israel

If I were an Iranian Strategist…

/ geotrickster / 2 Comments

The one and only downside about leaving academia for first the policy and then the policy analysis community is that almost everything has to be framed as in the American interest. Now, since I wish to change my own country’s policies, this is hardly a bad thing on the whole. But boy does it ever make me long for times when I studied other countries’ strategies on wholly their own terms.

I wish to do that now, in what I am sure will be a scandalous exercise to centrists and journalists everywhere. Good thing its just my personal site and I will also be writing about concepts indecipherable to those still stuck at a 5th grade reading level.

Though many years have passed and the differences in details are now many, I have made the case before that Iran would most likely be a tough nut to crack for the U.S. and especially Israel. This is no half-failed Arab state with arbitrary borders drawn from a colonial office in Europe. At the same time, I want to acknowledge that the government is deeply unpopular with young people, is a ridiculous theocracy, and the government subordinating so much of its own national interest to the cause of Palestinian liberation has been a disaster for its own self-interest. I also don’t think (edit: more on this here) the toppling or weakening of a single government could knock a proud civilizational state out of commission for more than the short term. A better government would probably end up an even more potent regional rival to Tel Aviv in the end.

That aside, let us look at the short term. We now exist in a situation where either Israel will continue striking Iran unilaterally (no doubt with American assistance in intelligence and logistics) or will bring in America either partially or full force on Israel’s side. With the exception of some logistical support across the Caspian, I do not expect Russia or China to meaningfully intervene. China is happy to stay out of the region and let its rivals bury themselves in loser-wars. Russia is bogged down due to its own over-extension. So let us assume that Iran has to do this basically on its own.

Israel on its own can be stalemated, hence Tel Aviv’s desperate quest to ensnare Washington.

A full-blown U.S. intervention on Israel’s behalf represents the worst possible scenario for Tehran. There will be no choice but to withdrawal to extreme defense as a national war of survival. Though Iran’s networks would enable it to offensively unleash indirect chaos elsewhere, especially in Iraq and Yemen. These could exacerbate population migration pressures and alienate Europe. Inevitable casualties and cost for fighting such a turtled foe would grind down the American public and its low-morale military which has seen nothing but ruin in the Middle East. This would be a repeat of North Vietnamese strategy in a sense, though with a far less robust home front. Iran would itself be in danger the longer the war went on, as its own popular support would be strictly relegated to that of national defense. Either way, the only winner of this exchange is Turkey, who would gain in the region at everyone else’s expense and possibly even up as the peacemaker to the conflict.

Nothing too interesting yet, but lets turn to what might be the most likely scenario…a primarily Israeli war with US supporting air and naval assets in direct action but no ground war. Here is where Tehran’s opportunity lies.

Israel launched this war either knowing the US would be in on it, or assuming it could be forced into it by seizing the initiative. Tensions now exist within the alliance. The majority of the US public is opposed to military action. This might tick up as populations are fickle when bombs fly, but overall skepticism reigns. Israel seeks to lure Iran into attacking US forces in order to ensure greater American involvement. Iran would be foolish to fall for this trap. It should so thoroughly avoid doing this that should anything happen to US forces, many will suspect Israeli false flag operations or a repeat of the USS Liberty incident.

Most importantly, if the US strikes Fordow or any other target with its air force, Hypothetical Iranian Strategist Me would take the no doubt internally unpopular position not to retaliate…on the US. But there would be retaliation…on Israel.

This would be the crux of the plan: Every US attack invites a massive missile barrage on Israel as well as increased Hezbollah activity against the Israelis. The more the US acts, the more Israel is punished. The messaging would be that Israel had started the war and was trying to dogwalk the US into it. It would resonate with many parts of the public because it would be self-evidently true. If Fordow goes, so goes Haifa. If Isfahan is hit, so will Tel Aviv.

US logistics would still be strained by this as Israel ran out of interceptors and other equipment. The lack of American casualties would increase the antiwar voices in American media at the expense of the pro-war ones when discussing the threat Iran poses to the US. The Houthis, after all, already do a form of this with Israeli ships but not most other people’s traffic. Discontentment with Netanyahu would grow at home and abroad. He would have failed to bait the US to go fully in. His cities would be under attack, the economy of the country suffering. The Israelis will demand more from the US, ever more histrionically, and the US may often refuse them. Questions will arise, third parties will demand a negotiation. The Israeli elite would have to rethink the present government, whose justification for continuity is entirely based on Netanyahu’s proven record at manipulating America. If he has that, he has nothing. Domestic antics ensue. And then the Israeli public figures it out…more American support means more attacks on them.

