No, America’s Declining Power Didn’t Cause Hamas’s Attacks

The problem isn’t a deficit of American global influence but the misuse of that influence.

America’s global power is long past its zenith. China’s sprint into industrial modernity has eroded our nation’s economic preeminence, while Washington’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have sapped the public’s tolerance for imperial adventures that will entail significant numbers of American casualties. The United States remains the most powerful nation on earth, but its capacity to project power abroad is not what it used to be. And the country’s perpetual domestic political crises have given its adversaries some cause to believe its imperial decline may soon accelerate.

Meanwhile, over the past two years, many long-simmering conflicts have come to a boil. Russia inaugurated the largest land war in Europe since World War II. China ramped up its military pressure on Taiwan. Azerbaijan ethnically cleansed the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Armenians. And last week, Hamas killed more than 1,200 Israelis in the largest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, while Israel responded by waging something approaching total war in Gaza.

Several commentators have tied that last development to America’s waning hegemony. In his newsletter for the New York Times, David Leonhardt writes that the “simplest explanation” for why so many U.S. adversaries have been taking “big risks” in pursuit of their geopolitical aims is that “the United States is no longer the dominant power it once was, and no replacement has emerged.” In the absence of a hegemon capable of enforcing a given order, revisionist powers scramble to redraw the world’s maps.

It is unclear whether Iran played a leading role in orchestrating Hamas’s attacks on Israel, but many have speculated that they were aimed at scuttling a U.S. attempt to broker a deal to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Both the Palestinians and Iran would have an interest in disrupting such a rapprochement between Jerusalem and Riyadh. So it is plausible that the attacks reflect, among other things, an attempt by Iran to assert its own interests in the region.

Leonhardt’s basic analysis is shared by Substack writer Noah Smith, who argues that Hamas’s “attack is a demonstration of America’s decreasing ability to deter conflict throughout the world.” The Times’ Ross Douthat similarly suggested that Iran’s encouragement of Hamas’s attacks reflects the predictable behavior of “revisionist powers facing a declining but still potent hegemon.”

It is plainly true that the U.S. has less capacity to dictate global affairs than it did in the unipolar moment of the 1990s. And the war-weariness of the American public, the emergence of an alternative economic powerhouse for developing countries to align with, and U.S. policymakers’ difficulty in setting geostrategic priorities are all plausibly emboldening adversarial regimes.

Nonetheless, I don’t think it reasonable to attribute Hamas’s atrocities to the decline of U.S. power. There is nothing new about Hamas committing acts of terrorism in pursuit of its vision of Palestinian liberation; the organization perpetrated such attacks throughout the 1990s and the aughts. The notion that it chose to launch the latest strikes only because it recognized that America’s ability to “deter conflict” had declined makes little sense. The U.S. has never assumed a primary responsibility for deterring attacks on Israel. With the aid of American dollars and weapons, however, Israel has amassed more capacity to deter attacks in conventional military terms than at any time in its history. Hamas did not attack Israel because it believed doing so would not trigger a substantial reprisal. If anything, it might have done so precisely for the sake of inviting counterattacks so brutal as to poison the prospects for a Saudi-Israeli rapprochement.

It is true that Hamas’s latest attacks achieved a categorically larger scale of destruction than its past efforts. But it may be a mistake to see this as entirely premeditated (let alone as a choice informed by a sense of America’s waning power). A senior Hamas official told the Associated Press the organization had intended “to make some gains and take prisoners to exchange them” and was surprised by the “great collapse” in Israeli security. This could be false modesty aimed at deepening Israel’s humiliation; roughly 1,000 Hamas fighters did attack by land, sea, and air. However, given that the severity of Israel’s security breakdown surprised both the Israeli and the American security states, it’s reasonable to suppose Hamas did not anticipate its success in killing so very many Israelis.

In truth, a deficit of American power did not contribute to this crisis so much as the misapplication of that power. The problem is not that the U.S. exerted insufficient influence in the region but that it used its influence to abet Israel’s domination of the Palestinians.

To his credit, Leonhardt gestures toward this fact by noting that former president Trump had “encouraged” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “to show little concern for Palestinian interests and instead seek a maximal Israeli victory,” a strategy that “contributed to the turmoil between Israel and Palestinian groups like Hamas.” Yet America’s failure to strong-arm a weaker ally into a less imprudent (or wildly unjust) approach to its occupation reflects a dearth of political will, not global influence.

