“The situation on the ground is fluid, and changes to the strategic calculus in Israel, Iran, or both countries may lead their leaders to believe that avoiding wider conflict poses a greater danger to their survival than does confronting one another in war.” — Dalia Lassa Kaye, “Will the War in Gaza Ignite the Middle East?” ~ Foreign Affairs
“Hamas is no one’s puppet, but it is one of the forces Iran supports to exert pressure on Israel and the US. Israel’s fight with Hamas is thus overlaid by its ongoing shadow war with Iran — and by Tehran’s tense, sometimes violent struggle with Washington. Interspersed is a menagerie of nonstate and quasi-state actors — the Houthis, Hezbollah, Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria — that act as Iranian proxies even as they pursue their own aims. Looming over the conflict in Gaza, then, is the threat of intervention by Iran and its allies, which would embroil Israel in a two-front fight and set off a regional chain reaction.” — Hal Brands, “US Must Press its Advantages Over Iran or War Will Spread” ~ Bloomberg
“For those who were not previously paying attention, it must now be clear that there are two distinct fifth columns within the West: populist charlatans on the far right as well as the Stalinist left who downplay Putin’s war crimes, and a combination of useful idiots and Islamist sympathisers on the left who exalt the terrorists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as freedom fighters against Israeli colonisation.
There are also powerful economic and political forces steering the US towards a kind of “appeasement-lite”, in particular the perception that American voters care more about their domestic economic situation than about new “forever wars” — a favourite term of isolationists on both sides of the political spectrum. And, as has been clear from Joe Biden’s handling of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, nothing worries the US president more than that he might inadvertently stumble into a Third World War.
The irony is, of course, that it was appeasement and the failure of deterrence that led the West into the Second World War.
I have argued since Biden’s election that we risked re-running the 1970s. Today, I increasingly fear we may be re-running the 1930s. If Israel finds it cannot contend with a three-front war in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, and turns to the United States for military help against Iran, we shall have reached one of history’s hinges. The future of the world will turn on it.” — Niall Ferguson, “Will There be a World War Three? Israel-Hamas War Risks Escalation” ~ The Times of London
I. The Fundamental Escalatory Nature of Deescalation
In consideration of Biden’s foreign policy of “deescalation,” a euphemistic self-contradiction as well as a delusion that one can control the peaceful outcomes of conflicts somehow by means of avoiding to commit to them— it is worth remembering that one of the largest scale wars in modern history was a product both of a perception of America’s unwillingness to intervene, and America’s more or less stated policy of nonaggression.
In the years leading up to America’s decision to intervene in World War One, President Woodrow Wilson bended over backward not to aid Europe, particularly Britain, to repel German aggression. Wilson was allergic to the idea of meddling in the affairs of foreign countries, whose interests he considered entirely immutable and distinct from America’s. Because he believed America was morally superior to the rest of the world, his notion of American exceptionalism was that it was America’s universal obligation to enlightened humanity not to besmirch her pristine heritage with meddling overseas in conflicts that did not immediately concern her. His was a foreign policy of what analysts today would describe as anti-imperialism, which you might describe as a radical belief that with diplomacy and the pretense of leading by example, a geopolitical power can simply will the moral mastery of its adversaries without resorting to arms or threats.
Historian Adam Tooze writes in his book The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916-1931
As the door to the American century swung wide in January 1917, Wilson stood poised in the frame. He came not to take sides but to make peace. The first dramatic assertion of American leadership in the twentieth century was not directed towards ensuring that the ‘right’ side won, but that no side did. The only kind of peace with any prospect of securing the cooperation of all the major world powers was one that was accepted by all sides. All parties to the Great War must acknowledge the conflict’s deep futility. That meant that the war could have only one outcome: ‘peace without victory.’ It was this phrase that encapsulated the standpoint of moral equivalence with which Wilson had consistently staked his distance from the Europeans since the outbreak of the war. It was a stance that he knew would stick in the gullet of many in his audience in January 1917. ‘It is not pleasant to say this… I am only seeking to face realities and to face them without soft concealments.’ In the current slaughter the US must take no side. For America to ride to the assistance of Britain, France and the Entente would certainly ensure their victory. But in so doing America would be perpetuating the old world’s horrible cycle of violence. It would, Wilson insisted in private conversation, be nothing less than a ‘crime against civilization.’
