近一年中东地区的冲突，各大国未能阻止或显著影响战事发展，这一失败揭示了当今世界一个充满分裂而非集权特征的状态，这种状态可能将持续存在。
美国和以色列之间的谈判，旨在结束加沙地带的战斗，虽然被拜登政府多次描述为即将突破，最终却均以失败告终。目前西方领导的努力正试图避免大规模的以黎冲突，这可视为危机管理措施。在哈桑·纳斯尔拉被以军击毙后，其成功与否显得十分不确定。
“当今世界分权力量远超集中权力，”前外交官理查德·哈斯评论说，“中东是这一危险分散现象的主要研究案例。”
纳斯尔拉作为30多年来的黎巴嫩真主党领导人以及该国非国家武装力量之一的建设者，其被杀留下了一片空白。这对伊朗打击，也是其支持者的重大打击，甚至可能动摇伊斯兰共和国。现在是否会展开全面战争仍不明朗。
“纳赛尔是为真主党代言的关键人物，并且是伊朗的前锋，”法国中东问题专家吉尔斯·科佩尔表示，“现在伊斯兰共和国或许已被削弱，甚至是致命性的削弱。人们不禁要问，在今日谁能真正下达真主党的命令？”
多年来，美国唯一具备对以色列和阿拉伯国家施加积极压力的能力。它推动了1978年的戴维营协议（Camp David Accords），该协议带来以埃和平；以及1994年以约和平。三十余年前，在美国总统吉西克·里夫的陪同下，以色列总理伊扎克·拉宾和巴勒斯坦解放组织主席阿亚德在白宫草坪上握手，象征着和平的决心，但这种短暂希望逐渐消失。
世界已发生变化，特别是与美国长达数十年对伊朗的不信任及对真主党及其盟友如黎巴嫩的影响力。华盛顿已将哈马斯和真主党定为恐怖组织，这使得它们在很大程度上避开美国外交的影响范围。
尽管美国对以色列有长期影响力，主要表现为10月28日拜登政府签署的价值150亿美元的安全援助协议。然而，在战略和国内政治考量的基础上，围绕两个民主国家共享价值观的铁板钉钉结盟意味着美国很可能不会威胁切断或完全停止武器供应。
以在加沙地带对哈马斯恐怖袭击所造成的以色列平民伤亡以及对其部分250人绑架的回应，美国方面仅提出了温和的谴责。然而，尽管有数万巴勒斯坦人在加沙死亡，其中包括大量无辜平民，美国对于困境中的盟友的支持却是坚定不移的。
如果美国政策未来发生变化，其影响只会是边缘性的，尤其是鉴于年轻人中日益增长的对巴勒斯坦事业的同情。
其他国家主要为旁观者，战争蔓延时鲜有干涉。中国作为伊朗石油的重要进口国和新兴力量，没有兴趣扮演调停者的角色。俄罗斯也同样缺乏意愿提供帮助，尤其是在美国总统选举即将来临之际。它依靠伊朗为其在乌克兰不可解之谜中的防御技术与无人机获取支援。对于任何迹象表明美国衰落或陷入中东泥潭的机会持热切态度。
对前总统唐纳德·特朗普的回归白宫的预期，莫斯科可能认为他是一个宽容向普京的领导人，后者对俄罗斯具有重大影响。
至于其他地区大国，并没有足够的力量或巴勒斯坦事业的承诺来直接挑战以色列。最后，伊朗也谨慎行事，因为全面战争可能导致伊斯兰共和国的终结；埃及担心大规模的巴勒斯坦难民涌入；而沙特阿拉伯寻求巴勒斯坦国的存在，却不愿为此付出生命成本。
卡塔尔过去一年以每年数亿美元的资金支持哈马斯，并在加沙建立错综复杂的隧道网络。以色列前总理本雅明·内塔尼亚胡对此视而不见，将其视为削弱西岸巴勒斯坦自治权力的手段，进而破坏任何和平机会。
10月7日的灾难也是阿拉伯和以色列领导人利用巴勒斯坦建国事业寻求政治利益的结果。一年后，人们都不知如何重建和平或停战协议。目前的情况迫使全球领导者们前往联合国大会年会，其中安全理事会几乎因对乌克兰相关决议的俄罗斯否决权而停滞不前；或对于与以色列相关的决议则面临美国的否决。
美国总统乔·拜登描绘了世界正处于一个“分叉点”，在民主政治和专制政权之间。然而，如联合国秘书长古特雷斯所言，“针对哈马斯一年前‘令人发指’的行为导致的集体惩罚”的说法激怒了以色列，这似乎未能改变局势。
没有一致且协调的国际行动方式，以总理内塔尼亚胡和哈马斯领导人亚赫亚·辛瓦尔面临的后果相对轻微。他们继续追求破坏性的路线，其结局不明朗但必将带来更多的牺牲生命。内塔尼亚胡已经避免了美国努力推动与沙特阿拉伯的关系正常化，后者在阿拉伯世界具有重要影响力。
此外，为了躲避导致10月7日灾难的军事和情报失败所引起的正式谴责，内塔尼亚胡可能对战争的延长持有兴趣，并试图回避对其腐败指控的审判。他在等待美国总统唐纳德·特朗普再次当选的结果，认为他可以成为强大的盟友，直到下一次选举来临。
以色列家庭为战争送上孩子的人不知道其最高指挥官是否真正致力于抓住任何可行的机会以安全地撤回士兵们。这一情况被认为是侵蚀了国家的灵魂。
至于辛瓦尔，他所拥有的在加沙区持有以色列人质的权力赋予了他在世界舆论中相当大的影响力。随着时间的推移，越来越多的巴勒斯坦儿童被杀，全球对以色列的态度渐趋负面。
简而言之，辛瓦尔似乎没有任何改变路线的理由，而在“混乱时代”的今天，这个世界不会为他做任何改变。
国际关系和全球问题解决的主导机构自20世纪中叶以来显然无法应对新的千年的挑战。它们效率低下、效能不足、过时且在某些情况下已不再适用。这已成为一年以来的主要教训之一。
新闻来源：www.nytimes.com
原文地址：Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War
新闻日期：2024-09-29
原文摘要：
Over almost a year of war in the Middle East, major powers have proved incapable of stopping or even significantly influencing the fighting, a failure that reflects a turbulent world of decentralized authority that seems likely to endure. Stop-and-start negotiations between Israel and Hamas to end the fighting in Gaza, pushed by the United States, have repeatedly been described by the Biden administration as on the verge of a breakthrough, only to fail. The current Western-led attempt to avert a full-scale Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon amounts to a scramble to avert disaster. Its chances of success seem deeply uncertain after the Israeli killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah on Friday. “There’s more capability in more hands in a world where centrifugal forces are far stronger than centralizing ones,” said Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Middle East is the primary case study of this dangerous fragmentation.” The killing of Mr. Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah over more than three decades and the man who built the Shiite organization into one of the most powerful nonstate armed forces in the world, leaves a vacuum that Hezbollah will most likely take a long time to fill. It is a major blow to Iran, the chief backer of Hezbollah, that may even destabilize the Islamic Republic. Whether full-scale war will come to Lebanon remains unclear. “Nasrallah represented everything for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah was the advance arm of Iran,” said Gilles Kepel, a leading French expert on the Middle East and the author of a book on the world’s upheaval since Oct. 7. “Now the Islamic