The U.S. is home to a large, well-organized, and well-resourced Jewish population that overwhelmingly supports Israel; our nation houses a larger population of Evangelical Christians who consider Jewish control of the Holy Land a precondition for their much-coveted Apocalypse. Thus, the U.S. has routinely chosen to prioritize the goals of the Israeli government over either the dictates of international law or its own strategic interests in the Middle East.

Since the most recent round of peace talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization broke down in 2014, U.S. deference to Israel has meant condemning the 2 million Palestinians in Gaza to an unending humanitarian catastrophe, the 3 million in the West Bank to the brutal rule of military occupation, and Israel’s 2 million Arab citizens to deepening discrimination.

In Gaza, the vast majority of households lack access to safe drinking water. Sixty percent require food assistance. The youth unemployment rate is nearly 80 percent. More than half the population is under 18 and has never had the opportunity to vote in an election or leave this strip of land only twice the size of Washington, D.C. These conditions are largely a function of Israeli policy. Although Israel formally withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005, it maintains effective control of the territory, barring Gazans from accessing as much as one-third of its arable land in the name of maintaining a buffer between the Strip and Israel.

Israel also maintains an economically devastating blockade of Gaza, insisting that its tight control over the goods that enter and exit the territory is necessary to constrain Hamas’s military capacities. But this security rationale cannot explain, let alone justify, the full sweep of Israel’s restrictions on Gazan trade. As Peter Beinart has noted, farmers in Gaza are allowed to export tomatoes and eggplants to Israel but not potatoes, spinach, or beans. As of 2018, the quantity of the former that Gazans were allowed to export was capped at 450 tons.

Elements of the blockade are motivated by petty agricultural interests within Israel, and the list of items banned for export expands and contracts in response to the nation’s needs. In 2011, Israel found itself suffering a shortage of palm fronds so proceeded to allow Gaza to export them again, giving a lie to the notion that the ban had ever been necessary for security.

The Israeli government may acknowledge that the blockade’s precise elements are arbitrary but insist that it must minimize cross-border movements of goods and people to restrict opportunities for terrorism. Yet as an approach to deterring violent extremism, engineering the unending immiseration of 2 million predominantly younger human beings does not seem especially wise.

And even if one believes Hamas poses so grave a threat that Israel simply has no choice but to strangle Gaza economically until that militant group forfeits power, Israel could at the very least seek to undermine Hamas’s popular legitimacy by honoring its obligations to the Palestinians in the West Bank. Instead, viewing the group as a useful foil, Israel has actually propped up Hamas’s power. As long as Palestinians remain divided between Fatah in the West Bank and an Islamist group in Gaza, pressure on Israel to unwind its settlement project and make peace will be limited.

At the same time, Israel has steadily expanded its settlements in the West Bank, further dispossessing the Palestinians and exposing them to mass violence at the hands of extremist Jewish settlers. Israel’s current far-right government has pursued the de facto annexation of the West Bank, entrenching Jewish supremacist rule over parts of the Palestinian territory. Last year, Israeli troops in the West Bank killed a record number of Palestinians; even before the present war, they were on pace to set a new high in 2023.

In Jerusalem, meanwhile, the now-routine spectacle of Jews praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, a Muslim holy site, has added religious offense to the Palestinians’ political grievances.

The U.S. has done nothing to deter these provocations or to pressure Israel into compliance with international law. This is not because our nation lacks the power to do so. Its centrality to the global financial system gives the U.S. considerable economic leverage over nations of Israel’s size. If the U.S. were sufficiently committed to strong-arming Israel into making concessions to Palestinian interests, it could at least make it very difficult for its ally to persist on the current course.

But the U.S. has no such commitment. On the contrary, as Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians has become increasingly extreme in recent years, the U.S. rewarded it with a series of diplomatic favors. Under Donald Trump, the country recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, violating the norm against the recognition of a conquering power’s rule over land secured through war. And the Trump administration recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a needless affront to the Palestinians’ national ambitions since they have long seen East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

Trump further undermined Palestinians’ aspirations by brokering deals normalizing relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco, effectively isolating Palestine from its putative allies in the region. The Biden administration’s efforts to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia — talks from which the Palestinians and their concerns have been excluded — have only compounded the embattled state’s sense of marginalization.

America’s disregard for the Palestinians, its complacent belief that the increasingly powerless and friendless people would mount little resistance to policies that deepened their discontent, may have helped bring about this week’s horror. But if so, our complicity doesn’t derive from our failure to project power on the world stage, but from how we’ve chosen to do so.