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Yes
I only had a skim, but couldn't find the part about arm-twisting.
It's a bit of an extended discussion, but at the bottom of this comment I wrote:
To which the response was:
I did ask @RandomRanger a little later on to clarify his position:
But received no response. He's welcome of course to jump in and make his stance on the topic clear, until then, draw your own conclusion; my interpretation is that if he doesn't think Israel is twisting the US' arm, it's only because Israel already owns the US government.
Israel doesn't own the US government but they have enormous influence especially in foreign policy and anything pertaining to Israel. Occasionally the US tries to do something that actually prioritizes American interests over Israel's, the Israel lobby usually nixes this in the end: the Iran deal for instance. Now the US does have huge leverage over Israel in terms of capabilities. Merely shutting off aid would be catastrophic for their military, who relies on US provided weapons, satellites, communications and USAF for air defence. I've said before that the US could annihilate Israel at will with sanctions alone, the state would quickly disintegrate.
But in terms of mental, political, lobbying power, Israel enjoys a huge advantage. The warrior can easily demolish a succubus in battle but it's irrelevant if she has her charm spell running.
I'm not dogmatic on whether it's arm-twisting or owning hearts and minds, there's a mix of both going on. Nor can I give you a date where it suddenly happened, it's not a switch that was flipped on but a gradual process peaking around the 2000s.
But something, surely, has to be off when you've got big figures like Ted Cruz going on interviews about how the Bible says God will bless those who bless Israel, curse those who curse Israel, how he got into politics aiming to be the biggest defender of Israel. Some of this is Adelson money and other Israel lobby cash/threats, some of it is weird Christianity, nevertheless it's unusual and indicates powerful influence.
I mean, the US has never invested ground forces in taking out any military group directly opposing Israel. There are/have been so many of these I'm not sure you could just label them occasional incidences of America not prioritizing Israeli interests at this point.
I'm not sure you understand the actual numbers involved. US annual aid to Israel is $3.8 billion, not a small number, but less than 1% of Israel's GDP. That number has gone up during the recent hostilities, but not to the extent that it would be a catastrophe for Israel to have to pay upfront.
Was this last bit about the USAF some sort of typo?
@ArjinFerman There you go.
Forget GDP, GDP is just a number. You can't just go out and buy large numbers of artillery shells, JDAMs, advanced missile defence, spare parts. It's not a liquid market, buying more can just make the price go up. Few countries make these things. Israel can't produce munitions at scale because they're a small country, they don't even have a domestic steel industry. They rely on the US for this because America is actually large and has huge stockpiles that are reliably used to replenish the Israeli arsenal. Otherwise they'd just run out of munitions or Israel would have to wait ages to restock, inhibiting their military capacity.
Furthermore, military aid always roars up whenever Israel actually needs it, it went up to about $22 billion in the year after October 7th. See here: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/USspendingIsrael
Technically speaking, the there is a law against America giving any military aid to nuclear powers who haven't signed the non-proliferation treaty like Israel but they just pretend it's fine.
No, the USAF and RAF literally, directly, provide air defence for Israel directly. US F-16s shot down Iranian missiles attacking Israel. Plus US warships nearby fire their expensive ABMs to defend Israel.
Saddam's Iraq was an anti-Israel force. Israel bombed their nuclear reactor in the 80s. In the Gulf War Iraq Scudded Israel. In 2003, the US invaded Iraq, in large part due to false intelligence about WMDs which the Israelis contributed. Plus a bunch of US policymakers talked about how the real reasoning was that Iraq was a threat to Israel. See my comment here: https://www.themotte.org/post/765/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/162796?context=8#context
GDP is a number that correlates pretty directly with the ability of the state to purchase goods and services, such as military equipment, from other states, unless you’re going to argue that money is fake and that allowing Israel to buy arms from Lockheed Martin at market prices using a medium of exchange like dollars is some unexplainable act of charity on the US’ part.
This feels like throwing out random tangents.
Suggesting that the market for military equipment isn't as illiquid as you made out. In any case, I'm not sure this is any more evidence of Israel controlling the US government than Ukraine does, given the $61 billion of aid that the US gave them in April 2024.