In a scenario where Israelis die but not Americans, the rest of the world will shrug and point to Gaza when confronted with Israeli Exceptionalism/Chosen People Syndrome. It is at this point the Iranians state that they will allow their nuclear program to be observed by a neutral international commission if given full security guarantees against Israeli attack by international agreement, with the caveat being that they will fully reactivate nuclear development if Israel attacks them again. Trump, ever mercurial, might just want to claim a win and move on at this point. Israel, running low on supplies, would at least need a breather.

Such would be my strategy anyway. I don’t envy Iran’s position though. Attacked by some of the most duplicitous actors abroad and governed by some of the wackiest boomers on Earth at home, they have to navigate this security dilemma on the backfoot.

The Progressive Betrayal is Complete

/ geotrickster / 2 Comments

Today the House, in the fully bipartisan way it often endorses the worst ideas, voted by a large margin to continue and expand mass surveillance and the funding of two foreign conflicts which are unnecessary to any rational and non-ideological definition of the national interest.

Every single Democrat, with no exception, voted with our street preacher tier evangelical neocon Speaker of the House to give endless amounts of money to Israel and Ukraine. The Speaker himself cited his faith as a reason to make this corrupt bargain. In an inversion of the world I grew up in, the only votes of dissent against the foreign policy of the Book of Revelation were by Republicans. Democrats, who hold themselves up as the resistance to the worst of the far right, were rooting for a Speaker who probably thinks the world is 5,000 years old as they worked together on this abomination. Remember this next time they come to demand that anyone who is not conservative vote for them as a lesser evil. Remember this also when the legions of liberal anti-fascism experts give a carefully curated list of what they define fascism as, while omitting one of the single most relevant ingredients: a death drive for endless expansionism abroad. It is not hard to see why this particular part is so commonly overlooked by our esteemed extremism experts.

I never want to hear about how the Democrats protect anyone from the worst excesses of the Republicans ever again. This sellout is proof that a two party system is just a more dysfunctional version of a one party system. One where competence and reason are suppressed and an illusion of choice is given by differentiating two basically identical camps with a false choice between two increasingly extremist culture wars. But on the matters of true power and import (finance and foreign policy) there is no real choice. There is only an empire of for-profit contractors and missionary ideologues working together to perpetuate a particular and declining class’ dominance over the rest of society.

There is at least resistance in the Republican side, if hardly enough. But the fact that there is none, not one vote, against this spending abomination from the Democrats is truly something to behold.

I was recently thinking about how I was lured out from a decade of not supporting any national level candidate from either of the two major parties by the potential of something worthwhile in John Fetterman…Only to end up getting the equivalent of a Mossad spokesman in the senate for my trouble. I think its safe to say that baring some kind of extremely unlikely and unforeseeable event, I will absolutely never hold out even rhetorical support for a Democrat at the national level again.

It is not parochialism or even that made up Cold War Era nonsense word of ‘Isolationism’ to ask for that money to be spent (or saved) at home. As the proponents of these spending bills so love to remind us, most of it is just going to our own defense contractors anyway. You know, those companies with increasingly terrible ratios of cost efficiency and slipshod production who are no doubt going to use much of that money to re-invest in lobbying for more terrible unwinnable wars. It is an understanding that a country that willingly deindustrialized itself cannot re-industrialize through circular defense speculation alone. That its true strength lies in reshoring, yes, but also reinvesting in infrastructure and meritocratic social mobility. That the U.S. has the geographic and resource power to be extremely competitive…so long as it can give up the mad and ultimately doomed quest for hegemony. Ironically, it is this quest, not a ‘lack of resolve’ that weakens it abroad. Over-expansion, as anyone who has critically examined macro-historical trends can tell you, is the ultimate death of great powers. By fighting constantly they fritter away their will and resources and wither in proportion to their out of touch bombast. Turns out that the further you go from the core, the more expensive the operations become and the more skeptical the public is to what it has to do with them. There is no world-cause that has yet to override the inherent territoriality of states.

