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Israel / Iran War Back On?
Rumors are swirling that Israel will attack Iran as early as today. Iran has promised to retaliate if they do.
Why would Israel do this? Some conjectures:
Iran's missile and drone attack was so pathetic that Israel feels it can attack with little fear of retaliation
The reaction to Iran's attack shows that Sunnis won't help Iran
An outside chance of regime change in Iran might be worth it. Israel has gradually improved relations with Sunni neighbors such as Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. However, Iran's proxy fights have been a constant thorn in their side. A regime change in Iran could finally bring true peace to Israel.
If they can set back Iran's nuclear program it will be worth it
One big wild card is of course the U.S. reaction. Biden is in the middle of a difficult re-election campaign where inflation is probably the #1 issue. Petrol prices have been a major obsession with the Biden administration, which is why they unfroze billions of Iranian funds and reduced sanctions (in what now looks to be a serious blunder).
Israel's attack could cause a spike in oil prices and threaten Biden's reelection campaign. Having already drained about half the SPR to help win the 2022 midterm elections, there is less flexibility to supress prices this time around. For this reason, Biden has urged restraint. But when the chips are down, I think everyone knows that Israel will have the administration's full support.
Less certain is the reaction of European countries and Muslim neighbors. Will countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia truly remain neutral if there is a full-blown war between Shia Muslims and Jews?
Notably absent among your conjectures 1-4 is deterrent to future attacks. That is the obvious top of the stack.
I think you're right, but it's not super obvious to most people. I'll spell it out to save people time.
Let's say both sides are equal. In that case, "deterrent to future attacks" is equivalent to "tit for tat forever". This obviously doesn't work.
However, since Israel is much stronger than Iran, deterrence actually works since they can impose costs on Iran which Iran can't impose in return. I'll assume this is what you meant.
Doesn't work compared to what? I would rather have intermittent tit for tat forever than constant tit for tit forever, which is the salient alternative. Deterrence is not about being stronger than your attacker; it is about making it persistently, conspicuously not-worthwhile for him to victimize you. That is how it works in prison, for example. Either you fight periodically, win or lose, or your horizons get broadened in a really interesting way.
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I don't know. Is a full blown war between Iran and Israel even possible? Does either nation have the capability to deploy and maintain a substantial force on the ground of the other, or is the worst that can happen a full air exchange?
No. Not even close.
Yes. Iran's max damage is probably 10k Israeli civilians.
Israeli could do a lot worse. They could probably kill Iran's leaders and cripple their oil infrastructure. At the far extreme they could nuke Tehran but obviously they won't do that for game theoretical reasons.
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I'm reminded of one of Scott A's old posts about internet arguments. Both sides feel like they've responded proportionally, just matching the insults of the other person to send a message that they're not a pushover. And both sides feel like the other side is escalating, ramping things up with a more aggressive response. I'm a little worried that might happen here... Iran says "we needed to send a message by responding to Israel's attack on our generals." Israel says, well that was us responding to your attacks on us, and now we have to respond to your attack by uh... bombing Tehran...?
Like the internet. There is a moderator involved. Israel can do as much as the US will tolerate. If they catch a ban (US decides to cut them off) then suddenly they probably can’t afford things like the Iron Dome especially in current warfare and even more drone attacks. It supposedly cost a billion dollars the other day and far less for Iran.
They can’t do things to the extent the US cuts them off and Iranian retaliation seems justified.
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From a game theory POV I would think you'd want to hit back much, much harder to discourage future retaliation in the first place?
And what happens when more than one party has this attitude? Wild mutual escalation that most people people involved don't even want. Turning what could have been a mild contention into effectively a blood fued.
I suppose this depends on being significantly stronger than the other party. Like, if you have nukes and the other does not.
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Though that may throw you into a weird equilibrium where enemies don't attack unless they're certain of your total destruction. Ie. fine, fine, dead.
So that's the sort of thing you can only do if you have a reliable second-strike/dead-hand system. And even then you can get pushed into a situation where your opponent will be so pissed off they just eat the loss. It only works against causal decision theories.
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As a specific nothingburger prediction, Israel will do something Iran can respond to with a typical Hezbollah-launched and ineffectual strike, Israel will blow up some building in Beirut, and they'll call it even.
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Maybe it'll happen this time. Maybe the next time. Israel is capable of successfully prosecuting a war against Iran without American assistance or approval, and the logic of the situation in the region makes such a war nigh inevitable (unless the Iranian regime goes down otherwise).
