Out of all my posts, ROI is easily highest when I just type out a bunch of bullet points until I run out of things and then hit send, so here goes.
A lot of internetoids are obviously very disappointed that America hasn’t been sucked into muh forever war with boots on the ground and regional turmoil and whatnot. Anti-interventionism online is held with a sort of religious fervour according to which any kind of military action abroad simply must spiral out of control and end in disaster. This is doubly true if it’s military action alongside or on behalf of Israel. The absolute worst thing that can happen, according to this view, is that America bombs Iran and then it’s basically fine. In meatspace, though, as explained here, what Trump did was just good policy, and if you don’t like it, it’s probably because you’re a massive fag.
Contrary to predictions that Trump’s populist agenda will be undermined by entanglements abroad, it’s overwhelmingly likely that Trump’s successes over the next 3 and half years will be mostly in foreign policy. The basic reason for thinking that is because that’s what happened in his first term. The slightly deeper reason is that America’s domestic problems are quite hard to solve, and all the solutions to them involve doing things that are unpopular, which Trump is disinclined to do, and also can’t do because his starting level of support isn’t high enough. On top of that, the policy-production apparatus that the Trump administration has as its disposal is just a big disaster zone of flaming poo. Conversely, if your main strength is thinking outside the box and punching walls to see if they turn out to be made of plasterboard, then there’s a lot more delta in foreign policy. It’s possible that this might go really drastically wrong and everyone on earth dies, but it’s more probable that you just score some easy wins that your predecessors didn’t do because of vague [reasons] that turn out to be fake.
Of all the decisions I’ve made since moving to Israel, probably the best turns out to have been moving to the Golan Heights. I’d like to be able to spin that as the product of farsighted geopolitical insight, and since it’s my blog, I can do what I like, so that’s the official line from now on.
Not the Golan Heights Israel has done a lot of pretty morally dubious stuff over the past two years, exactly how morally dubious we can make a firm decision about in a few years. But it’s also been doing the region a lot of favours. Lebanon - which I thought would be half rubble by now - has been done a big favour by reducing HizbAllah to a much less powerful local actor. Syria has been done a favour by finally putting an end to more than a decade of civil war and getting the chance to give neoliberal Islamism a crack. All the Sunni states have been done a favour in having Iran’s regional pretensions smashed to bits. Good for them. The country that probably won’t be reaping many of the benefits of this, however, is Israel because it is beholden to (a) kooks (gettit?) who literally think major metaphysical changes will happen to the structure of the universe if they build enough concrete tower blocks in Samaria and (b) dumb baboons who, in as much as their mental state can be translated into comprehensible thought, just think we always have to kill more people whatever the situation because ‘this is the Middle East’. Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain all show it’s perfectly possible to be a well-governed Middle Eastern state that intelligently manages its foreign relations just so long as you totally crush democracy and put all your mentally unstable religious nuts in underground jails, which sucks for us.
On that score, there’s a big part of me that would like to do a compilation of the delirious euphoria that has been flying around Right Wing Israeli WhatsApp over the past week. I think it’s kind of cheap and maybe in a sense a bit of a betrayal, but I also think someone should do it because in five years time when it turns out that Israel is still just a small country in a tough neighbourhood, with inherent strategic limitations and heavily dependent on a foreign power - plus the big fat anvil of Gaza that we hung round our necks no less heavy than it was before - people will point blank deny they ever said or believed all these crazy things.
Trump is not the hero we deserve, but he’s the hero we need. Technically speaking, he’s being kind of a knob because it’s actually pretty normal for a country, especially round here, to try and hit a list of remaining targets before the ceasefire deadline, but it doesn’t really matter what he’s telling us off for, it just matters that he did it, and in a way only he could. People here need to hear this. I think my readers abroad perhaps can’t quite appreciate how much they need to hear this, but they really need to hear this.
You’re not special, stop being psychos.
Over to you in the comments.
Come back to England, I will buy you a sandwich in return for 2 hours of your schizorambling about how I can fix it here
Whether or not it was a good idea kinda depends on whether or not the nuclear program has been set back by at least a few years. I am not getting the warm and fuzzies from the US government on this, which is either leaking low confidence reports that it's been delayed a couple of months or is just publicly saying without any evidence that of course it's destroyed you stupid reporter how dare you ask, what part of 30,000 lb bomb go boom did you not understand?
From Trump's perspective, I think he thought the Israeli operation was cool and wanted in, but on his terms - he does one super cool mission and because he doesn't like getting stuck in things, the war has to end like the next day. The downside of this is that if the job wasn't actually finished as a result of the super cool mission, he won't finish the job - and his ego won't let Israel finish the job either (that would imply the super cool mission didn't work and he already said it did work, moron), and Israel has already sacrificed so much, so there's going to be tremendous pressure in Israel to come to the conclusion that, b'hechrech, the job must have been finished, even if it wasn't.
Now, maybe Iran and the US can work out a deal but I doubt it. Fundamentally the problem with negotiating a deal with the US now on anything is that one of the US's two political parties doesn't think it's bound by agreements.