It should surprise no one that the modern day Democrats have become the Republicans of 20 years ago to a tee. I tried to warn people of this. The values on the culture war might be inverted, but the overall marriage of moralistic and teleological world view with an accelerationist militarism represents the same model: distract at home, bluster abroad. This is the point of the two party system…whatever the trends are of the day, the neoconservatives and democratists can pivot effortlessly between two supposedly opposed camps for whatever the best allies are for their project.

It behooves those of us who are opposed to them to show the same pragmatism. Preferably, a greater level of it. Here’s hoping (from my very non-conservative perspective) for a long and productive career for Thomas Massie in government. And here is also hoping that we can finally put the myth of lesser evilism in a two party duopoly to bed for good amongst the people of our society still capable of critical thought. While I personally prefer many parties to few overall, I do believe the honesty of a one party system may be preferable to the dishonesty of a two party one. They are both functionally the same, but even the low-information voters know who to blame for problems in the one party state. In the two party state, most people can be bought off by the political equivalent of jangling keys in front of their face and pointing at their neighbors to cast blame rather than their rulers. And that is what these progressives, many of whom originally ran explicitly to oppose neoconservatism, have done.

The only real lesser evil in the foreign policy debate is that of elevating those who know the limits of their national capabilities versus those who see no limits and stumble ever onwards towards self-imposed decline.

The Ouroboros of Cancellation

/ geotrickster / 3 Comments

The Left Sowing:

‘Yes, yes censorship and cancelling! This is how we get revenge on society for being the bullied losers in school! We are the cool kids now! You’re cancelled, you’re fired! No one will ever be made uncomfortable by words ever again when we abolish all bad things to protect victims everywhere!’

The Left Reaping:

‘Wait no, tyranny, censorship, how could I have known the culture of civic repression and empowering HR in society I took part in for a decade could one day revert back to the neoconservative and evangelical pro-Israel militancy from which it first spawned? What about my rights to dissent and not be fired for diverging from mainstream institutional thought?’

I always have despised the impact on public discourse by the Israel Lobby. Not one to enjoy taking part in ethnic strife halfway around the world in which I have no attachment to either side, I deeply resent the most effective group organization at entwining my country into a dispute which I think it should not be involved in at all. Israel is, of course, correct to follow its own interests in curating American support. But the United States is not correct in assuming its interests and those of Israel are the same, particularly since the end of the Cold War.

But I cannot help but laugh at the hole leftist activists have dug for themselves. Anyone with even a modicum of (fairly recent) historical knowledge knows that cancel culture in its modern form was pioneered by right wing Christians and their often-allies in AIPAC in a process that began in the 80s and continued without interruption through the 2000s. The left, subsumed by its own evangelical revivalist religion of wokeness, adopted all of these tactics for its own increasingly unhinged goals starting in the early 2010s. In a country where everything except some of their economic and socially libertarian ideas was deeply unpopular, this was always going to create a backlash. The question was simply when. As the former proper social justice causes of erasing legal inequalities got replaced by more and more ever-escalating demands which invaded people’s lives in the most horrifying of panopticons (workplace surveillance, censorship, ideological motivated firings, college campuses eschewing open inquiry for rigid conformity, victimhood grievance as the pinnacle of progressive activism, mandatory pronouns on work signatures, etc) a turn against the left-puritans was not only necessary, but inevitable. The linear-progressive view was such a blinker that it blinded the left activists to this obvious reality just as much as the same world view has blinded centrist liberals to the dangers of financial globalization and liberal internationalist diplomacy. It is dangerous to believe there is such a thing as a ‘Right Side of History.’

Ron DeSantis, or as I prefer to call him, Meatball Ron, was the first big figure to really exemplify this pivot back to the old pre-Occupy normal. A censorious culture warrior who governed an entire state seeking national media headlines, he pioneered (if not successfully for his own personal campaign so far) the return to right wing cancel culture by building off the very untenable situation created by the North American left. Even now he and that absolute horror show Nikki Haley are demanding mass censorship of universities and public spaces to defend the feelings of pro-Israel students. Cancel culture for me, but not thee. The right’s posture against censoriousness was always a canard.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone. The left absorbed and regurgitated the right’s old bugbears of sex entitlement, sex panic, the idea that people can become morally corrupted by entertainment media, and the cosmic battle of good vs evil to bring about the End Times. It merely repackaged them for different audiences. So why shouldn’t the right learn from professional managerial class and activist cancel culture? One form of slave morality meeting another in an Ouroboros of victimhood and cancellation.

