The Great Deal Maker Donald Trump is desperately trying to extricate the U.S. from the war we started for Israel in Iran. There isn’t a plausible or honest way of spinning it in any other way. The very best outcome will be for the status quo to return to the region but even that is unlikely as Israel refuses to stop bombing civilians and occupying territory in Lebanon.
What has also changed is a global dynamic. Iran didn’t “beat” the U.S. forces because they don’t have the capability but what they did manage to do was cause a stalemate that led to Trump blinking. Now the world knows that Iran can effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz at will.
Maybe America’s reliance on golly gee whiz-bang tech weapons will work against some opponents but against Iran, not so much. No one remembers the Highway of Death littered with burning obsolete Iraqi armored vehicles. Now warfare has moved in a very different direction, more on that in an upcoming post.
The bigger issue is that the U.S. finds itself handcuffed to the lunatics in Israel.
I have gotten some pushback in the past when I claim that Israel is already looking for the next existential threat to squabble with but the evidence keeps piling up to support my theory.
‘Syria & Turkey Represent Bigger Threat To Israel Than Iran’: Israeli Minister
Late this week Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli declared in an interview with Israeli Army Radio that Tel Aviv “will be at war with Syria sooner or later,” highlighting that the alliance between Damascus and Turkey poses a “strategic challenge” to his country.
The Likud official said, “There is no way that a jihadist regime rooted in ISIS and Al-Qaeda, whose aspiration is the unification of Jerusalem, can live in peace alongside the State of Israel.”
In a separate interview with Kol Barama, a prominent Israeli ultra-Orthodox radio station, Chikli identified Syria as part of a “radical Sunni axis of evil” involving Qatar, Turkey, and Pakistan, labeling it “far more troubling” than Iran, and claimed that these nations shaped a recent US–Iran memorandum of understanding (MoU) intended to end regional hostilities.
While Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hailed the memorandum as an “important development,” Chikli joined other Likud lawmakers in branding Turkey an “enemy state.”
Amichai Chikli isn’t the Prime Minister of course but he is part of Netanyahu’s Likud party so it is reasonable to assume that he is saying what Netanyahu isn’t saying. At least not yet.
Israeli officials have been talking about future targets even while the war was raging and now that it is sort of over, it doesn’t seem like their thirst for a new war is much diminished. The more they say what their plans are, the harder it becomes for naysayers to claim otherwise.
When someone says what they want to do over and over? Believe them.
Should there be a country left and people capable of writing histories, honest historians will note that Trump squandered an incredible amount of political capital on Israel. Already the Trump 2.0 presidency is marked by endless talk of war in the Middle East and the sort of inflation and higher gas prices Republicans criticized under Biden. When I was in northern Michigan last week there were a number of billboards pointing out that the higher gas prices we were paying were a result of this war.
With the midterms just a few months away things are promising to get uglier and soon. It isn’t all the fault of Trump’s obsession with Israel but is sure is a lot of it.