This doesn’t speak well for the new Islamic-fundamentalist government in Syria:
[There was] a wave of killings by Sunni fighters in Alawite communities along Syria’s Mediterranean coast from March 7 to 9. The violence came in response to a day-old rebellion organized by former officers loyal to ousted President Bashar al-Assad that left 200 security forces dead, according to the government.
A Reuters investigation has pieced together how the massacres unfolded, identifying a chain of command leading from the attackers directly to men who serve alongside Syria’s new leaders in Damascus. Reuters found nearly 1,500 Syrian Alawites were killed and dozens were missing. The investigation revealed 40 distinct sites of revenge killings, rampages and looting against the religious minority, long associated with the fallen Assad government. (1)
The current Syrian government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa came to power as head of an Islamist group “Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, which was previously al-Qaeda’s Syria branch, known as the Nusra Front.”
One of the developments to watch will be the position of Al-Sharaa’s government and the US toward the autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava I northeaster Syria, which is controlled by moderate (by Middle Eastern terms) secular government;
During the Biden administration, Syria was a sore point in US-Turkey ties. US troops first entered Syria in 2014 to fight the Islamic State militant (IS) group. They partnered with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Turkey views the SDF as an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The PKK has waged a decades-long guerrilla war in southern Turkey and is labelled a terrorist organisation by the US and the European Union.
“You can’t have a stable Syria without addressing the PKK. The US has to work with the Turks, otherwise there will be another war,” Bassam Barabandi, a former Syrian diplomat and opposition activist, told [Middle East Eye] .
During his first term in office, Trump tried to withdraw US troops from Syria. His own officials hamstrung him, and his former defence secretary, Jim Mattis, resigned over a partial troop withdrawal.
Although US troops were ostensibly in Syria to fight IS, they came to be seen as a force denying territory to Iran. With Tehran’s ally Assad gone, that rationale no longer exists. (2)
The strategic considerations for the US in keeping some US troops in the Kurdish area and supporting its autonomous status had much more to do with secured oil supplies from the area than with any great concern for the democratic prospects of the Kurdish people. But their presence has also served the latter goal up until now.
Syria under the Assad regime was friendly to Iran. So Israel was happy to see the regime fall. But Israel has also been seizing more territory inside Syria than just the Golan Heights, which Israel also illegally occupies.
A new report in the Times of Israel claims that Al-Sharaa’s government is not event including a demand to return the Goal Heights in its current negotiation with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel. (3)
Zvi Bar’el adds some detail to that picture, noting that Israel and Syria could agree to postpone negotiations over the Golan Heights until a later time. But the newly-Israeli occupied territories are an immediate issue:
The new president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, has so far successfully blocked Iran's military and political access routes, depriving Hezbollah of its most important supply route. Al-Sharaa declared that he isn't interested in conflict with Israel, and he hasn't ruled out the possibility that Syria would join the Abraham Accords "under suitable conditions." He has said most of the "right things" to date, and he has received a valuable reward that is reflected not only in Trump's warm handshake, but through the lifting of sanctions against Syria.
"Only" a minor issue called the Golan Heights remains – plus the fate of the territories in southern Syria and the Golan Heights that Israel took under its control during the war. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar already clarified last week that there's nothing preventing Syria from joining the Abraham Accords if Damascus is willing to concede the Golan Heights. Sa'ar effectively gave a stamp of approval to cooperating with Al-Sharaa, who until only a few weeks ago was still considered a dangerous Islamist Jihadist. [my emphasis] (4)
But he notes that Netanyahu’s government could also take the position that “the Golan Heights isn't even up for discussion, since Trump himself recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan,” the latter yet another piece of evidence of the incompetence of Trump’s diplomacy. And that position could push Syria to be even less willing to compromise on the newly-occupied territories Israel has seized.
Meanwhile, despite the professed objections of Peace President Trump, Netanyahu continues the genocide in Gaza: (5)
And the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank is also accelerating: (6)
In recent months, Israeli forces and settlers have intensified efforts to expel roughly 2,500 Palestinians living in a cluster of villages in the southern West Bank region of Masafer Yatta. In early May, when the military razed most of Khilet Al-Dabe’, it was the largest demolition in the area to date. Now, a new military directive threatens to fast-track the destruction of a dozen more villages. (6)
One of the increasingly prominent new themes in world politics is the rearmament of Europe. From Deutsche Welle: (1)
Al Jazeera (first 9 ½ minutes): (2)
We will continue to hear a lot about it. Here are a couple of my reference points in thinking about this.
Percentage of GDP as a measure of defense spending adequacy
The discussion right now is about the GDP percentage targets for NATO European members and Canada. It’s understandable why this measure is used. Because it’s a kind of measure of fairness among NATO members.
But it’s not an actual measurement of whether military spending is enough or too much. According to current IMF data, the GDP in US dollars of the US for 2025 is forecast to be $20.5 trillion (5%=$1.0T), German GDP $4.7 trillion (5%=$1.0T), Italy $2.4 billion (5%=$1.0T), Russia $2.2 trillion (5%=$1.0T).
But Russia is physically the largest country in the world, spread over two continents. It’s also a nuclear power. What it needs to maintain basic defense, even absent whatever expansionist ambitious it may have or may adopt, is simply a lot more in physical equipment and facilities than what Italy would need. But if Italy and Russia spent the same portion of their respective GDPs on defense, Italy alone would be spending more than Russia. (3)
GDP, in other words, does not equate directly to a physical measure of the adequacy of the country’s defense spending. (It’s also not a particularly helpful measure of to what extent a country’s economy is “militarized.”)
The ”Trump Daddy” schtick
European leaders crassly pandering to Trump as their “daddy” at this week’s NATO summit was inherently a bit sickening and pathetic.
But they also know that Trump eats up this kind of symbolic pandering. And, sure, they are glad to praise Trump for pushing them to boost military spending.
Here’s where reporters and commentators could use a healthy dose of Wilsonian provincial cynicism about the devious practitioners of Old World diplomacy. Seriously: anyone who has been paying attention to him – professional diplomats most of all – can see that Trump is a shallow narcissist and is remarkably clueless about the language of diplomacy. He also has no strategic foreign policy perspective beyond finding ways to get other countries to bribe him with hotels, cryptocurrency purchases, or whatever.
But the long-practice has been that the US bitches and moans that the Europeans and freeloading on the US by not spending more on military defense. And the Europeans respond by saying, okay, yeah, we’ll spend more, don’t worry about it. And then they continue more-or-less as usual. The US has considered this an annoyance but not so much an actual problem, because NATO has been a major multiplier of American power.
But Trump talks about NATO as though he sees it as a literal Mob protection racket on a grand scale. He consistently talks about the 5% GDP goal as though it involves payments by the NATO member countries to the US government. Take his infamous statement on the campaign trail:
Former President Donald Trump on Saturday said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that doesn’t meet spending guidelines on defense in a stunning admission he would not abide by the collective-defense clause at the heart of the alliance if reelected.
“NATO was busted until I came along,” Trump said at a rally in Conway, South Carolina. “I said, ‘Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn’t believe the answer.”
Trump said “one of the presidents of a big country” at one point asked him whether the US would still defend the country if they were invaded by Russia even if they “don’t pay.”
