The US is now fighting a regional war in the Middle East – even if the Biden administration won’t admit it

The US is carrying out airstrikes in three countries across the Middle East. It has sent billions of dollars in military hardware and is providing tactical support for its closest ally in the region, which is embroiled in a war against one militant group and almost daily skirmishes with another on its northern border. US forces in two of those countries have been attacked more than 150 times in the last three months, and the de-facto ruling power in an impoverished country in the Red Sea has brought international shipping there to a grinding halt.

It was not announced with great ceremony, as previous American adventures in the Middle have been – in fact, it was not announced at all. But the US is now embroiled in a regional war against an alliance of Iran-backed militant groups spread from Syria to Yemen. That war is being conducted with little congressional oversight, and with little acknowledgement from the Biden administration of the scale of the fighting.

It is an outcome that the Biden administration has claimed to have worked hard to prevent, but analysts say that the president’s unconditional support of Israel’s war against Hamas, in retaliation for the Palestinian group’s attack on 7 October, has ignited a tinderbox that will be difficult to contain.

“Unfortunately, we are now deep into a regional war and all the parties involved have made the worst possible miscalculations,” says Thanassis Cambanis, senior fellow and director of Century International, who warned of such an eventuality in the early days of the Israel-Hamas war.

Indeed, the Biden administration’s two main priorities in the aftermath of the Hamas attack seemed incompatible from the start. Mr Biden promised unconditional support for Israel’s war in