Republic is weakened, perhaps mortally, and one wonders who can even give an order for Hezbollah today.” For many years, the United States was the only country that could bring constructive pressure to bear on both Israel and Arab states. It engineered the 1978 Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt, and the Israel-Jordan peace of 1994. Just over three decades ago, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, shook hands on the White House lawn in the name of peace, only for the fragile hope of that embrace to erode steadily. The world, and Israel’s primary enemies, have since changed. America’s ability to influence Iran, its implacable foe for decades, and Iran’s proxies like Hezbollah, is marginal. Designated as terrorist organizations in Washington, Hamas and Hezbollah effectively exist beyond the reach of American diplomacy. The United States does have enduring leverage over Israel, notably in the form of military aid that involved a $15 billion package signed this year by President Biden. But an ironclad alliance with Israel built around strategic and domestic political considerations, as well as the shared values of two democracies, means Washington will almost certainly never threaten to cut — let alone cut off — the flow of arms. The overwhelming Israeli military response in Gaza to the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis and its seizure of some 250 hostages has drawn mild reprimands from Mr. Biden. He has called Israel’s actions “over the top,” for example. But American support for its embattled ally has been resolute as Palestinian casualties in Gaza have risen into the tens of thousands, many of them civilians. The United States, under any conceivable presidency, is not about to desert a Jewish state whose existence had been increasingly questioned over the past year, from American campuses to the streets of the very Europe that embarked on the annihilation of the Jewish people less than a century ago. “If U.S. policy toward Israel ever changed, it would only be at the margins,” Mr. Haass said, despite the growing sympathy, especially among young Americans, for the Palestinian cause. Other powers have essentially been onlookers as the bloodshed has spread. China, a major importer of Iranian oil and a major supporter of anything that might weaken the American-led world order that emerged from the ruins in 1945, has little interest in donning the mantle of peacemaker. Russia also has scant inclination to be helpful, especially on the eve of the Nov. 5 election in the United States. Reliant on Iran for defense technology and drones in its intractable war in Ukraine, it is no less enthused than China over any signs of American decline or any opportunity to bog America down in a Middle Eastern mire. Based on his past behavior, the potential return to the White House of former President Donald J. Trump is likely seen in Moscow as the return of a leader who would prove complaisant toward President Vladimir V. Putin. Among regional powers, none is strong enough or committed enough to the Palestinian cause to confront Israel militarily. In the end, Iran is cautious because it knows the cost of all-out war could be the end of the Islamic Republic; Egypt fears an enormous influx of Palestinian refugees; and Saudi Arabia seeks a Palestinian state, but would not put Saudi lives on the line for that cause. As for Qatar, it funded Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars a year that went in part to the construction of a labyrinthine web of tunnels, some as deep as 250 feet, where Israeli hostages have been held. It enjoyed the complicity of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who saw Hamas as an effective way to undermine the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and so undercut any chance of peace. The disaster of Oct. 7 was also the culmination of the cynical manipulation, by