Hence, despite his platitudinous infatuation with “democracy,” the series of assaults on democracy curiously Biden has presided over everywhere in the world—Afghanistan, Ukraine, Israel—to name only the most significant. As Wilson sought peace by refusing to fight, so Biden seeks to save democracy by giving dictators as much room as possible to consolidate their autocracies.
II. A Legacy of Complacent Errors
Over the decades since World War Two, America finally seemed to learn that its global engagement was unavoidable (inconvenient ethically though it might be for progressives), and confrontation if not conflict was inevitable. Especially following the collapse of the USSR, and the interventions from Vietnam to Bosnia that culminated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, America finally, thankfully seemed to be growing used to wielding its outsize military might, economic power, and influence to guarantee relative international peace.
But anti-imperialism threatened to return under the auspices of the conciliatory Barack Obama presidency, overflowing with self-effacing apologies. But even Obama, who had disparaged the war in Iraq as “a stupid war,” was made to realize the hard way that there were consequences for nonaction just as much as action. Regarding the Middle East, when his disastrous impulse to withdraw troops from Iraq spiralled into a veritable Petri dish for the growth of ISIS, he redeployed troops to the region, and later even approved an intervention in Libya. Nevertheless Joe Biden has sought to build on Obama’s doctrinal legacy of appeasement and nonaggression.
Despite his promises that with his election, in contrast with the erratic unilateralist excesses of his predecessor, now that America was “back,” the order of the day was to out-Trump Trump, ironically. Ignoring warnings from within his own administration of the dangers of implementing the Trump-negotiated Doha agreement with the Taliban, not at least without securing the safe passage of America’s Afghan allies and leaving a contingent of troops, Biden callously sacrificed Afghanistan on the alter of anti-imperialism, the sooner to boast to what he assumed would be an admiring public that he ended a “forever war.”
Trump talked about doing it. I did it.
A fiasco of a withdrawal that ended with a suicide bomber killing a hundred Afghans and fourteen American servicemen and women that Biden called “the greatest airlift in history” not only did perhaps irrevocable damage to America’s reputation as the world’s hegemonic guarantor of liberty and protector of human rights, but it also eroded the credibility of American deterrence as Vladimir Putin namely interpreted it as a sign of weakness and a green light to invade Ukraine.
If Obama’s reaction was to do nothing when Putin first invaded Ukraine seizing Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, seeing as how determined Biden was to pay homage to his anti-imperialist forebear and complete his “pivot to Asia,” trying to resurrect the Iran nuclear deal for seasoning, why should Biden care if Putin invaded Ukraine, this time with the intent to absorb the entire country into the fold of the Russian Federation? Putin did not “miscalculate” as much as we like to think, not with Biden in the White House.
The Economist catalogues Biden’s foreign policy deficits this week, saying,
Above all Mr Biden’s foreign policy meant doing much less in the Middle East, a region that had consumed the energies of many an American president. He sought to end the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. He promised to restore the nuclear deal with Iran, which Barack Obama had signed in 2015 and Donald Trump abandoned in 2018, to contain the danger of a nuclear Iran. He initially said Saudi Arabia should be treated as a “pariah”. He reverted to America’s long-standing support for the “two-state solution”, ie, the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, though he put little effort into it.
None of this worked out. Far from being stable and predictable, Mr Putin invaded Ukraine and information exchanges under New start are suspended. America’s chaotic departure from Afghanistan allowed the Taliban to return to power instantly. In the Gulf, meanwhile, China took the plaudits for the restoration of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, appearing to fill a vacuum left by American indifference.
The consequences of Biden’s Wilsonian foreign policy of leaving nations considered morally inferior alone, each to prosecute their own interest in the name of self-determination, under the corollary illusion ridiculously that he could simply surrender Afghanistan, pay off Iran, scold Israel for its polarizing judicial reforms while rolling out the red carpet for Narendra Modi, and forget about Russia while he worked out a senseless “thaw” with China, Biden has backed himself into a tight corner in the Middle East.