“No, I would not protect you,” Trump recalled telling that president. “In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.” [my emphasis] (4)
This from a guy who was notorious for stiffing contractors he had hired.
But the reason European NATO members are declaring in apparent seriousness that they are boosting their defense spending is not that they’re awed by Trump’s bluster. It’s because they no longer believe they can count on the United States to live up to its obligations under the NATO Treaty.
It’s not that they are awed by the Orange Anomaly’s “Daddy” energy. It’s because they don’t believe they can trust the US for mutual self-defense against Russia in the way they could for decades. The rest is theatrics. The Europeans also know it’s to their advantage to keep the US involved in European defense for as long as it’s possible to do so without taking actions they believe will undermine their own security.
Military buildups do not equal foreign policy
We’ll be talking and hearing about the Russian threat to Europe for God-only-knows how long. Russian writers and propagandists aren’t entirely wrong when they say that Western countries have been irrationally obsessed about the Russian threat for more than a century.
The world would be enormously better off today if we had collectively used the period after the end of the Soviet Union to establish a Europe-wide cooperative system like in Mikhail Gorbachev’s famous phrase of a common European home. (5)
The ”realist” approach to foreign policy would strongly suggest that in the “multipolar world” of China, the US, and Russia as the three major powers, it would be in the interest of the European NATO members (and probably Canada, too!) to maintain a mutual defense alliance and to pursue a collective foreign policy. Russia and the EU nations are currently in an adversary position, which will continue until something like a stable peace or long-term ceasefire agreement is in place between Russia and Ukraine. And the US under Trump 2.0 is basically hostile to the EU and to the norms of liberal democracy on which it is based. The US is also actively promoting far-right parties in the EU to undermine both the EU. And the more literate MAGA types like J.D. Vance or Peter Thiel generally hate democracy.
Traditional power-balancing considerations would see this as incentive for the EU to improve relations with China as much as possible to balance against the US and Russia. At the same time, the EU countries also have a strong interest in moving to some form of a common-European-home arrangement with Russia. Germany has a history especially since the 1970s of trying to find peaceful accommodations with Russia. Which in itself is a good thing.
The post-2024 defense paradigm for Europe
There have been a couple of serious but popular books in German recently on the broad subject of how the public needs to think about the new world of a “wartime” Europe. One by Franz-Stefan Gady, Die Rückkehr des Krieges: Warum wir wieder leranen müssen, mit Krieg umzugehen [The Return of War: Why We Have to Re-Learn How to Handle War] (2024) is kind of a primer for a general audience on the vocabulary of military planning and war, including the inevitable Clausewitz theory of war as politics by other means and the broad concepts of war planning and war doctrine in the current moment.
Another is a somewhat more academic book by the German historian Herfried Münkler, Macht im Umbruch [Power in Upheaval] (2025) on the topic pf “Germany’s Role in Europe and the Challenges of the 21st Century.” This one is more a primer on broad concepts of strategic thinking from Germany’s perspective in particular. With perhaps a bit too much emphasis on the concept of Mitteleuropa, a long-standing theme historically in German foreign policy thinking which basically focused on Central and Eastern Europe, not necessarily including European Russia. Timothy Garten Ash wrote about the tangled history of what he called the “diffuse and inchoate” discussion around the concept in 1990. (6)
A lot of the news articles tend not to emphasize the magnitude of the shift towards a European defense structure. So far. They are following the lead of the political leaders of the NATO countries who prefer to strike the public posture of the NATO countries who prefer to stick with the polite fiction that the rest of the alliance members still believe the Trump 2.0 regime takes its defense commitments seriously. But the reality is different, though it may take a bit of extra focus at the moment to see that.
If there was one moment that suddenly brought the curtain down on the old European view of NATO, it was the infamous February 28 Oval Office meeting of Volodymyr Zelensky with Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Marco Rubio, during which Trump and his team publicly bullied and berated him and repeated current Russian talking points in the process. Combined with J.D. Vance’s separate public encouragement of the far-right parties in Germany and Rumania.
European leaders generally seem to have understood after that moment that they really had to prepare for defending themselves against Russia without the active participation of the US. The question of how likely it may be that Russia would attack any NATO member is a related but different question. Russia is currently taking an adversarial position toward the EU and both the NATO and EU treaties do commit all members to supporting any member nation attacked by an outside power. (How that might play out in the case of the US attacking Denmark or Canada is another question!)
The entire structure of the current NATO defense against potential Russian engagement is based around a US-led defense. The current nuclear-deterrence strategy is based on the United States responding with its own nukes against any Russia use of nukes against NATO. The European allies rely heavily on American-made military equipment and weaponry. (In that sense, a lot of European defense spending goes to American companies, but they don’t pay it directly to the US government in the way Trump’s protection-racket conception would have it.)
Even battlefield intelligence is heavily based on US equipment and contractors. Do European countries really want to depend on private companies of creepy rightwing billionaires like Elon Musk?
This means that European countries have to revitalize and expand their own domestic defense industries in a massive way. If European leaders want to avoid some of the problems the US military-industrial complex creates, they might want to look closely at the work my former Congresswoman Jackie Speier has done of the shabby oversight and (often legal) bribery involved in the truly scandalous US military spending. (7)
It is already leading them to loosen some of the ridiculously conservative spending restrictions justified by austerity dogma rather than by reality-based economic concepts. They might even want to consider the option of publicly-owned defense industries. Some EU leader should mention the concept at a convention of defense-industry lobbyist just to see how much of the audience would faint immediately.
There is also a geopolitical challenge in that the EU as an organization can’t currently replace the NATO structure in coordinating a general European defense. Both Britain and France will be needed to at least partially replace the nuclear-deterrence function. The EU countries with the biggest armies are Poland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Britain, not currently an EU member, has already been publicly pursuing military cooperation with the EU countries. And the European countries will also surely try to engage NATO member Turkey as an ally in defending against Russia. Turkey with 355 thousand active soldiers has the second largest army in NATO (after the US).
Problems are inevitable
Even some of the less-dim bulbs in the Trump 2.0 regime will inevitably notice that the European move toward greater defense independence and much more extensive defense cooperation outside of NATO will mean a real diminishment of the US ability to use NATO as multiplier of US power and influence.
If the hypothetical but not impossible case that the US actually does militarily attack Canada or Denmark (Greenland), the reshuffle in defense plans will become even more drastic.
And while increased military spending can and will have some spillover benefits for the European economies as a whole, the new emphasis on military spending will lead the billionaires’ lobbyists to push even harder for drastic cuts in civilian spending. There are always political fights over resources. And some of them are likely to become much more intense.
Obviously, some criticisms of the higher military spending will be more substantive and realistic than others. And both the US and Russia will have their own reasons to try to use related issues to influence EU politics.
But actual critical thinking and debate about European defense spending will become increasingly important. While there may not be a one-to-one tradeoff between “guns and butter” in the new environment, the various military-industrial complexes involved will figure that the potential profits for “guns” will benefit them far more than the “butter.” And if they are allowed to operate in the shamelessly corrupt way their US counterparts do, there will be big disputes, and for good reason.
