Joe Biden seeks response to Iran-backed attack that avoids a wider war

Outside the White House on Tuesday, Joe Biden walked over to the cameras to say that he had finally decided on the US response to a deadly attack on its troops in Jordan, after two days of talks with his national security team. 

But the US president tempered that message with another: that he was not seeking a broader conflict in the region. 

“I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East. That’s not what I’m looking for,” Biden told reporters. 

The drone attack that killed three American service members on Sunday, which the US has attributed to an Iranian-backed militia, was a moment American officials had feared since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out in October.

It has raised the stakes in terms of Washington’s involvement in the Middle East, piled political pressure on Biden in an election year, and highlighted the struggles of US policy in the region during this crisis and throughout his administration. 

Biden’s team is looking to balance three different objectives as it calculates its response, said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East programme at the CSIS think-tank in Washington.

“One of the strategic goals is to prevent an open-ended region-wide war that would occupy years and billions of dollars. One of the objectives is deterring Iran from its many efforts to grow its power in the Middle East and push the US out of the Middle East. One of the goals is to create a Palestinian-Israeli settlement that lowers the temperature in the region,” Alterman said.  

“Ideally, you do all three of those. The administration is not 100 per cent confident that any single action it takes will do any of them.”

Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, warned on Monday that the Middle East was at its most “dangerous” juncture since the Yom Kippur war between Israel and its neighbours in 1973. At the same time, he said, “we’re going to defend our people, we’re going to defend our personnel, we’re going to defend our…