CNN
—

Ten days before the American presidential election, an uncontrollable war in the Middle East appears to have been avoided for now; That came to the relief of President Joe Biden’s White House aides and Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign team in Delaware.

“It looks like they hit nothing but military targets. My hope is that this is the last time,” Biden said Saturday after receiving an update on the situation from intelligence analysts.

Such an outcome was hardly a foregone conclusion earlier this month, when Iran’s massive ballistic missile bombardment of Israel sparked fears of a massive and escalating retaliation, potentially targeting Iran’s nuclear or oil sites. Yet, in Biden’s mind, if the worst-case scenario is averted, the larger knot of the Middle East conflict will remain as knotty as ever.

A direct attack on Iran puts the region in a new and more dangerous place; Tehran is now considering its own response to this response.

According to the statement from the White House, Biden and Harris attended a meeting with national security teams on Saturday and received information about the latest developments in the region.

“This morning, President Biden met with Vice President Harris and his national security team to receive a briefing following Israel’s decisive response to Iran’s ballistic missile attack on October 1 and to discuss the latest developments in the Middle East,” the White House said in a statement. “He made a phone call.”

Israel continues to expand its operations in Lebanon, which has killed hundreds of women and children and tested America’s patience; However, there has been no major breakout so far.

And the conflict in Gaza does not appear to be over as it was before the death this month of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, whose death Biden hoped would lead to renewed efforts toward a hostage deal for a ceasefire.

That window of opportunity remains fractured, at least in the eyes of senior Western diplomats, and negotiations are set to resume in Qatar this week.

However, few people believe that any solution will be found before the November 5 US presidential elections, making Biden and Harris’ failure to bring stability to the region a serious political liability.

Even if a full-scale war between Iran and Israel doesn’t break out now, it’s not where the United States had hoped it would be before Election Day.

American officials do not believe it would be very creative to put an end to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s multi-front operations before the elections.

And there is little doubt in their minds that Netanyahu considers former President Donald Trump, with whom he called many times in the weeks before Election Day, a close ally.

“We will take care of Israel and they know it. Bibi called me yesterday and the day before. We have a very good relationship. Fortunately, they didn’t listen to Biden, because if they had listened to Biden, they would be waiting for a bomb to fall on them right now. And they did their own thing,” Trump said at an event in Georgia this week.

Speaking before embarking on a rare campaign trip on Saturday, Biden said he was “not surprised” that Trump was in regular contact with Netanyahu. He acknowledged concerns that the Republican candidate did not represent the United States in these talks.

Harris has offered little evidence that she would take a different approach if elected. Questioned by a voter at CNN’s recent town hall in Pennsylvania about “how to ensure that not another Palestinian dies from bombs funded by U.S. tax revenues,” Harris once again pointed to the nascent ceasefire agreement and did not say where it would succeed. Biden failed.

But when pressed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper about what he would say to voters who won’t vote for him because of their anger over his administration’s handling of Gaza, he said Trump would make things worse.

“Listen, I’m not going to deny the strong feelings that people have. “I don’t know that anyone who sees the footage wouldn’t have strong feelings about what’s going on,” Harris said. “But I do know that a lot of people who care about this issue also care about lowering food prices. “They also care about our democracy and not having a fascist US president who admires dictators.”

These answers did little to persuade Arab American voters to support Harris; Harris has given them little to suggest that she will not simply act as an extension of the Biden administration on this issue.

Abdullah Hammoud, the Democratic mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, one of the cities with the largest concentration of Arab Americans, this week refused to endorse any candidate and instead encouraged residents to “vote your moral conscience.”

“I have not found any candidate, especially one in my party, who is willing to depart from the current course that President Biden has taken us down on the genocide in Gaza and the broader conflict that is happening right now. It touched Lebanon,” he told “The Hill” in an interview on Wednesday.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s tour across the region this week revealed little concrete evidence that Hamas is willing to update its demands for the hostages to be released or that Israel has any new interest in reaching a deal.

While the main focus of his attention has been planning for post-war Gaza, the steps to get to that day are as elusive as ever.

Biden has been trying for months to pressure Netanyahu to reach a deal to end the conflict in Gaza; This, in his view, would lower temperatures in the region and potentially pave the way for a broader, transformative normalization in the Middle East.

He was rejected almost every time, leading to great disappointment and long periods of silence between the two men.

That has created a degree of uncertainty in recent weeks as Biden and his aides try to figure out how Israel will retaliate for Iran’s Oct. 1 ballistic missile attack.

From the beginning, they signaled a different approach from April, when Israel’s successful capture of Iranian rockets and drones encouraged Biden to “win over” Netanyahu and forego responding.

Biden aides said the scale of the ballistic missile bombardment was different this time and required action.

But in a rather frank public statement, the president made clear that he opposed attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities and advised against going after the country’s oil reserves.

In a phone call on October 9 – his first in almost two months – Netanyahu assured that these targets were not in Israel’s sights, despite pressure from some conservatives in his own government to take advantage of Iran’s moment of weakness to go after them.

Last year marked a rare instance of Biden’s advice being adopted by his Israeli counterpart, although Netanyahu has his own reasons for avoiding the most sensitive Iranian targets and has made clear that his country’s decision-making is independent of Washington’s guidance.

“It was very comprehensive. He was targeted. It was clear. It was against military targets throughout Iran. It was very carefully prepared in many ways. “And again, I think it’s designed to be effective,” a senior U.S. administration official said late Friday.

“From our perspective, this will end direct exchanges between Israel and Iran,” the official continued.

Ultimately, whether this will happen or not is, of course, completely out of Biden’s control.

CNN’s Betsy Klein and Samantha Waldenberg contributed to this report.