And, since human beings are who we are, there are built-in hazards in military buildups. Generals will be tempted to seek out smaller conflicts to provide combat experience for their armies. Nationalist politicians in places like Hungary and Rumania will see new opportunities to revise territorial borders established by the two world wars. And, the more bombs that are dropped, the more missiles used or shipped to allies to be used, the scarier the external threat is, the more likely military contractors will see profit opportunities in encouraging the kind of policies and fears that lead to ever-bigger military expenditures.
And will be important for citizens, journalists, and politicians to keep in mind I.F. Stone famous observation about countries’ approach to war: “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.” (8)
(3) A quick look at the charts in this Wikipedia article will show that there are various ways to calculate GDP, which is one of the complications in using % of GDP as a measure for military contributions: List of countries by GDP (nominal). Wikipedia 06/15/2025. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)&oldid=1295715876> (Accessed: 2025-27-06).
(4) Sullivan, Kate (2025): Trump says he would encourage Russia to ‘do whatever the hell they want’ to any NATO country that doesn’t pay enough. CNN 02/11/2024. <https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/10/politics/trump-russia-nato> (Accessed: 2025-27-06).
Mary Trump, the President’s niece who is a longtime public critic of the Orange Anomaly, recently did a podcast focusing on one of the ugly and sleazy aspects of the Trump state-terror arrests and deportation program: the money that private for-profit prison companies are making off of it. (1)
Private for-profit prisons are one of the most noxious products of the neoliberal era. How do for-profit companies make money, boost their stock performance, and generate huge bonuses for corporate objectives? Maximize revenue (bring in as many inmates as the government can feed you) and minimize costs, i.e., spend as little on the inmates as you can get away with doing. Responsible treatment of inmates? Rehabilitation? Medical care? The less they provide, the more profit they make.
This got me thinking about a political theory issue concerning the now-very-immediately-topical issue of fascism.
Partial fascism?
The description in that podcast reminded me of a recent revisiting of 1970s political analysis of American carceral practices. Which made me think of its implications for the current discussions of authoritarianism.
In a 2023 book, Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano takes a look at one aspect of the discussion on the American New Left in the 1970s. In that particular conglomeration of political theory and often-sectarian politics, the concept of fascism was often sliced and diced to a dizzying degree.
But Toscano focuses on a particular aspect of those polemics that might be thought of as a theory of partial fascism:
lt was largely due to the [Black] Panthers, or at least in their orbit, that ' fascism' returned to the forefront of radical discourse and activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s - the United Front Against Fascism conference held in Oakland in 1969 brought together a wide swathe of the Old and New Lefts, as well as Asian-American, Chicano and Puerto Rican activists who had developed their own perspectives on American fascism (for instance, by foregrounding the experience of Japanese internment during World War II).
In a striking testament to the peculiarities and continuities of US anti-fascist traditions, among the chief planks of the conference was the notionally reformist demand for community or decentralised policing - to remove racist white officers from Black neighbourhoods and exert local checks on law enforcement. lt is not, however, to leading members of the Black Panther Party but to political prisoners close to the Panthers that we must turn for theories about the nature of late fascism in the United States. While debates about 'new fascisms' were polarising radical debate across Europe, the writing and correspondence of Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson outlined the possibility of theorising fascism from the direct experience of the violent nexus between the carceral state and racial capitalism. [my emphasis; paragraph break added] (2)
Without diving into the rabbit-hole of American polemics about fascism in the 1970s, one of the implications of the analysis he references is that practices of repression, racism, and violence that we associate with the whole society of Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany can actually exist within a society that is predominantly a liberal-democratic one. So, the practice of racial segregation and mass incarceration in the United States had put a significant portion of the population under an undemocratic, repressive manner of living. And fascism could be understood as the extension of those conditions to the society as a whole.
It was an important part of the New Left perspective that the treatment of “outsiders” by the society offered a key insight into the nature of the society as a whole. Outsiders in US in the 19670s and 1970s included racial and national minorities who were discriminated against, prisoners, the poor, indigenous peoples, the chronically ill, and cultural nonconformists from hippies to marijuana smokers to those with non-heteronormal sexuality. This notion that the essential character of a society can be recognized in its treatment of the most vulnerable has also been one shared by religious reformers for many centuries before that.
In the view referenced by Toscano, the treatment of the outside groups not only stands as a constant warning for normies not to depart too drastically from the preferred social model. It also provides a way to understand the imposition of fascism/authoritarianism in a country not as a sudden event but more as an expansion of the treatment of outsiders to the treatment of everyone. Such an expansion of repressive practices could, of course, occur as a sudden event, i.e., a rapid change.
Fascism and capitalism
In a famous observation about fascism, Max Horkheimer wrote the following in 1939 about German emigrants fleeing Nazi Germany, of which he was one of many. As the Jewish leader of the famous Frankfurt School, the leftwing Institute for Social Research, he had more than one reason not to hang around in Germany.
The opening sentence of this paragraph reflects the discretion that emigrants from Germany were aware they needed to practice in their host countries.
No one can demand that the emigrants hold up a mirror to the world that generates fascism out of itself precisely where it still grants them asylum. But those who do not want to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism. The English friends of today have better experiences than Frederick [II, King of Prussia] with the blasphemous Voltaire. His hymn of praise to liberalism by intellectuals may often come too late, as countries are transforming into totalitarian ones faster than books find publishers. But they do not give up hope that somewhere the reform of Western capitalism will take place in a milder way than that of the German version. And that well-recommended foreigners will still have a future. But the totalitarian order is nothing more than its predecessor, which has lost its inhibitions. [my emphasis] (3)
The bolded sentence stresses a direct connection between fascism and the capitalist economic system. In the case of Mussolini’s Fascist Party in Italy, Hitler’s National Socialist regime in Germany, and their various admirers and imitators fit that definition well.
Horkheimer there also uses the term “totalitarian order” clearly in reference to the contemporary fascisms of 1939. In the postwar era, “totalitarian” came to be commonly used to refer to any kind of dictatorship. More specifically, it became a common way to equate Communist states and parties to fascist ones.
In the famous Studies in Prejudice project that Horkheimer directed in the US after the war, they used the more general term “authoritarianism,” but those studies were clearly focused on the phenomenon of fascism, in particular. Today, authoritarianism has also taken on a more general meaning to refer to “democratic deficits” in societies without particular reference to their underlying economic systems.
Defining political systems and ideologies is a fuzzier undertaking that, say, zoology, where the difference between say, cats and dogs can be defined in discrete physical terms. And while it’s not particularly controversial today to recognize that all kinds of societies can have “democratic deficits,” it is also widely assumed that economic relations do have a huge influence on political forms.
During the 1980s, the cooperation between China and the US in opposition to the Soviet Union led many Western commentators to treat China as a kind of honorary capitalist country, despite the large role of public ownership and the very explicit Marxist-Leninist ideology that it has had since the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 - although with some distinctly varying versions of it over the years.
The general focus on China as the rising superpower now seems to have focused more attention in public commentary on the structural differences between its economic system and capitalist ones.
Part of the fuzziness in characterizing China’s economy can from the popularity of the term “market system” to describe capitalism. And China does have a “market.” The post-Cold War neoconservative version of the End of History even adopted implicitly (and often explicitly) an economic determinism that the flourishing of the “market system” would inevitably create irresistible pressure for a country to adopt Western-style liberal democracy and the acceptance of so-called free-market capitalism.