As I've said a year and a half ago:
It's a popular conceit on the far right that the US will one day grow out of the «Greatest Ally» narrative. What is not considered is that Israel is straight up a politically stronger, more agentic and more serious country, and can pull the plug from their own side.
Some random Russian economics and history channel comes to mind:
The author is Catholic, but I get the impression – from many distinct sources – that even mildly Zionist Jews are inclined to agree.
Americans are truly delusional if they believe that their clients – be those Ukrainians or Jews – feel any loyalty to them just because of past help, or can be blackmailed with talks about some common Western cause or principles or interests. They're going to do what they find useful, at occasions they deem opportune.
The US aren’t “pathological liars and traitors”, they just put their interests first. The Israelis didn’t tell Austin about the consulate attack because (as the telegram channel correctly says) there was a good chance they’d tell the Iranians to “preserve stability” and “avoid escalation”. But all major powers have these considerations, look at the way the Russians screwed the Armenians over again recently, for example. There are even things the British and Canadians don’t share with the US. Only Germany and possibly Australia are really pure vassals.
Huh? I don't endorse the author's evaluation, as I do not believe Israel is entitled to even greater American support. Protesting American displeasure is pure arrogance on Israeli part.
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Ukrainians and Israelis both are capable of adapting to a world without US support, that they received US support is because it is in the US interest to keep the conflicts within a narrow bound.
Most obviously, the cheap drones being lobbed smugly by vatniks and jihadis can be replicated with miminal effort by even a semi functional state. With no external support at all, nothing is stopping Ukrainians from kitbashing a kamikaze drone from shit ordered off aliexpress and an arduiono with the midterm output of a computer vision junior and slamming them into Russian oil refineries. Similarly, Israel is already conducting cross border kinetic actions that destabilize US intererts - Eliat is hardly an important port and if the Red Sea chokes why does Israel care about that more than Tel Aviv.
No, the US support is ultimately a bribe to keep spillover effects, not a show of solidarity. Ukraine and Israel and even Taiwan are not mountain locked Kurds or Panjshir Afghans, these state actors have their own capabilities and dangers that can threaten second order US interests with far greater consequence than what we see now.
Harsh disagree here. Ukraine is currently losing and has been for quite some time, despite the US' support - and at this point there's no support the US can give that would make a difference short of simply announcing that their side of the Dnieper is under the nuclear umbrella.
As for Israel, it would depend on how exactly "US support" gets defined. They'd easily be able to survive if the US simply cut off the free money, but Israel takes (in some cases, like intelligence, without asking) a lot more than that. If they were actually and seriously cut off from the West they'd be reliant on their nuclear program for deterrence - and that just isn't enough to protect them from their threat environment, especially seeing as how they've been pissing off Russia and China. They'd have to find a solution to the problem of the orthodox as well, and that's not going to be terribly easy for them.
I actually largely agree with your specific points, though the statements I made were to service a different argument. Don't get me wrong, I was hardly implying that the Ukrainians were winning or had a clear path to victory laid out before them. The Russian mistakes of 2022 have been largely corrected and Ukraine is set for a slow and inevitable defeat, as befits the poorest and most corrupt nation (stated in order to highlight the lack of state capacity not to denigrate the Ukrainians) in Europe going up against the Russian Armed Forces who out of sheer pride would - and have - endured humiliating loss ratios to eke out a path to victory. Similarly, my statement on Israel being able to live off the US teat merely shifts the existential burden more on Israeli shoulders, largely in line with all the points you raised.
No, I should be explicit in what I mean: US aid is not charity, or even soft power projection to hurt US enemies. US aid is there to keep dangerous dogs leashed and to keep them from making further disruptions. Unchecked, Ukraine may decide to go down swinging and in turn utterly destroy all manner of Europe bound infrastructure because hurting Russia is all that matters. Similarly Israel may give zero shits about the delicate balance of power in the mideast and take 'decisive' action against Iran, regsrdless of its implications to the Strait of Hormuz.
US allies aren't just recipients of US generosity, they wed themselves to continual compliance with the restrictions imposed from the top lest the tap shut. The converse also applies, if the tap shuts then the 'allies' become free to wreck shit.
I commend you for recognizing a rare piece of insight that many don't realize. Both the premise that a leash can be tugged from both ends, and that military aid is as much a means to regulate as to enable violence.
