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Top Administration Officials Are Now Openly Admitting That America Is Israel's Bitch.
This wasn't clipped and quoted from a fringe groyper. This was posted by an official White House account.
I can't believe this shit. The United States has abdicated strategic initiative to Israel. The American armed forces in the Middle East have been reduced to reacting to and mitigating damage from Israel's operations in the theater. The straightforward interpretation of the above quote is that Israel started a war that killed American troops.
I was watching Tucker Carlson lay out this exact theory and thought, “well that’s an interesting idea. Too bad we’ll never know for sure.” And then the first thing I see when I tab over to Twitter is Marco Rubio making the exact same thought.
That quote doesn't seem so bad if true? It is much easier to hit missiles on the pad than to knock them out of the air.
I am personally much more interested in the consequences of the Iran war for nuclear proliferation. For potential dictators, the lesson of Libya, Ukraine, and North Korea was that your leadership cadres will be secured in power if they can get nuclear weapons, but that giving up a nuclear program is asking to be harrassed by your neighbors. The winning move for Iran was thought to be the nuclear progam, delaying Israeli intervention until enough weapons-grade fissile material could be covertly manufactured.
This war in Iran flips the apparent incentives. The bombing of capital ships and leadership greatly increases the costs (both military and personal) to leadership discreetly pursuing nuclearization. The new rule effectively seems to be "running a nuclear program is not enough to secure your power: you'd better complete nuclearization before you are detected." This seems like it will be a successful means of deterrence against nuclear proliferation, which benefits everyone. I strongly approve.
It is also especially interesting that this is now the third time that the US is has committed surgical strikes against leadership cadres instead of full-scale ground conflict. In the short term this provides strong motivation for leaders of other states to capitulate to US demands, and reduces casualties for everyone who is not in leadership cadres. In the long term, localizing the effects of wars close to the people who start them seems like it will be great for the achievement of world peace. I wonder if the strategy here is asymmetric in favor of the US (Iran having a higher population of Israeli informants than camels), or if the defensive game is hard enough that this opens up US leadership to threats (Iran does have a large military drone sector, but Trump is just old enough that he doesn't care).
One must also wonder what would have happened in Iraq if Saddam Hussein was droned and his replacement was told "behave, or you get droned, too." Talk about aligning incentives.
I agree with this take, nuclear proliferation is an extraordinary global risk and this really seems to be a low cost to way to prevent it.
https://www.amazon.com/Fallout-Story-Secret-Nuclear-Trafficking/dp/1439183074
Is a fantastic book which illustrates some of these risks.
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