase the chance of the United States getting directly involved in conflict with Iran. If it does, war in the Middle East would be seen as not just a matter of Israel bashing Palestinians but instead would involve equities of Israel’s superpower patron.

This analysis assumes the Israeli state is a rational actor. But there’s another possibility: that Israel’s war machine is operating on automatic, without any supervising intelligence or strategy. This was a possibility raised by Amos Harel in an April 12 article for Haaretz that looked at both the Damascus bombing and the recent assassination of the family of Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’s political bureau, which saw three of his sons and three grandchildren killed.

According to Harel:

The two attacks have something in common. Both feature unsupervised hyperactivity against the backdrop of Israel’s political torpor. More than half a year after the October 7 massacre, Israel is finding it difficult to achieve a military victory that would strategically counterbalance part of the damage inflicted by the disaster, and is still not close to alleviating the dire distress of the families of the 133 hostages (many of whom are dead).

To some extent, there is an operations tail here that is wagging the political dog. In the attack attributed to Israel in Damascus, it’s likely that the professionals applied pressure from below to take action; in Gaza, the decision was taken at an intermediate level, without even updating those above. In both cases, it appears that insufficient thought was given to the full significance of the act.

In terms of consequences, it doesn’t matter if Israel’s policy of escalation is driven by Netanyahu’s craven quest for political survival or whether this is a case of war machine that is out of control. The reality of escalation is still there. As Dahlia Scheindlin of Haaretz warns, “Iran and Israel are still one miscalculation away from war.”

Biden’s record in this crisis is mixed. Through his feckless coddling of Netanyahu, Biden helped create the crisis. But the White House has shown real deftness in using diplomacy to defuse the crisis. The question now is: Can Biden hold fast to de-escalation, or will Netanyahu still be able to drag the United States into war?

One path forward is for Biden to stop keeping his warnings to Netanyahu private (although National Security Council spokesman Admiral Josh Kirby has effectively verified that Biden doesn’t want an escalation). Biden needs to publicly, in his own voice, denounce the Israeli provocations that threaten the peace of the Middle East, and indeed very possibly the peace of the world.