Israel’s mission to eradicate Hamas in Gaza following the group’s killing of over 1,200 Israelis on 7 October 2023 has expanded into a much wider military campaign. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seizing this moment to restore his country’s deterrence, downgrade the capabilities of Hamas, Hezbollah and other armed non-state actors, and reassert Israel’s military and technological dominance in the region.
But what has enabled this moment? How can Netanyahu prosecute a war that has killed, to date, over 42,000 Palestinians and at least 2,000 Lebanese civilians without the entire international community imposing or demanding a ceasefire?
The cause of Israel’s actions this time around can be attributed to Hamas’s military incursion and Hezbollah’s repeated missile attacks against its territory—no country should have to endure that. But to comprehend how a single conflict actor can seemingly act with impunity, one needs to look at the changes in the international political environment following the US-led war on Iraq.
Security in a multipolar world
While the conflicts we are witnessing now have a long and painful history, their nature stems from the aftermath of Iraq, which tempered the appetite of Western governments to intervene in conflicts. The chaos left in the wake of the NATO-led operation in Libya in 2012—which was supposed to exorcise the ghost of Iraq—only compounded leaders’ reluctance to engage in future conflicts.
This shift became abundantly clear when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and deployed its forces into Syria in 2015. The Western response—to impose sanctions and arm opposition groups—was limited. Even after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022—which was on another scale, on par with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990—Western states employed similar measures. By doing so, they signalled to middle powers that they were free to act at will and could do so without fear of major sanction.
