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Notes -
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?
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.
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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