John Kenneth Galbraith described the emergence of the concept of the “market economy” with one of his characteristically sardonic observations:
[I]n reasonably learned expression there came "the market system." There was no adverse history here, in fact no history at all. It would have been hard, indeed, to find a more meaningless designation - this a reason for the choice.
Markets have been important in human existence at least since the invention of coinage, commonly ascribed to the Lydians in the eighth century B.C. A respectable span of time. In all countries, including the former Soviet Union, as also in what is still by some called Communist China, they had a major role. (4)
Horkheimer’s 1939 observation remains true. Historically, liberal democracy was associated with the rise of capitalism. Nineteenth socialists including of course Marxists saw the capitalist system evolving by its own dynamics toward a more collective type of organization that would require what came by to be called by Marxists “collective ownership of the means of production”, i.e., state-owned major industries, banks, and services. Nineteenth century socialists also generally understood that form of economy to require democratic government. In Europe in the 1800s, the Social Democratic parties were the main champions of parliamentary democracy.
Without writing hundreds of pages about the evolution of democracy, socialism, and communism since 1900, the Italian and Germany fascisms of the 20th century definitely represented an anti-democratic development stemming from capitalist economies and societies. The tendency of capitalist accumulation to centralize wealth and power into the hands of a small groups of oligarchs is more evident in 2025 as it has ever been.
Former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich, in an adaptation of a saying credited to Louis Brandeis, have been saying lately, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”
As Reich also says regularly, democracy is not a spectator sport. Even the best institutional arrangements can’t save democracy if enough of the citizens are willing to do away with it and enough others are indifferent to it.
But extreme oligarchy creates ripe conditions for doing away with it.
Notes:
(1) SHOCKING: Mary Trump UNCOVERS the Trump Scandal HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT. Mary Trump Media YouTube channel 06/21/2025. <https://youtu.be/_gOywBo1xPo?si=aUg5XHSFfMZ5Q0Wf> (Accessed: 2025-21-06).
(2) Toscano, Alberto (2023): Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, Chap. 2. London: Verso.
(3) Horkheimer, Max (1939): Die Juden und Europa. Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 8:1-2, 115-116. My translation to English.
(4) Galbraith, John Kenneth (2004): The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time, 6. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Anne Applebaum in this interview gives a sensible view of the current European reaction to Trump 2.0. (1)
Simon Rosenberg: Tell me what you what's your assessment of what we know about what happened in NATO in the last couple days trump has been. I mean, for me one of the most interesting things about the Iran story is that Trump [is that] he's sort of on two sides of this, right?
On the one side, he wants to decapitate the [Iranian] regime. And then he's got his Russian friends who are allied with Iran and Iran is helping them in the war in Ukraine. And it seemed in the last few days that he's been struggling to kind of put all these pieces together. And I just wondered what your assessment of all that is.
Anne Applebaum: my assessment is something I've said before but it's worth constantly repeating. Because people have trouble believing it. I don't think that Trump has any strategy at all. In other words, he doesn't have a geopolitical theory that he's working from. He doesn't really understand the connections between Iran and Russia and China and why they matter.
He doesn't have an endgame in Iran that he has a real plan to achieve. Any decision that he makes is one that is affected by his perception of how to be the winner in that particular moment. He lives in a in a kind of eternal present, where he always is in combat against somebody. Whether it's the Iranians or whether it's the CNN or whether it's a judge or whether it's some other critic - and he always needs to somehow emerge as the winner.
And that seems to be, if you watch him over time and you watch him step by step, that is the best determinant of how he'll act. And so, looking for a grand strategy or an explanation of why he likes Putin, but doesn't like Putin's allies, but is sometimes on one side or the other, you will misunderstand him. And I find that actually rational people often resist this interpretation of Trump.
Applebaum has made it clear that she’s speaking for herself as a historian and political analyst. But she has been married for decades to Radosław Sikorski, the current Polish Foreign Minister. So she has something of a privileged perspective in that way.
Because people - especially Europeans - I've said this to Europeans and I find they react by saying "We just can't believe that's how the American President acts. That can't be the explanation. There must be 3-D chess, right? There must be a grand strategy behind it."
I always say, of course there are people around Trump who have strategies. And there are people who wanted him to achieve things. And he's clearly influenced sometimes by one person or another, one group or another, but I don't think he himself has thought this through.
I mean, that he was attacking Iran who is Putin's ally and Putin is his friend. I doubt very much that that pattern of associations went through his head.
This is very well said. Trump has no strategic sense of foreign policy, at least not in any normal sense of the word. I call his perspective Old Right isolationism because of his combination of contempt for alliances and an instinctive hardcore nationalist militarism.
The guy thinks that tariffs are taxes that other countries pay to the United States government. At least that’s how he normally describes it when he’s talking about it. They are actually paid by importers who then pass all or most of the tariff cost on to consumers. It’s the importers and their customers who pay additional taxes to the US government, not the exporting country.
That’s his favorite foreign policy idea. And he has that completely garbled.
In addition to his lack of any strategic sense, he obviously has an extremely limited understanding of how diplomacy in general works. There is an enormous amount of misdirection and deceit in normal diplomacy. But a President needs to have some understanding of the ways foreign countries will read his public statements and Truth Social rants.
Not declaring your bottom line to the opposite party in a negotiation is one thing. Not having any sense of how the rest of the world interprets in the normal language of diplomacy what a US President is trying to convey is a very different thing.
Applebaum gives some further examples of how clueless Trump is on some major issues:
I really can't stress this enough. I mean, Trump doesn't know anything about Putin. He doesn't know what it means that he has KGB training, or that he's attempting to manipulate him. You know, Putin clearly sees Trump as a kind of mark and reckons that talking to him is you know he can he can he can manipulate him into doing what he wants.
[Trump] doesn't know anything about Russia and its history with Ukraine. He doesn't know that much about the war. …
It's like [Trump is] a sort of blunt object running into this complex situation and sometimes he gets frustrated. But I've still never heard him openly criticize Russia in a way that suggested to me that he was planning to put any pressure on Russia or increase sanctions on Russia, which actually Senate Republicans have argued he should do.
Nor have I heard him talking about increasing armament levels or increasing any kind of support for Ukraine: So I take this is a kind of performance. He's so-called anger at his friend [Putin], maybe in the hope that the friend will somehow change his mind. But as I said, there's a very deep and profound misunderstanding of who is Putin, who is Russia, what is this war about, why Ukraine is fighting also why Russia's fighting.
Look, Russia started this war because they believe that the United States and Europe would not ally with Ukraine. And he genuinely believed that this was a way to end bring an end to NATO, to demonstrate that the western alliance is weak, to undermine American power. For Putin this is existential, in that sense that he understood this as a as the final kind of death blow to the liberal world that he hates.
And of course Trump doesn't see any of that context at all.[my emphasis]
Other foreign policy analyst might tend to describe Russian aims in Ukraine as more specifically directly at keeping Ukraine out of NATO than the hope that NATO would just fall apart over the 2022 invasion.
But her description of Trump’s diplomatic cluelessness and incompetence certainly fits well with what we’re seeing of him in action.
By the way, Trump isn’t yet even six months into his second Presidential term.
Applebaum also has some worthwhile comments about Trump’s domestic authoritarianism in the interview.