I lament the canary in the coal mine that is mass censorship targeting critics of the U.S.-Israel alliance and will always advocate for the freedom to dissent from the establishment, as I always have. But I can’t help but laugh when it targets the American activist left. If anyone deserves this, it is them. Those of us who have remained consistent on these issues get nothing but our own peace of mind. But those others who are so insecure they are threatened by mere words will never know the confidence and satisfaction we feel to explore the world around us unburdened by their insecurities.

Fools Pick Fights That Aren’t Their Own

/ geotrickster / 7 Comments

I was originally going to write this post anyway before all the Gaza Strip stuff happened. I was simply waiting to get back from an international trip before doing so. That a new round of fighting between Israel and Palestine broke at the tail end of my trip only added from my desire to write such a thing. And while I know it would get more attention if I published it externally at some official publication, I feel few would allow me to say what I really want on the subject.

Every tribal war or local territorial dispute now has taken on global dimensions due to media saturation, the universalist claims of the American state, and the existential rhetoric its opponents adopt in response. This leads to a massive distortion in what people regard as self-interest, rejecting rationalist prudence for a crusader mentality of whatever the pet cause of the day is or ones personal/psychological vendettas.

People who live in North America for instance, but have no friends or family in either Israel or Palestine, are deeply invested in a tribal ethnic war that has no bearing on their life. Or, would have no bearing on their life were it not for the risk of outside power escalation. And the primary driver of outside power escalation is of course countries (and their publics) wanting to ‘do something‘. This is why interventionist states and their mouthpieces in the press are so obsessed with human rights narratives. They are always seeking to manufacture consent for the next intervention. It is increasingly obvious that in order to care about peace and stability one must not embrace, but renounce, the human rights focused view of the world.

While I am sure a large amount of the religious fanfiction of some cultures draws them like flies to shit when conflict in the Levant breaks out, this region is hardly alone in attracting this kind of attention. Having a national interest based discussion about Ukraine in North America, for instance, is always buried under layers of posturing bullshit about democracy, clashes of civilizations, and whatnot.

The obsession with tallying ‘War Crimes’ is a big part of this and may be central to this kind of rhetoric. The problem is war crimes trials are always by necessity victors justice, and without trials the concept has no meaning but a kind of whine. Power differentials make the concept situational as we know certain people will be punished and others not. Furthermore, such discussions feed into a false belief that war can be tamed and functions as a kind of courtly jousting match on a predetermined field. But in an era of mass urbanization, high explosives, and existentially justified stakes, this is impossible. Any war is a war on civilians and therefore the point of ‘war crimes’ is moot. To support a military operation is, inevitably, to support war on a society, not just its front line military. Considering the logistical network required for militaries to function this is both logical an inevitable. But it also means that to support a war means, undeniably, support for war on civilians and all that entails. This is why I personally support only a very few military operations even though I am not a pacifist. In my adult life I have only directly supported counter-ISIS and counter-Al Qaeda operations. And yes, this means I was fully supporting the demolition of places like Aleppo and Raqqa. Nor did I have the gall to pretend the policies I was advocating were actually for the good of the people being bombed, because no such policy can be good for everyone. The very existence of foreign policy presupposes the obvious observation that there are multiple groups of people with divergent interests.

The political center and its lapdog journalists, in love with war as they are, are actually made more hawkish by their faith that war is a controllable, even chivalric force of social change. Their maudlin humanism is not a hypocrisy except in rhetoric, it is a natural extension of their world view of treating war as transformational and moral rather than the breakdown of order and the failure of diplomacy. But some, even going back to Sunzi, warned us of the truth from the start: War is always a failure and a dangerous roll of the dice, even when it is necessary. That is why it must be kept to a minimum even though it is always prepared for as inevitable. But when it is embraced, it is only rational to embrace it to the maximum. If you believe a war is necessary, you believe the attempted demolition of another society is necessary. At least have the honesty to admit it. All people have a place where they reach this point. It is dishonest to deny it. And becoming squeamish when your faction does not behave in the way a suburban commentariat wishes just shows your views are superficial at best, calculated for social prestige at worst.

