As MidEast simmers, US arms flow to Ukraine thaws in time for summer offensive

(Originally published April 22 in “What in the World“) The bill reviving U.S. military aid to Ukraine could be passed by the Senate and signed by President Joe Biden in Washington by Tuesday.

The long-delayed legislation will free up a $60 billion backlog of ammunition (much of it sitting in Germany) needed to fend off an expected Russian summer offensive. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has complained that Russians are firing 10 artillery shells to every one his own depleted forces fire. While both sides have been locked in a rough stalemate for the past year, Russia has been getting fresh ammo from Iran and North Korea, enabling it to re-take an area roughly the size of Detroit from beleaguered Ukrainian troops.

The funds will also allow Ukraine to resupply anti-missile systems like the Patriot missile batteries to protect cities and infrastructure from Russian barrages.

The revival of aid to Ukraine will shift focus back to that conflict, following Israel’s more measured retaliatory strike against Iran. Israel’s response was much smaller than the hundreds of missiles and drones Iran launched unsuccessfully against Israel last week. But Israel’s attack was arguably more successful: while Israel and its Western allies’ navies managed to intercept most of Iran’s fusillade, Israel’s strike hit an Iranian anti-aircraft installation meant to protect the country’s nuclear weapons program near the city of Natanz.

The attack’s restraint was conducted in a way, however, to maximize Tehran’s anxiety about Israel’s ability to retaliate: Iranian forces haven’t been able to figure out how it was conducted, though it appears it was the result of both missiles fired from an Israeli warplane that evaded Iranian radar and from drones launched from inside Iran.

But the cycle of reprisals between Iran and Israel isn’t likely over, especially now that Iran has stepped beyond its longstanding proxy war to risk direct attacks. Afshon Ostovar, an Associate Professor at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, argues in a new piece in Foreign Affairs that Iranian foreign policy is now dominated by hawks who:

reject pragmatism in dealings with the West, remain deeply committed to the Islamic Revolution’s founding ideological principles, and are particularly invested in using Iran’s military power and proxy network to advance their long-term objectives of destroying Israel as a Jewish state and ending U.S. influence in the Middle East.

Indeed, the proxy war between Iran-backed militants and remnant U.S. forces in Syria appears to have re-started, with a militant truck-mounted launcher in northern Iraq destroyed Sunday in an apparent U.S. airstrike after firing on American positions across the border in Syria.