Notes:
(1) On Trump's "Spectacle of Power" - A New Interview With Anne Applebaum. Simon Rosenberg YouTube channel 06/25/2025. <https://youtu.be/gXgoN96dsfA?si=1bw6GzBAlxhljLVV> (Accessed: 2025-26-06). Slightly edited from the YouTube transcript, e.g., omitting the “you know”s.
The Israeli regime-change war against Iran has brought us new evidence of how disruptive and confusing Trump 2.0’s truly incompetent diplomacy can be.
With all the theatrics, some of them much deadlier than others, it’s easy to lose focus on some central issues.
One is that the Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza continues. And it is spreading to the West Bank to a smaller but still deadly degree. (1)
Another is that the United States in the form of “Peace President” Trump’s administration is fully supportive of the genocide. And, through its “humanitarian” aid operation that displaced its, is orchestrating the seemingly daily murders of starving Palestinians coming to attempt to get even a small amount of food. The BBC reports that on June 25 alone, a minimum of 46 people were killed by the Israeli Defenses Forces (IDF), aka, “the world’s most moral army.”
UN agencies have condemned the US and Israel-backed food distribution system, with one official calling it "an abomination" and "a death trap".
Such deadly incidents have recently become a near daily occurrence but have attracted relatively little attention outside Gaza since Israel attacked Iran more than a week ago.
Without including the latest deaths, the UN has said that more than 410 Palestinians are reported to have been killed by Israeli gunfire or shelling since the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began work in late May. (2)
Trump’s lack of self-discipline and his impulsivity only make it harder for the public to understand what US policy is and further reduce what is left of his credibility as a negotiator with Israel and Iran.
It’s understandable that Trump and his administration would want to make it sound like Trump can direct Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to do what they want and get Israel’s compliance. In fact, Netanyahu has been able to get Trump to do what he wants, including directly entering Israel’s regime change war against Iran with a bombing strike that probably was the final blow to any reasonable hope that a new nuclear arms-control treaty with Iran can be negotiated. The small differences on timing and Trump’s public grumping about Israel are reality-TV fluff.
Given Netanyahu’s decades-long obsession with overthrowing the Iranian government, he cannot be expected to stop trying to get the US further involved in his war with Iran. He also has the added personal imperative that he needs to keep war going to stay in power, facing as he is an almost certain prison term for corruption charges if he leaves the Prime Minister’s office and its immunity protections.
Expanding war is in the self-perceived interest of “Ahab” Netanyahu. But it has wide-ranging implications:
The conflict between the two countries drew Türkiye into what became a complex regional crisis. Ankara emphasized Iran’s right to self-defense, and supported the resumption of the U.S.-led nuclear talks while urging Israel to halt its military actions.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan condemned Israel’s strikes on Iran, calling them a “clear provocation and a blatant violation of international law.” He accused the Netanyahu government of dragging the region, and the world, toward a catastrophe through its “aggressive, unlawful, and irresponsible” actions.
As the Iran-Israel conflict escalates, some political leaders and analysts in Türkiye have voiced concerns that their country could be the next target of Israeli aggression. (3)
And Netanyahu’s government keeps doubling down on the genocidal intent and actions:
Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has called the humanitarian aid currently entering Gaza "an absolute disgrace,” calling for “not a temporary halt to ‘humanitarian’ aid, but a complete stop.”
The minister's comments came after the Israeli government accused Hamas of seizing aid and halted aid deliveries to Gaza until the Israeli military presents a plan, according to a report by Israel’s Channel 12 news.
“When I warned repeatedly, and was unfortunately the only one who voted a month and a half ago against bringing aid, I was certain it would grant Hamas a lifeline,” the far-right, often incendiary minister said in a post on X.
“Halting aid will expedite reaching victory. I will demand that the prime minister bring the issue of introducing aid to the sector to a vote again in the next cabinet session.” (4)Middle East Eye also reported in the early morning of June 26: “Fourteen people have been killed in Israeli attacks this morning across Gaza, Al Jazeera Arabic reported citing citing sources in the enclave.” (5) In the same report: “The Palestinian Health Ministry said three people were killed and seven others were injured by Israeli settlers who stormed the town of Kafr Malik near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank and set homes and cars on fire on Wednesday.” (5)
And, oh, by the way: the Iranian and Russian defence ministers are visiting China.
Chinese Defence Minister Dong Jun framed Thursday's meeting of officials in Qingdao, home to a major Chinese naval base, as a counterweight to a world in "chaos and instability".
"As momentous changes of the century accelerate, unilateralism and protectionism are on the rise," Dong said as he welcomed defence chiefs from Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Belarus and elsewhere on Wednesday, according to state news agency Xinhua.
"Hegemonic, domineering and bullying acts severely undermine the international order," he warned. …
And meeting Dong on the sidelines of the summit, Russian Defence Minister Andrei Belousov hailed ties between the two countries as being "at an unprecedentedly high level". (6)
To close, here’s a June 23 interview with Über-Realist John Mearsheimer on the situation: (7)
(2) Knell, Yolande (2025): UN condemns Gaza aid 'death trap' as dozens reported killed by Israeli fire. BBC News 06/25/2025. <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15wz2ee05do> (Accessed: 2025-26-06).
Start with an alleged ceasefire between Israel and Iran. That would be ceasefire by Israeli Prime Minister Ahab Netanyahu endorsed by Donald I-Run-The-World Trump.
Early indications?
"In light of the severe violation of the ceasefire carried out by the Iranian regime, we will respond with force," the Israel Defense Force's chief of general staff said, with Defense Minister Israel Katz saying he had ordered "intense strikes against regime targets in the heart of Tehran."
Later on Tuesday, a visibly frustrated Trump condemned Israel and Iran for violating a ceasefire that he had heralded one day earlier.
“We have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn before departing to meet with NATO allies in the Netherlands. (1)
PM Ahab has a long-established modus operandi of violating ceasefires and claiming it’s the Other Side that really violated it. In any case, if you’re reading this within 10 minutes of it being posted, Ahab and the Very Presidential Orange Anomaly may have declared another ceasefire and already ended that one because The Other Side.
Here we see Orange MAGA statecraft at work:
■ The cease-fire was announced by President Trump and later confirmed by Israel and Iranian media. Around an hour after the Israeli government announced a cease-fire, the Israeli army said it had identified a missile launch from Iran, as Israel vowed to "respond forcefully to Iran's violation."
■ The Iranian armed forces also said that the country did not launch any missiles recently, as Iran's state television denied any news of a missile attack on Israel.
■ Israel struck Iran in three stages up until 5:30 A.M GMT on Tuesday, the spokesman of Iran's Khatam al-Anbiya central military headquarters said.
■ U.S. President Donald Trump said that both Israel and Iran violated the cease-fire, and he was not happy with either country, but especially Israel. Trump later wrote on social media that Israel would not attack Iran. After Trump demanded Israel to 'calm down,' IDF jets flew back to Israel, as plans were scaled back to solely strike Iranian military radar. (2)
While I was typing this, Reuters put up the following report: (3)
I see I’m not the only one to think of the metaphor of Captain Ahab and Moby Dick in connection with Benjamin Netanyahu’s obsession with Iran.
