WASHINGTON, Sept 27: US efforts to secure a Gaza ceasefire remain stalled after nearly a year of fighting. Iran-backed Houthi rebels continue to attack Red Sea shipping. And now, despite intense US-led diplomacy, the Israel-Hezbollah conflict threatens to flare into an all-out regional war.
With the clock ticking on his administration, US President Joe Biden faces an arc of Middle East crises likely to defy solution before he leaves office in January and which look all but certain to tarnish his foreign policy legacy, analysts and foreign diplomats say.
Biden has struggled over the past year to thread the needle of embracing Israel's right to self-defense against Palestinian Hamas militants in Gaza and the Hezbollah group in Lebanon while trying to contain civilian casualties and prevent a spiral into a broader Middle East conflict.
Time and again he has confronted the shortcomings of that strategy, the latest being Israel's rejection on Thursday of a US-backed proposal for a 21-day truce across the Lebanon border as it pressed ahead with strikes that have killed hundreds of Lebanese.
"What we're seeing are the limits of US power and influence in the Middle East," said Jonathan Panikoff, the US government's former deputy national intelligence officer for the region.
Perhaps the clearest example of that trend has been Biden's reluctance to exercise much U.S. leverage - as Israel's top arms supplier and diplomatic shield at the United Nations - to bend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington's will.
—REUTERS