An example of almost certainly-not-sanctioned Ukrainian resistance to Russia was the Nordstream pipeline explosion, which on further investigation was very likely- and plausibly- a Ukrainian operation of considerably sparse means of not much more than a rental boat, some divers, and far-from-impossible to procure explosions. As a result, the entire German economic strategy was derailed as the strategic premise of Nordstream blew apart, every resistance group around the world gained a sudden interest in scuba certification, and Russia lost its monopoly on under-seas infrastructure violence that it had been trying to leverage until then. Every power in the region had reason enough to cover it and pay it no further mind, not least because the people who would have wanted to take issue with Ukraine for doing so couldn't stop it from happening again, and there ceased to be an economic case for breaking with NATO in favor of Russia when any of the people between Germany and Russia could blow up the business case of Russian energy.
Giant geopolitical and global economic implications, teensy little boat. And not something particularly seen sense, despite impressively deep Ukrainian special forces intrusions to strike deep within Russia.
Restraint can be a function of inability as much as unwillingness, and as much as renting a boat and finding some surplus explosives is relatively conceivable to us, the net frictional effort may be less efficient than remaining in the wests good books in exchange for artillery and A2AD. Specifics on why a mass special force terrorism campaign has not been seen yet is for armchair generals on NCD, since discussing operational or tactical or technical military matters here is generally lacking as actual subject matter experts are circumspect and blowhards are unrestrained.
More germane to the topic of discussion, the broadly philosophical 'why' of these wars, seem to be tinged with aspects of the culture war. I am suspicious of claims that one party is slave to the whims of another, especially if that 'other' is a stated proximate enemy. The real enemy after all are the cowardly democrats forcing Ukraine to fight innocent Russia who champions true hero of the anti-woke (Trump), or the real enemy are the LGBTQIA+ Harvard DEI consultants encouraging the ummah to strike back against the bastion of Western Colonialism. The vague stink of culture war obviously permeates anything, but Ukraine in particular seems to attract a specific strain of aggrieved 'peacenik' who cannot fathom at all why someone would fight back against an aggressor.
When these discussions do not pass the smell test, it certainly invites suspicion that the discussions are not going to be held in good faith. No amount of discussion, good faith or otherwise, will dissuade a party set in their opinion, and the discussions bog down into mutual whining. Its certainly can be fun and even enlightening by accident, but the core arguers are unlikely to budge.
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Israel’s Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi said that “the strike will be met with a response”. The question is, will Israel’s response be a substantial escalation, or will this turn into an international slap fight?
I would assume that a slap from Israel can be far weaker, and yet far more painful, because Iran is not well known for its anti-rocket defense systems. Would that still count as escalation? Depends on who you ask.
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Like you, I expect an attack on nuclear facilities is possible.
Israel would be stupid (which is entirely possible given Bibi hanging on by a thread etc) to respond now unless they really thought they good meaningfully slow the nuclear program. In that case this would be the only opportunity to get away with it without the same level of international condemnation.
But Iran’s nuclear facilities are underground and well fortified, I don’t know that Israel could actually damage the program by that much.
If the nuclear facilities are out of reach, Iran's power generators are not and destroying all of them would significantly damage Iran's economy and hence its military capacity.
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I'm not sure either, but I'm also a big believer in the power of human ingenuity. Stuxnet certainly set a high bar for what Israeli is capable of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
Not sure what kind of surveillance assets Israel has, but one possibility would be targeting people in high leverage positions within the nuclear program. Kill enough of them and people might reconsider the cost/benefit of working to build nukes.
Mossad's been gunning down Iranian researchers for ages - you are not proposing a new idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nuclear_scientists
Great minds think alike I guess. Still, it's probably easier to kill some scientists when you have a green light to bomb as opposed to being sneaky.
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Yes. Like their The Jackal style robot muder van that killed Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
File not found. Want to post a summary?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/mossad-killed-irans-top-nuke-scientist-with-remote-operated-machine-gun-nyt/
Israelis built a truck with a remote control gun on it and killed Iran's top nuclear scientist with it in Iran.
Ah, the old Walter White method. I've heard the Russians have some pretty tricky ways to kill people too. Surprised the Israelis haven't made a heart attack gun yet.
In any case, if Israeli can reduce the life expectancy of an average Iranian nuclear scientist to less than 10 years, I think that should do the trick. The rest should take care of itself. "What are we making nukes for anyway, Reza? You ever wonder what would happen if we just.. didn't".
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Jordan allowed Israel to use its airspace to counter Iranian drones and shot some drones down itself. I'm not really sure how neutral that counts as, at this point.
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Because I was called out for being too late with my nothingburger prediction before I'll make sure to get it in early this time around.