Ofri Ilany just used it in a column:
The prevailing attitude in the anti-Netanyahu camp tends to see him as cynical and corrupt. The protest movements have generally depicted him as a hedonist heading a Byzantine court saturated with pink champagne and cigar smoke. Many believe that the submarine affair of yore and the Qatar scandal are just the tip of a vast iceberg, harboring corruption on a humongous scale, and that sooner or later it will emerge that over the years, the Netanyahu family stole huge sums from the state.
I thought so as well in the past. But somehow the hedonist portrayal just hasn't stuck. After all, the prime minister is an extraordinarily grim and stern man. This dark disposition was captured precisely by Donald Trump, who recently described Netanyahu as an "angry man." The situation in which we now find ourselves exposes the truth about his personality. The political phenomenon known as Benjamin Netanyahu, which has been determining our fate for generations, is revealing its true nature now more than ever.
Like Ahab, Netanyahu is unrestrained and out of touch. This has certainly resulted in resounding failures, culminating in October 7. However, these failures did not emerge out of extreme decadence, but are due rather to his total devotion to an obsessive personal mission: a life-and-death struggle against the Islamic Republic of Iran and its leader Ali Khamenei. This is far more alarming than mere political corruption. [my emphasis] (1)
The analogy of Captain Ahab is often associated with obsession. But particularly with self-destructive obsession and fanaticism:
Ultimately, the prime minister's prophecy of an unavoidable clash fulfilled itself. We are now facing a fateful final act. Just before his final exit from the stage, Ahab had to surrender to the death drive and steer the ship straight toward the whale. And even if everything was to shatter into pieces, Ahab would not change, nor would he abandon his mission. [my emphasis]
Netanyahu is taking his country and the whole region toward a much worse situation.
With the full cooperation of Peace President Trump.
And he has created a nightmare for his country and for the Palestinian civilians he is targeting. Ahmed Ahmed and Ibtisam Mahdi report on the nightmare he and the Israeli Defense Forces have created at the aid-distribution locations for starving Gazans:
After two months without a single drop of food, medicine, or fuel entering Gaza, a trickle of white flour and canned goods has been allowed in since late May. Most of it has gone to sites in Rafah and the Netzarim Corridor managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), guarded by private American security contractors and Israeli soldiers. On June 10, small shipments also began arriving via aid trucks operated by the World Food Programme (WFP).
But with hunger deepening, people no longer wait for the trucks to move safely past Israeli troops. Instead, they rush toward them the moment they appear, desperate to grab whatever they can before supplies vanish. Tens of thousands gather at the distribution points, sometimes for days in advance, and many go home empty-handed.
Starving civilians gather in massive crowds, waiting for permission to approach. In many instances, Israeli troops have opened fire on the masses — and even during distribution itself — killing dozens as they try to collect a few kilos of flour or canned goods to bring home in what Palestinians have dubbed “The Hunger Games.”
Since May 27, well over 400 Palestinians have been killed and over 3,000 wounded while waiting for aid, according to Gaza Civil Defense spokesperson Mahmoud Basel. The deadliest single attack on aid seekers occurred on June 17, when Israeli forces fired tank shells, machine guns, and drones into a crowd of Palestinians in Khan Younis, killing 70 and injuring hundreds. [my emphasis] (2)
A genuine horror show. The kind of scenes fanaticism and obsession can produce.
And the fanaticism in both America and Israel is made worse for nationalistic religious/apocalyptic influences:
To his evangelical base, Trump is fulfilling end times prophecies before their eyes. Moving the [US] embassy [from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem during Trump’s first turn] was but the first step in reorienting US policy toward prophecy. What is happening right now — with the US joining with Israel in this bombing — is nothing less than God's work, and they believe that they are the recipients of the long-awaited promise of Jesus' return.
... [T]he MAGA "Jesus" and their particular prophecy tradition only dates to the mid-1800s. It was a completely invented theology about 200 years ago.
Yet that theological innovation has been one of the most wildly successful heresies in the history of Christianity in terms of spread and influence — mostly via Pentecostalism, the largest and most sustained global religious movement of the last century. (3)
Abed Abou Shhadeh also elaborates on that theme:
Israel’s decision to attack Iran cannot be interpreted through any rational lens. I>t directly contradicts Israel’s longstanding military doctrine, which was built on short, decisive operations aimed at securing tangible strategic goals - a doctrine rooted in Israel’s inherent geographic, economic and demographic vulnerabilities.
What we are witnessing now is a fundamental shift: the abandonment of strategic realism in favour of a theology-driven war without end.
The transformation is stark. Israel is evolving from a western-backed colonial project seeking international legitimacy, into a messianic colonial enterprise that thrives on perpetual war. The growing use of religious rhetoric and the enlistment of God into the logic of war underscore this systemic change. [my emphasis] (4)
Mehdi Hasan and Trita Parsi gives their quick take on the US bombing raids against Iran. Which in international law is a criminal war of aggression. (1)
Iranian Foreign Minister Sewyed Abbas Areaghchi posted on X/Twitter: “The events this morning are outrageous and will have everlasting consequences.” (2)
Local Call’s Orly Noy wrote on June 20: “after initially declaring that it aimed to thwart the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, Israel is already openly professing its ambition to topple the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.” (3)
Dan Steinbock:
Dan Steinbock:
Only days ago, President Trump reiterated that Iran will never have nuclear weapons. Yet, according to US intelligence assessments, Iran was up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver a nuclear weapon. While Israel built its case for war, the US didn’t buy it. The problem is that Trump did.
The Israel/US Iran offensive is not about nuclear weapons. It is about still another unwarranted proxy war. It aims at the restoration of the pre-1979 Iran.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA):
“Pres. Trump came into office promising to ‘end the endless foreign wars,’” Mark Warner, ranking Democrat on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, said in a statement tonight. “Tonight, he took steps that could drag the United States into another one, without consulting Congress, without a clear strategy, without regard to the consistent conclusions of the intelligence community, and without explaining to the American people what’s at stake.” (5)
Israeli columnist and former diplomat Alan Pinkas, a columnist for Haaretz and The Independent, has some very informative comments on the new Israeli war against Iran, starting around 19:00 in this report: (1)
Pinkas there emphasizes that Benjamin Netanyahu would very much like to drag the US more directly into the war against Iran.
He discusses the risks in a new analysis in The Independent, including his take on “Netanyahu’s unhinged, messianic approach to Iran.” (2) Netanyahu has political reasons (keeping his governing coalition together) and personal ones (staying out of jail if he has to step down as Prime Minister). But he seems to have made a regime-change war in Iran – which would require the US to take the primary role – as a key mission in his life. Pinkas describes it this way:
[In Netanyahu’s view,] Iran threatens not only Jewish civilisation, but the West – which makes Netanyahu not just the protector of Israel, his image initially bolstered after the 7 October Hamas attacks (and vastly diminished due to the death toll in Gaza since), but also the saviour of the West. This, he believes, is how he should go down in history.
The fact that he “Israelised” the Iranian threat is conveniently forgotten. He called for international cooperation… and when that produced an agreement, he was against it. Some, like him, may think of that as Churchillian. Others choose to evoke Nero Caesar. [my emphasis in bold]
The current situation is an ugly one. On the one hand, we have the master-manipulator and chronic warmonger Benjamin Netanyahu who has made it a central element of his life’s mission to drag the US into a regime-change war with Iran.
