Biden administration officials predicted that Israel would expand the war in Gaza to be able to strike Iran and Lebanon, sources told The New Yorker.
During the Biden presidency, as part of ongoing clashes with Iran, Israel launched strikes on significant parts of Iranian infrastructure and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-backed terror groups in the region, such as Hezbollah.
In a detailed long-form report for the magazine, several former administration officials said that former president Joe Biden reportedly believed that any pressure that the US put on Israel during the war in Gaza would lead to bigger attacks from Iran. This would mean that the US would have to step in to defend Israel, even if it caused a larger regional war.
Biden’s former White House coordinator for the Middle East, Brett McGurk, argued that immovable support for Israel would help contain Iran.
Even though the administration told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on multiple occasions to refrain from provoking Iran or its terror proxies in the region, he continued to blindside the US administration by launching strikes with no real notification ahead of time.
B<strong>iden officials feared Israel would expand war in Gaza</strong>
For instance, sources told the New Yorker that the Israeli government did not warn the Biden administration before it carried out several strikes on Hezbollah and Iranian officials, including the September 2024 beeper attack.
One former White House official added that Israel assassinating former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah nearly two days after the US called for Israel and Hezbollah to observe a temporary ceasefire was a “humiliation” for Biden.
However, the former administration did not publicly criticize Israel for the moves, although many times it led to clashes where the US felt compelled to defend Israel.
Most notably in April and October of 2024, when the US helped defend Israel against Iranian strikes during which very few people were injured.
Netanyahu unsuccessfully pushed unwilling Biden officials to attack Iran
However, officials told the New Yorker that Netanyahu wanted to attack more of Iranian infrastructure in additional strikes, and only backed down “reluctantly.”
Former Biden administration officials told the New Yorker that looking back, they regret that the protection the US provided unintentionally led Netanyahu to push boundaries with Israel’s closest ally.
“We could advise them very firmly, and Biden did that with Bibi repeatedly: ‘Goddammit, take the win and don’t drag us into a further war.’ But the Israelis knew we were going to defend them,” Philip Gordon, former national-security adviser to then-vice-president Kamala Harris, told the New Yorker.
Former defense secretary Lloyd Austin reportedly went so far as to compare Netanyahu to a gambler “playing with house money.”
But then, US President Donald Trump was elected to office. One former senior Pentagon official said Biden's team warned the incoming Trump administration that "the Israelis were not going to let this opportunity go."
Within the first half of Trump’s term, the US has engaged twice in conflict with Iran.
In the latest round of fighting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the US struck because American intelligence believed that Israeli strikes on Iran were imminent, which would have launched a subsequent attack on US forces in the Middle East.
“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that they would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” Rubio told reporters in March.
Though Trump said he “might have forced Israel’s hand” in the strikes earlier this year, the report notes that Rubio’s recount of the reasons to strike Iran was familiar to Biden officials.
The former administration, and potentially the current one, felt as if it could not stop Israel from attacking targets in the region, but felt the need to “shoulder the burden” no matter the outcome.
Gordon told the New Yorker that Washington was in a “moral hazard” due to its staunch support of Israel, which emboldened Netanyahu to expand the war in Gaza to Iran.
Some former senior Biden administration officials told the New Yorker that, at least in some aspects, the Iran war was an extension of the Israel-Hamas War.
Notably, some senior administration officials, McGurk included, argued that public condemnation of Israel, like that which occurred after the World Central Kitchen incident, led to Hamas believing that regional war could be possible.
Additionally, the New Yorker report noted that US intelligence agencies believed that Iran would leave actual combat for its proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.
It also noted that the agencies believed that the then-supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was risk-averse due to his age.
However, some intelligence reports generated after the October 7 massacre suggested that a small number of Iranians believed that this was the moment to wipe Israel off the map.
Now, as Israel stays on alert for a new round of potential fighting with the Islamic Regime, Biden officials told the New Yorker that they blame Trump for allowing the war in Gaza to last until last October, expand to Iran, and cause regional instability.