Nowhere. In. Two. Weeks.
Nothingburger predictions work most of the time. But when they're wrong, they can be very wrong. That's why there's no alpha in making them. In terms of options trading, it's called picking up pennies in front of steamrollers.
(But yeah, you're probably right).
Nothingburger predictions are why I didn't believe the western intelligence community's claim that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent. You can find similar claims of imminent invasion going all the way back to the annexation of Crimea, with nothing to show for it. The intelligence community has successfully predicted 8 of the last 1 Russian invasions.
Can you show evidence that the US IC warned of a Russian invasion where nothing happened?
Sometimes, warnings being deemed legit depends on the threat actor actually following through. Putin could have backed off at the last moment. People like you would then call the warnings fake news, but the intent and preparation and potential was there.
In fact, that was the goal of the US: share enough (unprecedented) intel that Putin would decide to change his mind. If US foreign policy had been more successful, you would call that an intel failure, when actually it would be about the most successful intelligence can be.
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Iran's strike from its own territory appears to be, in my admittedly imperfect knowledge, rather unprecedented in the history of tit-for-tat strikes between the two countries. Historically, the strikes on Israel have come from Iranian proxies, not Iran itself. Even with the telegraphed nature of the 4/13-4/14 strikes (allegedly Iran told the US exactly what flight-paths the drones/missiles would be on?!?!?) Israel wouldn't want to let the precedent stand that Iran can launch on targets in Israel proper without Israel having grounds to strike at Iranian targets inside Iran in retaliation.
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It continues to surprise me how many of these blunders date back to the first weeks of the administration. I'm not a huge fan of the previous president, but many of Biden's first actions included repealing the "remain in Mexico" policy (which seems linked to ongoing trouble with immigration), making nice with Iran (which didn't prevent October 7th, and seems hotter now than before), and passing the final round of pandemic stimulus (which we were told wouldn't cause inflation).
It doesn't exactly inspire the most confidence in me.
Its similar to the "reversed stupidity is not intelligence." Biden just got into office and reflexively repealed a bunch of high profile Trump actions without seeming to engage in any thoughts about the merits and tradeoffs relating to any of those policies. So what you got was floods of new asylum claims, funding going to a bunch of terrorists, etc.
US foreign policy is schizophrenic. Why would anyone want to negotiate with the US at this point? Obama takes great pains to advance diplomacy with Iran and join the TPP - Trump immediately reneges on the nuclear deal and leaves the TPP - maximum pressure and trade wars! Biden wants to go back to Obama policies on Iran and climate. Why should anyone trust in his word when the next guy can negate it?
Trump wants to throw Ukraine under the bus. Well, fair enough. May as well get off the sinking ship in a lifeboat rather than swim in the cold. But it's still not consistent, it's confused and certainly does Zelensky no good.
Because we are the 1000 lb gorilla. But more seriously, this is all caused by Presidents thinking they can make foreign policy solo. Wars are supposed to be declared by Congress. Treaties are supposed to be approved by 2/3 of the Senate. If Obama wanted to make a serious nuclear deal with Iran he should have gotten 2/3 of the senators on board, not done a deal he knew 54 senators were opposed to. This sort of unserious flipping happens when a President tries using foreign policy to secure victories on domestic policy.
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The pro-migrant and internationalist left flank had not gotten fully humiliated by the migrant busses and Afghanistan yet, and that wing wanted their pound of flesh upfront.
That wing is still at the same place even after the've been "humiliated". They are incapable of that emotional state.
That wing however is capable of having its impotence exposed, and that has lead to their rantings being dismissed. Jayapal is no longer the force she used to be, and the Squad is little more than a punching bag for right wing shock jocks. They have no political cachet to demand more pounds of flesh up front, and their continual failures are as much due to republican successes as much as their own allies failing to back them up.
Uhh? Biden's whole Mid East policy is based on pandering to that wing. They have a lot of cachet.
My assessment stems from Jayapal getting smacked down for her October 2022 call for Ukraine to surrender, and how the new Israel ceasefire statement is made by Pogan instead of her. The CPC is the largest caucus, sure, but Biden seems to occasionally coincide with their priorities rather than wait on them. My main indicator is how neutered Jayapal specifically is despite her stated ambitions, and I will be happy to reevaluate my conclusions based on evidence of either Jayapals nonrelevance to the CPC or Jayapals wing being specifically catered to.
Jayapal is the chair of the CPC, but doesn't appear to reflect progressive consensus on Ukraine, which is that defeating Russia is super important.
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