On the other hand, we have the Orange Anomaly, Donald Trump, who: has no strategic vision of foreign policy other than imposing tariffs (and he apparently doesn’t understand even the basics of how tariffs work); who has shown that he’s spectacularly incompetent on diplomacy (Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, Iran); and is working hard to set up an authoritarian form of government (in that he has at least something in common with Netanyahu).
If the US avoids getting dragged into a direct war with Iran, it will be dumb luck. And it will take ordinary citizens and their elected officials to actively oppose such a move to give dumb luck a chance on that score.
Netanyahu has been warning of an imminent Iranian nuclear threat for, uh, quite a while: (3)
Hanin Majadli expresses her concern about the wider fanaticism within Israel:
Since its founding, and even more so since October 7, 2023, Israel has cultivated a national psyche in which Jewish survival appears to rely on the destruction of the other. What would Israelis do if other countries took the same liberties that Israel takes for itself? The language, the statements, the tone of politicians, journalists and citizens alike all reveal the same truth: there's no cure. Israelis are blind, captive and incited.
And perhaps what's most frightening is that this logic no longer seems extreme, but has become the norm; that Israeli society, with its institutions, advisers, journalists, parents and children, has learned to think this way. The language itself has changed, and Israeli children will grow up immersed in it, unaware that another path exists. [my emphasis] (4)
I’ve always thought that the notion that Donald Trump is a Peace President who wants to avoid “forever wars” was wishful thinking. Because to the extent he belongs to any identifiable foreign policy trend, it would be Old Right isolationism. Which itself is basically blustering nationalism and militarism, although it does try to strike a pose of being opposed to unnecessary wars.
But the Trump 2.0 Administration has also been astonishingly inept with diplomacy: on Israel-Gaza, on Russia-Ukraine, on the Israel regime change war against Iran, on relations with NATO allies.
This discussion by Jon Stewart, Ben Rhodes, and Christiane Amanpour is a good analysis of “Israel, Iran and Trump’s Incompetence.” They talk about Trump’s bizarrely bumbling diplomacy and the risks and challenges of making peace – a difficult task that has its own risks. (1)
DW News take a look at the Russian view of Israel’s regime-change war and the implications for Russian foreign policy and for the Russia-Ukraine War, in particular: (2)
Howard French this week gave us a quick reminder of the dubious results of some previous ill-considered interventions:
The United States’ interventions in Iraq were enormously costly in both lives and treasure and left a broken country in their wake that has never fully rebounded. America’s long occupation of Afghanistan ended in abject retreat, having achieved even fewer of its goals and after exacting even higher costs.
Although far less debated, the United States’ intervention in Libya may present the relevant precedent for what could happen if Washington commits itself to war against Iran. That intervention, conducted in collaboration with European allies, helped overthrow the longtime dictatorship of Muammar al-Qaddafi, but it also shattered that country, sending it spiraling downward into warlord-driven violence and civil war. And the collateral damage it delivered to neighboring states, as small arms spread freely through Africa’s Sahel region, was devastating. [my emphasis] (3)
Owen Jones gives us a helpful flashback at Benjamin Netanyahu’s dishonest warmongering in earlier years: (4)
French calls attention to Trump’s arrogance, recklessness, and poor judgment in making Presidential declarations and threats as though they are all part of a reality-TV show rather than a very serious war with huge implications. And to the sad degree of continuity with other US Administrations:
His unseriousness can also be seen in other statements, such as “nobody knows” if he will attack Iran or not, even while calling his demand that Tehran “surrender” unconditionally an “ultimate ultimatum.” This is no way to enter into a major conflict that is full of risks for the United States, for Iran, for Israel, and for the world. What it does appear to be, though, is a way to surrender decision-making about American strategy and national security decision-making to another country’s leader, namely Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who would be realizing a long-held goal of getting the United States to help Israel wage war against Iran if the White House commits to front-line involvement.
The United States is rightly committed to the defense of Israel, but it has suffered a progressive decline in its ability to distinguish its national interests from those of its most important traditional Middle Eastern ally. This has been on clear display recently across two administrations, in Washington’s failure to effectively pressure Israel to end its ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and its widespread encroachments and abuse of Palestinians on the West Bank. And over the longer term, it has been clear in the weakness and inconsistency of Washington’s efforts to pursue the so-called two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict that so many American administrations have paid lip service to. [my emphasis]
The “two-state solution” now seems to be nothing but a ritual diplomatic formula. A decent settlement to the Israel-Palestine conflict at this point could only be some version of a secular state in what the Israeli Likudniks call Eretz Israel and the Palestinians refer to as “from the river to the sea.” But the “two-state” solution has been the formal diplomatic framework by the US and other Western countries for a long time. (Whether Trump 2.0 is even bothering to think about the two-state solution framework is another question.)
(2) How pleased is Putin to see the world distracted by the ongoing Israel-Iran conflict? DW news YouTube channel 06/20/2025. <https://youtu.be/Mqw7UxfVaaY?si=WBMqv16caNrOdlOa> (Accessed: 2025-20-06).
Historical analogies are inevitable. They can be used constructively. Or they can be used for dishonest propaganda purposes.
I was reminded of this by a recent comment ba a columnist for Haaretz:
The implicit message in Israel's public messaging is clear: President Franklin Roosevelt refused to bomb the railroad to Auschwitz in 1944. Trump now has the chance to level the "new Auschwitz" at Fordow [Iranian uranium enrichment facility]. For years, Netanyahu has described Iran's nuclear program as a modern version of the Nazi death camps. In recent days, he has avoided such statements, but it's likely that the war plan devised by Netanyahu and IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir is based on a "final step" that the U.S. must take, a bombing raid with a massive payload, that would destroy the nuclear facility buried deep underground. If Fordow remains intact, Iran could rehabilitate its nuclear project much more quickly. [my emphasis] (1)
There is a long-standing dispute about whether the United Nations allies (US, USSR, Britain, France) should have done more to directly prevent mass killing during the Holocaust. In the most hardcore Zionist version, that failure showed the callous indifference of most of the world to the fate of Jews.
The British historian William Rubinstein examined those accusation in The Myth of Rescue (1997), finding that there was actually little the Allies could feasibly have done to directly interfere with the mass exterminations during the war itself. The actual mass killings of Jews by Hitler regimes began just after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. There was serious and systematic repression, mass arrests, and serious persecution of Jews in German-ruled areas before that, but not systematic mass killings.
Tom Segev, one of the best-known Israeli historians, deals with an early version of the accusation that the Allies could have done more to save the lives of Jews in Axis-controlled areas in his book The Seventh Million (1993). One of the controversies in Israel on which he focuses was known as the Kastner affair, which dealt with a specific negotiation during the war that could have potentially ransomed some Hungarian Jews.
The claim that the Allies should have bombed the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz is a popular one, perhaps because it’s so easy to picture and therefore sounds obvious. Certainly one part of the reasoning was the coldly pragmatic general calculation that Allied bombers, who by no means had uncontested control of the skies, should be used primarily against targets that were immediately connected to Germany’s capability to wage war.