Arab and Israeli leaders, of the Palestinian quest for statehood. A year on, nobody knows how to pick up the pieces. So in their annual pilgrimage, now ongoing, world leaders troop to the meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations, where the Security Council is largely paralyzed by Russian vetoes over any Ukraine-related resolutions and American vetoes over Israel-related resolutions. The leaders listen to Mr. Biden depict, yet again, a world at an “inflection point” between rising autocracy and troubled democracies. They hear the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, deplore the “collective punishment” of the Palestinian people — a phrase that incensed Israel — in response to the “abhorrent acts of terror committed by Hamas almost a year ago.” But Mr. Guterres’s words, like Mr. Biden’s, seem to echo in the strategic vacuum of an à la carte world order, suspended between the demise of Western domination and the faltering rise of alternatives to it. The means to pressure Hamas, Hezbollah and Israel all at once — and effective diplomacy would require leverage over all three — do not exist. This unraveling without rebuilding has precluded effective action to stop the Israel-Gaza war. There is no global consensus on the need for peace or even a cease-fire. In the past, war in the Middle East led to soaring oil prices and tumbling markets, forcing the world’s attention. Now, said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, “the attitude is, ‘OK, so be it.’” Absent any coherent and coordinated international response, Mr. Netanyahu and Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader and a mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack, face no consequences in pursuing a destructive course, whose endpoint is unclear but which will certainly involve the loss of more lives. Mr. Netanyahu has shunned a serious American effort to bring about the normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, perhaps the most important country in the Arab and Islamic world, because its price would be some serious commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state, the very thing he has devoted his political life to preventing. Mr. Netanyahu’s interest in the prolonging of the war to sidestep a formal reprimand for the military and intelligence failures that led to the Oct. 7 attack — a catastrophe for which the buck stopped on the prime minister’s desk — complicates any diplomatic efforts. So does his attempt to avoid facing the personal charges of fraud and corruption brought against him. He is playing a waiting game, that now includes offering little or nothing until Nov. 5, when Mr. Trump, whom he considers a strong ally, may be elected. Israeli families who send their children to war do not know how committed their commander in chief is to bringing those young soldiers home safely by seizing any viable opportunity for peace. This, many Israelis say, is corrosive to the soul of the nation. As for Mr. Sinwar, the Israeli hostages he holds give him leverage. His apparent indifference to the massive loss of Palestinian life in Gaza affords him considerable sway over world opinion, which has progressively turned against Israel as more Palestinian children are killed. In short, Mr. Sinwar has little reason to change course; and, in what Stephen Heintz, the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund philanthropic organization has called “the age of turbulence,” the world is not about to change that course for him. ”The institutions that have guided international relations and global problem solving since the mid-20th century are clearly no longer capable of addressing the problems of the new millennium,” Mr. Heintz wrote in a recent essay. “They are inefficient, ineffective, anachronistic, and, in some cases, simply obsolete.” That, too, has been a lesson of the year since Hamas struck.