III. How Diplomacy and Appeasement Played an Essential Role in Facilitating and Enabling the Hamas Attack
It all began as a consequence of Biden’s attempts to bribe Iran not to go nuclear and simultaneously put the finishing touches on the Abraham Accords with his plans for Saudi-Israeli “normalization.”Leave it to progressives to see if by wording something in such a way that it signifies the opposite of what something is, they can thereby define it. To normalize ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia would indeed be very weird. It would all but end the centuries old Arab-Israeli conflict. In exchange for Israel giving concessions to the Palestinians, Saudi Arabia would guarantee Israel’s legitimacy in the eyes of its Arab counterparts. It remains a fine idea in concept.
However, from Iran’s perspective, it signified pivotal steps towards a mutual defense pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia, along with all the other Arab states that had already agreed to recognize Israel. By officially aligning all the Gulf states, the prospect of a Saudi-Israeli accord threatened to certify the isolation of Iran in a region it has long aimed to dominate, especially as the regime inches closer and closer towards nuclear weapons. Similar to China, moreover, the Islamic Republic probably feels that if it has any chance of asserting itself, now is the time, because its window is closing. So as the regime does, it sent one of its proxies on a suicide mission to destroy any prospect of peace between the Arab world and Israel. The effect has been devastating.
1400 Israeli Jews murdered in the most barbaric episode of ethnic cleansing in Jewish history since the Holocaust. Having taken a drug called Captagon to make murdering people a “euphoric” experience, (I read in a newsletter from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies), Hamas marauders burned Israelis in their homes. Babies were decapitated in their beds. Women and girls were raped until their pelvic bones were crushed. Hundreds of concert-goers were massacred. Israeli women’s bodies vaginally bleeding from rape were paraded through the streets of Gaza to jubilant crowds. And hundreds of hostages were taken. It was one of those once-in-a-hundred years atrocities that you could fairly describe as satanic in the way it was carried out. People simply cannot do worse to each other than what Hamas did on October 7th.
IV. Escalation Begins
Fat chance for carrots with the Palestinians. Sorry, Saudi Arabia. The Israeli Defense Forces have mobilized 360,000 reserves and commenced to lay siege to Gaza, into which to invade and occupy, and to root out and tear Hamas to pieces. With the threat of Hezbollah—another Iranian proxy with 20 or 30 something times the capabilities of Hamas with hundreds of thousands of rockets and missiles that would overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system and anywhere between 500 and a thousand Precision Guided Munitions— opening up a second front in the North, compelling Israel to evacuate towns and station troops on the northern border, Israel is fighting for its life.
Hamas’s attack represented not only an invasive threat to Israel’s integrity as a nation state, but an existential threat to the Jews’ existence as a people, and penetrated to the heart of Jewish-Israeli identity. For Israel there will not and there can be no rest until the terrorists that surround it, who would otherwise perpetually threaten it with the genocidal possibility of another October 7th or worse, are decimated. In the mood Israel is in, and rightfully so, if war with Hamas means war with Hezbollah too, or even Iran, the Jewish state will fight whomever and go to whatever lengths it must, to ensure its own survival and that October 7th or anything comparable to it can never ever, ever happen again. (If this means ending internationalist hopes for a fabled “two-state solution,” Israel would be advised to ditch it. I think a realistic appraisal of the situation from a consequentialist standpoint actually compels chucking those dreams which are fanciful, and at this point I would argue it is even cruel and selfish for which to continue hoping. Rather conscience dictates Israel has no choice but to level and occupy Gaza indefinitely much like the US did with Germany and Japan, both of which it had a key role in reconstructing since World War 2. And it would be the international community’s obligation to help fund Gaza’s massive reconstruction.)
Gaza and the Palestine issue besides, if Israel were to think war with Hezbollah were inevitable, it would not limit itself to pre-emptively striking the Iranian proxy inside Lebanon. Or if Hezbollah were to consider it opportune to attack Israel while the IDF was bogged down in Gaza, especially as the incentives ratchet up to come to the aid of an ally, Hezbollah could foreseeably strike Israel. They are already exchanging fire. And some Hezbollah terrorists have already clashed with IDF soldiers at the border.
Brian Katz in his Foreign Affairs article, “A Second Front in Hamas’s War,” insightfully lays out the dynamics and the stakes of Hezbollah’s intervention,
If fighting between Israel and Hamas continues to escalate, Hezbollah, sensing weakness, could be tempted to abandon its caution and intervene. That will be particularly likely if Israel, its leaders seeing no choice but to launch an all-out assault into the Gaza Strip to deal a devastating blow to Hamas and rescue Israeli hostages, ends up bogged down in urban warfare. As its forces are pummeled and casualties in the strip mount, Hamas will have every reason to call for help from its partners—putting pressure on Hezbollah to enhance its support.