But let us not just pick on the centrists. The past month has shown us the worst spread of leftoid and rightoid thought across the board. Our entire culture is unprepared to seriously engage with nuance and restraint. Earlier, a moronic English language spokesperson for the Ukrainian military threatened U.S. citizens for criticizing involvement in the war. Even a cursory examination of this person’s past reveals a sadly predictable pattern: the lost soul in search of a cause who wanders the world looking for a fight that isn’t theirs. Having finally found one (a war which, since the failure of the first Russian offensives anyway, is basically now one of local territorial control) the foreign volunteers have adopted as a cause above and beyond their empty listless life in an attempt to find meaning they are too weak to make for themselves. A lack of self-cultivation leads to radicalization abroad.

I used to analyze patterns of extremist recruitment for jihadist networks when I worked for the U.S. government. It is interesting how many of the psychological identifiers are in place for western Ukraine volunteers. Downward mobility, an obsession with culture war and global teleology, the desire to erase one’s own personal insignificance by joining an existential cause beyond themselves. When these people come home, mark my words, they will destabilize their home countries. They are the new Freikorps, or Japanese army officers after the Siberian Intervention, or jihadists. Their jihad is Reddit (or Azov) and their connections and sense of entitlement make them a domestic danger. At the very least they should be put under surveillance. And for me, a general opponent of the surveillance state, to say that means I am very serious about the danger these people pose to the rest of us.

The right, if anything, has beclowned itself even more than the left and center. At least Ukraine ties into great power competition and therefore is a national security issue of some kind. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can’t even do that unless you think Saudi Arabia and Iran are global powers…an odd thesis. For years I have been warning the realism and restraint community (who has been rightly happy with more republicans listening to its argument than at any time in generations) that this was a fair-weather situation. I told many people, again and again, that the second something happened to Israel you would see the Bush/Cheney marriage of evangelical end times prophecies and neoconservatism come roaring back to the surface like it had never left. That happened this week. All the Big Tough Guys who pose about being better than the pussy humanists now shriek about seeing the face of war brought to their darling little pet nation, Israel, the nation they have sworn allegiance to above that of their own. This transferred nationalism allowing them to go to places the regular old kind at home is inadequate for. The conservative love of a country which could be considered the biggest ‘welfare queen’ in American history, one that bombed the USS Liberty and constantly schemes to involve Washington in more Middle Eastern quagmires, is a masochistic and yes, quite cucked, affair. Any utility this alliance once had ended with the end of the Cold War, and it now serves only as a burden. Yet these sentimental rightoids cannot stop themselves. Its the Bible Country and its under attack! Tom Clancy would want us to be the heroic protagonists of this new Battle for Civilization! The Left Behind series is now real- get ready to RAPTURE!

And these American Pied Noirs are just waiting to see their Biblical fever dreams reenacted at home as well as abroad. Once again, surveillance is needed. In a rational state without delusions of Imperial Globalism, that’s what we would do. We would treat people more interested in fighting other people’s battles as inherently dangerous and unstable, and merely waiting to bide their time to import those battles back home. The historical record on these type of people is very clear on this point. At the very least their antics should be tracked and publicly documented on public forums.

Conflict zone interest should be categorized on a location-based capacity. The further something is located from you, the less relevant it is. Its ability to impact you only worsens the more things get involved. Anglos are taught from birth to see all struggles as global and good vs evil, but they are inevitably local, contextual, and tribal. They can be everything and existential if you live in or near a place, but are not if further afield. The true danger of globalization is that every struggle can become globalized.

Conflict is both inevitable and eternal. Understanding this, the only rational conclusion is containment, not intervention. Containment is not pacifism and requires both vigilance and force, but it can and will reduce the spread of outbreaks of violence. Those who wish to make local conflicts go global are complicit in making the world a more awful place, be they hawkish politicians or these psychological damaged war tourists. Diplomatic wisdom is being rooted more in place, in a very real physical sense, than being rooted in some Platonic-Manichean realm of battling ideals. It is spatial relationships that should concern the makers of foreign policy, not dreams of world transformation.