Inside the Frantic U.S. Efforts to Contain a Mideast Disaster

As Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken flew to Mongolia on July 31, his mind was on events far away, in the Middle East.Hours earlier, Israel had assassinated a top Hamas leader in Tehran, and Iranian officials were vowing retaliation for the murder of a close ally on their soil.

Using a secure phone in his private compartment of the plane, Mr. Blinken spoke to several foreign officials in the hours after the killing, asking them to urge Iran against taking any action that could lead to all-out war with Israel.

Days later, one of the officials, the foreign minister of Jordan, Ayman Safadi, visited Tehran and called for “peace, stability and security.”

President Biden also quickly persuaded the leaders of Egypt and Qatar to schedule a new round of talks aiming to secure a cease-fire in Gaza. Those meetings had an unstated purpose as well: discouraging Iran from mounting an attack that could derail the talks and make Tehran look like a spoiler.

In the month since Israel’s assassination of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, U.S. officials have worked almost nonstop to contain the latest tit for tat, with Israel on one side and Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah on the other. They are desperate to avert a regional war that they fear could pull the United States into the fighting.

So far, that kind of disaster has been avoided, however narrowly.

Biden officials believe they have played an important role in staving off the worst, though they concede that other factors have kept a precarious lid on the fast-boiling pot. And while they have managed to contain the wider war for now, they have not secured a cease-fire in Gaza, a failure that could ultimately undermine their work.