Hezbollah, meanwhile, may have already changed its assessment of Israeli capabilities. Following its withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, Nasrallah called Israel “weaker than a spider’s web”—menacing from a distance but vulnerable when challenged. Although the ensuing two decades did much to remind Hezbollah of Israel’s superior capabilities (and the destruction it could wreak on southern Lebanon), Israel’s military and intelligence failure in recent days has likely undercut that deterrent. With Israeli soldiers bogged down, Israeli intelligence distracted, and an ally under duress, Hezbollah’s leaders may see a once-in-a-generation opportunity to strike directly into northern Israel. Indeed, its entire military apparatus—infantry, special operators, and rocket, missile, and drone forces—is trained, oriented, and indoctrinated for this exact scenario. Nasrallah may step back and ask why Hezbollah has accumulated all of these capabilities to fight Israel if it is never going to use them.
An attack would escalate quickly, with little to stop it from erupting into full-scale regional war. Hezbollah’s capabilities would allow it to attack by land, sea, and air, supported by artillery and rocket munitions. Precision missiles could target Israeli military and intelligence facilities and key infrastructure and even reach sensitive sites in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Israel, in turn, would unleash a devasting air campaign across Lebanon. Hezbollah’s backers—from Iran and Syria to Shiite militias in Iraq and perhaps as far away as Afghanistan and Pakistan—would be pressured join the fight. And before long, the United States could easily get dragged in, its forces and facilities facing attacks throughout the Middle East. Iran could respond by activating cells in the region and beyond.
Were a full blown two-front war to open up between Israel and its proxies, not excluding Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Yemeni Houthis, and others, Iran for itself would be liable to get involved directly. Faced with the possibility of its terror proxies being destroyed forever, if the regime were to consider it in its interest to attack Israel while the Jewish state were at its most vulnerable, it is not unlikely, let alone impossible. Considering as Iran goaded Hamas to sink any prospect of Saudi-Israeli rapprochement, we can infer the regime already feels insecure to put it mildly. It is also emboldened.
That Iran would seek so provocatively to interfere with the US- brokered Gulf state diplomacy, and then celebrate the terror attack in full expectation that neither the US nor Israel would acknowledge its complicity, is a good barometer if any, of how important regional hegemony is to Iran, and it should give one an approximation of the lengths the regime is willing to go to secure it. It would be foolish to underestimate Iran’s appetite for war with Israel at the risk of provoking war with the United States. An additional concern for the regime is the possibility of Donald Trump returning to power or any Republican for that mater, that all but guarantees a reversal of course on America’s Iran policies (the nature of which under the last two Democratic administrations has been consistently pro-Iran and anti-Israel— read “The Realignment” in Tablet Magazine).
There would be several reasons for Iran to lash out and start making moves now. Being a nuclear threshold state and an authoritarian regime whose endurance is continually shaken by its citizens who hate and strongly desire to topple it, whose Supreme Leader is even older than Biden and thirsting for glory, with everything to lose from the finalization of the Abraham Accords, the last thing it needs is a Republican that would knock its lights out.
V. Remembering the Way Deescalation Led to at Least One World War
In this respect, it’s worth remarking on the parallels between Germany during the Great War and contemporary Iran. Like Iran, Germany was threatened, vulnerable, feared and loathed by all its neighbors. But with revanchist designs on the whole of Europe and the wider world, and undeterred by any semblance of international order, it felt emboldened to start making moves. Germany invaded and conquered Belgium and Luxembourg committing grievous human rights abuses along the way, including the mass executions and rape of civilians. Then it was mired in a slugfest with France that would last until the end of the war. Like its contemporary equivalent in the Islamic Republic, Germany chose to bet against Britain or the United States intervening to stop it. While Hamas leads the IDF into a grueling invasion of Gaza, and international outcry builds against it, expect Hezbollah to incrementally escalate its rocket strikes on the Israeli homeland, and the continuation of strikes by other terror proxies meanwhile on US forces in Iraq and Syria.
