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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.
I don't buy what Rubio said in that quote. He makes it seem like the Israeli action is like some natural phenomenon that cannot be stopped, like an earthquake or volcanic explosion. Whereas the reality, I'm pretty sure, is that if the US government really wanted Israel to not strike, Israel would not strike. Would Israel ignore the US if it was faced with a genuinely existential, immediate threat? Yes, I think so. But this situation was not an immediate existential threat.
On a similar note of "stuff I don't quite believe"... there's now an article in the Financial Times about how Israel tracked Khomeini. Allegedly, with sophisticated data hacking and analysis. Now, was there sophisticated data hacking and analysis? Probably. But I don't quite believe the details presented. It would be stupid of the Israelis to leak the actual details of how they did it, thus educating their enemies. Of course, an unauthorized leak is possible. But I notice that the Financial Times article is another data point in an ongoing pattern: first the info that came out about Stuxnet, then the info that came out about the pager operation in Lebanon, and now this. A series of supposed leaks about tremendous intelligence capability being deployed against Israel's enemies. It's unlikely that the intelligence agencies involved would keep letting such leaks happen over and over again.
I think it's likely that these supposed leaks are actually America + Israel running a deliberate intimidation campaign to make their enemies scared and also to potentially make them waste energy taking wrong precautions. Because if the leaks are part of a deliberate intelligence campaign, then it would be reasonable to conclude that the details are inaccurate: most likely, a combination of accurate details and inaccurate ones put together in such a way as to have enough truth to seem plausible to Israel's enemies, while being inaccurate enough to cause them to take wrong actions in response.
Mike Johnson confirmed Rubio's statement
Why? What leverage do we actually have over them? They could easily fund themselves if we cut aid (after all they spend tons of money on their universal healthcare and free higher education, they aren't hurting finacially) and that's a big IF considering how aggressively pro Israel most of the Republican and Democrat parties are. Restoring any aid cuts to them might be one of the few things that makes Congress act.
We're in more dire financial straits than them, yet we give them money as they fund things we consider frivolous back home. If that's not being their bitch then I don't know what possibly could be.
I think you're underestimating the multifaceted nature of US influence over Israel beyond just the annual aid package (which, sure, is "only" about $3.8 billion but is also overwhelmingly military specific, funding things like Iron Dome interceptors and David's Sling defence systems that can't be easily self replicated overnight). Now yes, cutting that wouldn't bankrupt Israel (they're a high-income economy with a GDP per capita higher than most of Europe, after all) but it would materially constrain their operational capabilities in a prolonged conflict like this, especially when they're already stretched thin across Gaza, Lebanon, and now Iran.
Now add intelligence sharing (the US provides a huge chunk of Israel's real time targeting data and satellite recon), diplomatic cover (vetoing UN resolutions that could lead to sanctions or isolation), and arms resupply pipelines (Israel's F-35s, JDAMs, and bunker-busters are US sourced and require ongoing parts/maintenance approvals).
If the White House truly went all-in on opposition (say, by halting those exports under the Arms Export Control Act or even threatening to abstain on a UNSC vote condemning the strikes), Israel would face immediate logistical headaches and international backlash that could force a rethink. We've seen glimpses of this before: Reagan delayed F-16 deliveries in the '80s over Lebanon incursions, Bush Sr. withheld loan guarantees over settlements in the '90s, and even Obama slow-walked munitions during the 2014 Gaza op. Israel grumbled but adjusted.
You're right that Congress is overwhelmingly pro-Israel, and restoring aid cuts would likely be bipartisan lightning fast. But this situation started with Israel's June 2025 unilateral strike on Iranian nuclear sites, which escalated to the ongoing joint op after Iran's retaliations threatened US assets directly.
It's not purely about defending Israel from an "imminent" nuke (though that's what is claimed). If the US had drawn a red line earlier and enforced it with those levers, I doubt Bibi pushes this far without coordination. I'll have to reiterate @Goodguy here, both Rubio and Johnson's statements feel like post-hoc justification for Trump's decision to join rather than restrain.
For sure, countering Iran immediately appears to align more with Israel's interests than the US', but I'm not convinced that the US has zero strategic interests in this joint op (though what those interests may be, I'm not 100% sure).
Israel isn't the country it was even in 2014 - religious Jews outbreeding secular Jews has changed the balance of power.
There was a soft right wing of Likud, including people like Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, who thought that Israel's best hope of security was to annex as much land with as few Palestinians as possible, build a fence to keep the vast majority of the Palestinians out, and rely on American support (based on shared interests and values) for defence against Iran and friends. That soft right is now de facto the centre left (parties like Kadima and Blue & White), and even so can't win elections against the Netanyahu coalition. (The only government without Likud since 2009 was a short-lived monstrosity formed when far-right Naftali Bennett went into coalition with the centre-left because he was disgusted by Netanyahu's personal corruption. It lasted 18 months, after which Bennett's party was wiped out).
Netanyahu's coalition don't want to build a fence (at least in the West Bank - Gaza is a shithole nobody wants) - they want to fill Eretz Israel with Jews (sometimes explicitly for religious reasons - religious Zionists are a core part of the coalition) and somehow-or-other have the Palestinians who currently exist there go away. And given a choice between relying on God or the United States for Israel's security, they are going to choose God. Israeli religious Zionists don't have shared interests and values with the US, but there is a popular evangelical heresy which wrongly teaches that they do. Given Netanyahu's ability (or at least perceived ability) to sic AIPAC (in a Democratic primary) or Christian Zionist evangelicals (in a Republican primary) on individual American politicians who cross him, his approach to the US is closer to oderint dum metuant.
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If the US did all of that, we might actually get all the Epstein files released, but by Mossad.
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