I don't know of any times the US has ever provided direct air defence for Israel beyond the two recent episodes when Iran shot missiles at them, and while they doubtlessly appreciated it, it’s no different to what the US would do if missiles were fired towards Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or any of their other middle eastern allies, and far less than what the US would be obliged by treaty to do if someone started firing missiles at a NATO ally. The US does less for Israel than it would do for Estonia in this context.
I’m not even sure this is a motte and bailey, given how unlikely the claim that the US went into Iraq primarily for Israel’s sake, just a bailey and a slightly less rickety bailey. In any case, the claim that US foreign policy is mostly dictated by Israeli interests is so extreme that the Iraq claim could be true and it still wouldn’t be sufficient for your argument given that US hasn’t deployed ground troops to take out any the modern threats facing Israel in Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza or Iran.
Someone should remind the North Koreans their 'GDP' is small, so they can't provide more shells to Russia than Europe (huge GDP!)
Israel gets the most advanced US weapons to fight a few Arabs, while Ukraine gets second-rate equipment, F-16s rather than F-35s, in a war with Russia.
The distinction is that all other US allies bring something to the table. Saudi Arabia brings oil and money. Turkey controls a key strait and sends troops to help the US occasionally, though they're not a great ally. Britain, Australia, Canada will send troops to help America too.
Israel only takes. They create enemies for America, they harm collaboration with the Islamic world, they sell military technology to China and frustrate US diplomatic efforts to pull out of the Middle East and focus on Asia. They never send troops to help America, they send shoddy intelligence and suck up aid like a leech. They even got the US to pay off their neighbours too, Egypt and to a lesser extent Jordan get billions in aid for being nice to Israel, the aid started as soon as they signed a peace treaty with Israel.
Go tell that to the neocons, generals, and officials who were there when decisions were made and describe their reasoning perfectly clearly. Did the US go into Iraq to seize the oil, which ended up mostly in the hands of Chinese companies? Or did they go in to fight the Islamist terrorists, mostly of Saudi background and who Saddam was suppressing anyway? Clearly not, instead there's silly discourse about aluminium tubes and other shoddy intelligence, much of which came from Mossad or was used to justify a pre-determined decision. If it weren't for Israeli influence, the war wouldn't have happened.
The US has bombed Yemen and Iran, given Israel munitions to bomb Gaza and Lebanon. US troops were infamously on the ground in Lebanon before getting blown up and departing. Just because the Israel lobby doesn't get everything they want all of the time, it doesn't mean their influence isn't excessive.
If someone told the North Koreans that having a higher GDP meant you could buy more foreign weapons, I'm sure they'd agree. In any case, I don't know how this supports your original claim that "merely shutting off aid would be catastrophic".
Plenty of other countries also get F35s, like Belgium, who don't even have Arabs to fight.
Israel brings plenty to the table, although I suspect you're too emotionally invested in a certain point of view to ever accept any evidence of this.
Because they have mutual defence treaties. Such an agreement between the US and Israel would be drastically more in Israel's favour than America's, given how much more often Israel is attacked. Frankly if you want a single piece of evidence that America foreign policy isn't beholden to Israeli interests, this would probably be it.
Every vaguely functional Islamic country is already onside with the US (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, etc). Iran's hate for the US goes far beyond Israel. The original reason the US chose to ally with with Israel during the Cold War is because it wasn't one of the Arab states aligned with the USSR.
This is the only legitimate criticism of Israel I've seen you make so far.
I'd advise you to look at those aid numbers again. They're small when it comes to how wealthy Israel is, and insignificant to the US. And I'm not sure why you'd consider Israel a leech and not Ukraine when Ukraine has been getting much larger amounts of aid over the past few years.
Egypt and Jordan get money to keep their governments from falling apart. Neither poses anything close to a threat to Israel. The peace treaty between Egypt and Israel was signed six years after the Yom Kippur war ended with Israel advancing on Cairo, because relations and with and recognition from the largest Arab state were worth way more to Israel than continuing to humiliate Egypt further.
I doubt it, but it doesn't matter, because the claim that Israel caused the war isn't sufficient for your argument that the US almost always prioritises Israeli foreign policy over its own.
On a scale from complete non-intervention to ground invasions in all the countries mentioned (which is probably what most Israelis would like to happen if they could choose), the US' historical actions in the ME are overwhelmingly closer to the isolationist side of that spectrum.
Didn't you start by saying something very close to this? The particular quote being:
In any case:
Is much more reasonable than the original position you staked out.
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