Between an Israel that can only handle so much by itself, and that moreover would prefer to concentrate on eradicating Hamas and reoccupying Gaza, which though it has the capability, is not going to be easy; and, an utterly feckless Biden administration that at least before 2024, is looking to avoid another war in the Middle East at just about any cost, the puppet-masters in Iran think they can set the price according to which Biden desperately aims to avoid war, escalating at their leisure without fear of consequences.
Hamas has already murdered 31 Americans as a component of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, and despite being fully aware of Hamas’s ties to Iran, Biden said nothing about the regime in his first speech since the war began. He only issued a warning to nameless outside actors to “stay out” of the conflict. Then he sent two carriers, the Gerald Ford and the Dwight Eisenhower, as a symbolic expression of solidarity, whose military application Iran does not think Biden has the will to use. And after finally having mustered the courage to use the word, “Iran,” recently Biden said he would “respond” to attacks on US troops.
It hasn’t helped his illusion of deterrence either that he has been quietly pressuring Israel to walk back the siege of Gaza. Moreover it is entirely unsurprising that even after Hamas slaughtered innocent Americans, Iran has continued harassing troops in Iraq and Syria with drone strikes. The mullahs have also made a series of brazen threats to the effect that a wider war was “inevitable.”
I read in Bloomberg this morning, the Iranian foreign minister said this yesterday— “If the United States continues what it has been doing so far, then new fronts will be opened up against the United States.” Iran is so undeterred either by Biden or our troop presence that the regime is seeking to deter us. It would be understating the situation to say this is a really really bad sign.
It’s sobering to recall that before Wilson finally declared war, he sat back and absorbed repeated attacks from German submarines that killed over a hundred American civilians on ocean liners. It was only after the Zimmerman telegram that Wilson declared war, and that was only because it would have been politically inviolable not to declare war after Germany was found to be proposing to conspire with Mexico to invade the United States. That is to say, no matter how many more of our troops Iran’s proxies manage to injure or kill or American hostages they slaughter, though it could put pressure on him from the Republican party, Biden has no redlines, less the will to enforce them, meaning more troops will die needlessly.
In his Washington Post column, “Iran’s Proxy Forces are Teaming up to Attack Americans,” Josh Rogin says the terrorist militias are presently organizing with the explicit purpose of attacking Americans,
I spoke with two Syrian rebel commanders who partner with U.S. forces there in the fight against the Islamic State. They told me that the IRGC’s notorious Quds Force has consolidated various militias under the new moniker to focus efforts and resources on one shared mission: targeting Americans.
“There has been absolutely no response to these attacks, which has resulted in the fact that the Iranian backed militias are getting much braver,” said one Syrian rebel commander, who requested anonymity out of concern for his safety
And Rogan underscores,
To be sure, the Biden administration must be careful about feeding a cycle of escalation that could lead to a wider conflict. But that fear of escalation risks paralyzing policy. U.S. forces have responded to Iranian-backed militia attacks in Syria while Biden was president. The logic then still applies now; failure to respond encourages these groups to get bolder.
If Biden intervenes, it will be because his hand was forced like Wilson’s. And it might be a long time yet before Biden’s hand is forced. But here are some things to consider.
Though Iran depends on making Israel look like a human rights abuser, counting on global progressivism one way or another whether from the far left, or even the center-left, to favor the welfare of the Palestinians at the expense of Israel’s right to defend itself, the winds can shift. Germany depended on the German diaspora in America, in particular Wilson’s German constituency in the Democratic party, to restrain him. Germany was also betting on anti-British sentiment in America through Britain’s support for the Confederacy in the Civil War, the War of 1812, and the American Revolution. Analogously, today Iran is fueled by a predominant anti-Israel streak in the Democratic party, feckless hamstrung internationalists like Biden, the New York Times, the EU, and CNN who simultaneously support Israel but virtue signal that they don’t want a single Palestinian to get hurt— residual wokeness and a temperamental loathing of Bibi Netanyahu—and a Republican party blighted by isolationism and more concerned with the Southern border and fentanyl than anything else in the world, whose Iran hawks at any rate, Joni Ernst, Nikki Haley, Tom Cotton, Mitch McConnell are either not in power, or they lack meaningful influence to shape policy.