But there is also the reality that targeting railroad tracks as such was not only a big challenge for the targeting capabilities of bombers at the time. We could almost say that in the wartime conditions, it was a feat to hit the right city. And more specific targeting of individual buildings are apartments like the ones we hear about daily in Israel’s ongoing wars just was not a capability the bombers of the 1940s had. In addition, antiaircraft defenses forced bombers to fly at a high altitude.
And, in any case, railway tracks could be replaced rather quickly and easily. Mass killing of Jews was one of Hitler’s main goals, arguably his chief obsession. Germany was diverting military resources even during the most critical later phases of the war from defending the country to imprisoning Jews and shipping them to be killed in the death camps.
But there was a set of bombing missions that did interfere with rail traffic to Auschwitz: the bombing of Dresden in 1945. Germany was shipping Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz through Dresden. The related but separate issue about whether Hungarian Jews could have been saved by a deal is one of the topics covered in Segev’s book as well as Rubinstein’s.
The rail hub connecting Hungary to Auschwitz ran through Dresden. And the Dresden bombing did briefly delay those shipments of Jews to Auschwitz. But Germany was able to repair those connections within a few days and resume the deadly traffic.
It worth mentioning here that “Dresden,” i.e., the 1945 Dresden bombing, has been and remains a standard talking point in Nazi-friendly and Holocaust-denier pseudohistory. (2)
In an at-least-superficially bizarre twist, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has also used the Dresden bombing as a justification for Israel’s current genocidal violence against Palestinians:
[T]he Allied campaign against Nazi Germany and Japan during World War II has become something of an historical precedent for an Israeli state seeking to justify the large-scale killings of the people of Gaza as it ostensibly pursues Hamas fighters. Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Tzipi Hotovely, has compared Israel’s campaign with the devastating Allied bombing of Dresden, which, conducted over three nights in 1945, was intended to force the Nazis into surrender, and led to the deaths of some 25,000-35,000 Germans. Non-state affiliated advocates of Israel have also drawn similar comparisons. [my emphasis] (3)
The analysis continues:
Yet, these attempts erase the roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their land during the creation of Israel in 1948, the destruction of 500 towns and villages at the time, and the subsequent illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. They also ignore how World War II led to a new international law regime, and serve to dehumanise Palestinians while justifying Israel’s decades-long violence and discrimination — described by many international rights groups as akin to apartheid — against Palestinians, say historians and analysts.
Israeli historian and socialist activist Ilan Pappé told Al Jazeera that these efforts by Israel are aimed “as a justification for its brutal policies towards” Palestinians and that they represent an old playbook used by the country. [my emphasis]
This is a reflection of the deep xenophobic and militarism that both opinion polls and practice have shown are widespread in Israel, particularly among the more rightwing Zionists. As Orly Nor writes this week:
Over the years, the Israeli public has grown convinced that it can exist in this region while harboring deep contempt for its neighbors — engaging in murderous rampages against anyone, whenever and however it pleases, relying solely on brute force. For nearly 80 years, “total victory” has been just around the corner: just defeat the Palestinians, eliminate Hamas, crush Lebanon, destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities — and paradise will be ours.
But for nearly 80 years, these so-called “victories” have proven Pyrrhic. Each one digs Israel into a deeper pit of isolation, threat, and hatred.The Nakba of 1948 created the refugee crisis that refuses to go away and laid the foundation for the apartheid regime. The 1967 victory gave rise to an occupation that continues to fuel Palestinian resistance. The war of October 2023 spiraled into a genocide that turned Israel into a global pariah.
The Israeli military — central to this entire process — has become a mindless weapon of mass destruction. It maintains its exalted status among a sedated public through flashy stunts: pagers exploding in men’s pockets at a Lebanese market, or a drone base planted in the heart of an enemy state. And under the command of a genocidal government, it digs itself deeper into wars it has no clue how to exit. [my emphasis] (4)
The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. used to say, “All wars are popular for the first 30 days.” The economist and political critic John Kenneth Galbraith came up with a Veblen-esque description of this familiar phenomenon:
Almost any military venture receives strong popular approval in the short run; the citizenry rallies to the flag and to the forces engaged in combat. The strategy and technology of the new war evoke admiration and applause. This reaction is related not to economics or politics but more deeply to anthropology. As in ancient times, when the drums sound in the distant forest, there is an assured tribal response. It is the rallying beat of the drums, not the virtue of the cause, that is the vital mobilizing force.
But this does not last. It did not as regards the minor adventures in Grenada [1983-Reagan Administration] and Panama [1989-Bush I Administration], nor as regards the war with Iraq and Saddam Hussein [the Gulf War of 1990-91, also during Bush I]. The effect of more widespread wars has been almost uniformly adverse. World War I, although it evoked the most powerful of patriotic responses at the time, has passed into history largely as a mindless and pointless slaughter. (1)
And he observed: “the Korean and Vietnam wars, both greatly celebrated in their early months, ended with eventual rejection [by the American public] of the wars themselves and of the administrations responsible.”
If you want a current example of beginning-of-war zealotry, you can check out chronic warmonger Niall Ferguson’s celebratory essay of June 14, “Israel’s Attack Restores the Credibility of the West.” And, no, he doesn’t mean the West’s credibility as a promoter of international law and sensible restraint when it comes to war. (If you want to hear more from him, there is a YouTube interview available from The Free Press, “Who Will Win the Israel-Iran War?” with assistance from a gushing Dexter Filkins. I won’t link it here because, well, it’s nauseating.)
If Trump intervenes directly in the war against Iran, we will probably see some kind of upward blip in support for that action. Though it would likely be more short-lived than usual.
Gideon Levy in a column Sunday remarked on the rally-around-the-flag in Israel:
Israelis like wars, especially when they begin. There has not been a war yet which Israel – the entire country – has not rooted for at its onset; there has yet to be a war – other than the 1973 Yom Kippur War – that did not lead the entire country to express wonder at Israel's amazing military and intelligence capabilities, at its onset. And there has yet to be a war that did not end in tears.
Menachem Begin embarked on the first Lebanon war in a state of euphoria. He left it in a state of clinical depression. Begin as a parable. There is a good chance that this will also happen at the end of the war against Iran. We already have a euphoric beginning – war photo albums are already going to press – but this could well end in depression. (2)
And he speculates on how quickly and drastically the mood in Israel could turn:
The first days of a war are always our nicest ones, the most intoxicating and pleasing ones. Look how we destroyed three air forces in 1967, or how we killed 270 traffic policemen on the first day of the 2009 Cast Lead operation in Gaza. It's always the same hubris, touting the achievements of the army and Mossad.
On Friday, there were already people who, after only 100 sorties, were envisioning replacing Iran's regime. This swollen pride is always accompanied by a sense of righteousness. There was no choice in 1967 or in 1982 – no wars were more just than those two. On Friday, again, there was no other choice. The beginning is like something out of a movie; the end may be something out of a Greek tragedy. [my emphasis in bold]
Breaking Points gives us a good description of the professionalism (NOT!) of the Trump 2.0 regime is expressing itself in the current crisis: (3)
We may be about to see how the Orange Anomaly, aka, our Peace President, handles a serious war. We have some previous experience in how that could go. The last song in this medley that starts at 4:00 in the video is likely to be particularly relevant. (4)
Notes:
(1) Galbraith, John Kenneth (1992): The Culture of Contentment, 166-7. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