However, as the public came gradually to learn of the German menace and take Britain’s side— on account of Hamas’s crimes against humanity, still undying global support for the Jewish state, if the world were to wake up to the Iranian menace, it could cool sympathy for the Palestinians as the Iran’s hegemonic ambitions, on one hand, to go nuclear, and, on the other, to wipe Israel off the map are revealed. Additionally perhaps one terrorist attack on Jews by fanatical Muslims in Europe or the US stands in the way of the feckless center-left internationalists throwing all their weight behind Israel in alignment with the center-right.
VI. How Things Spiral
Another point to consider is that given Biden’s desire to prevent or forestall Israel going to war with Iran with whom Biden deludes himself he resurrected the nuclear deal (cash relief not to enrich uranium), if the war escalates, that delusion could become untenable, especially as Republicans blast him for it. Knowing how Biden is motivated purely by political incentives without any recourse to any higher concept of American interests or values, if an Iran deal is politically inconvenient, and the war threatens oil prices—which his deal was also supposed to stabilize— anyway, then we could watch Biden’s appeasement strategy tentatively solidify into a containment strategy. We have already seen premonitions in this regard with his absurd proposal to refreeze the unsanctioned oil funds, and that he struck back against the Iranian militias in Syria and Iraq. Let’s say Biden is finally compelled to set some hard and fast redlines. For example, Biden could condition intervention on the question whether Iran for example were to threaten Israel with ballistic missiles. The moral imperative to defend the Jewish state against existential threats could supersede his reluctance for war, and though Biden is one of the most cowardly antiwar doves in politics, he could foreseeably end up going to war no matter how averse to it he is.
And one other thing to keep in mind is that if Israel were to be worn down in Gaza, and the Hezbollah threat increases, Israel increasingly will lobby the United States to intervene, like Britain did with Germany. A major factor precipitating American intervention was Britain’s maritime blockade of German trade. It may be some time down the road, but Israel could impose a blockade on the Iranian oil trade and send oil prices (already high, having hit $95 a barrel this summer) through the roof, and sending inflation rocketing back up. And Iran for its part, could impose a blockade on Israel or just start bombarding oil shipments indiscriminately. At the moment Iran is lobbying Arab states to impose an oil embargo on the West over Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
Elizabeth Braw writes in her Foreign Policy article on the subject, “How the Israel Hamas War Could Spike Oil Prices,”
Ships that ordinarily travel through the Strait of Hormuz will, in fact, become the most tangible indicator of escalation involving Iran: if insurers consider such violence likely, shipowners will have to reroute their vessels to alternative—and much longer—journeys. That will cause disruption and price spikes in the oil market. “I don’t think it’s in Iran’s interest to shut down the Strait of Hormuz,” said Cormac Mc Garry, a maritime analyst with Control Risks. “But shipowners are very cautious. I’ve seen some owners wanting to pull out completely if another ship gets attacked.”
Trying to keep order in the Strait of Hormuz itself is creating highly volatile situations. Late last month, IRGC forces shone a laser at attack helicopter pilots assigned to the U.S. force in the strait while the chopper was airborne. Indeed, every action that the U.S. forces undertake to guard commercial vessels against Iranian harassment can cause Iranian forces to retaliate—which could make an armed conflict a fait accompli.
When push comes to shove depending on what suits him politically, Biden could be forced to intervene on Israel’s behalf whether he would like to avoid a wider war or not, before 2024 or after, rather than continue seeking alternatively to nurture a mental fantasy of detente with Iran, and, placate his anti-Israel constituency and the international community already shooting itself in the foot.
We will see.
— Jay
What strategic value would overthrowing Assad have at the moment? To me that would be a gigantic waste of resources and men. The only thing we should be thinking about in foreign policy is Iran. Not Syria, not Hamas, not Hezbollah-- Iran.
Your case is sound so far as World War Two is concerned, but when it comes to the Great War the situation was more complicated.
It’s true that as the war dragged on and the casualty lists lengthened, there were calls here and there for a negotiated peace—not just from America. But they fell on deaf ears, because the logic of the war precluded any such thing. The more that the belligerents sacrificed, lives and national treasure alike, the more vital it seemed to them that nothing short of total victory could justify those sacrifices. In short, Wilson’s diplomatic efforts along the lines of a “peace without victory,” brokered by America, were irrelevant. After 1916 at the latest, the war was fated to be a fight to the finish. And it was on that understanding that America joined in.
That caveat aside, I agree with your analysis.