The Palestine Crisis Continues To Reshape Geopolitics

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Let’s start with the military situation. The most worrying part of this situation is that Zhou really does sit in the Oval Office. I’m not sure whether this bluster to 60 Minutes makes you feel safer:

Herbie Ziskend @HerbieZiskend46

QUESTION: “Are the wars in Israel and Ukraine more than the United States can take on at the same time?”

POTUS: “We’re the United States of America for God's sake! The most powerful nation in the history of the world! We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense. We have the capacity to do this, and we have an obligation to. We are the essential nation.”

In the meantime Israel appears to be taking stock of its position. Troubling stories have come out from Israeli survivors of combat between Hamas fighters and Israeli forces that speak of indiscriminate Israeli fire killing numerous hostages. The Israeli government appears to being trying to get control over the process of freeing hostages when that appears possible. Hamas, for their part, is demanding the release of 6,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Israeli hostages. These considerations undoubtedly have stopped Israel from plunging into Gaza, but there may be additional considerations. One is concern for what Hezbollah might do:

OSINTdefender @sentdefender

Sources within the Israeli Defense Force have reportedly told the Jerusalem Post, that one of the Primary Reasons for the Delayed Invasion of the Gaza Strip has been the Increasing Worry that Hezbollah will Join the War soon after the Invasion does begin, with IDF Northern Command making sure that Forces along the Lebanese Border are prepared for an Major Outbreak of Hostilities which is claimed to now be almost Complete.

1:57 PM · Oct 16, 2023

The reality, of course, is that Israel’s primary concern with regard to Hezbollah is not that Hezbollah would attempt an invasion of Israel. The true concern is how many Hezbollah missiles might get through—those missiles are not only far more powerful than Hamas’ rockets but are also far more accurate and, probably, difficult to intercept.

Additionally, there are real concerns about Israeli military readiness. Without attempting an assessment of that, I’ll provide a transcript of some brief remarks by Doug Macgregor, who is generally quite pro-Israeli. These remarks came at the very end of a much longer and broad ranging video interview with Daniel Davis. Macgregor’s remarks are useful for us because they immediately pivot from purely military concerns to broader geopolitical concerns that give the lie to Zhou’s idiotic bluster:

Col. Doug Macgregor: the truth behind building Ukraine combat pwr & IDF's prospects in Gaza

The context to this final exchange is that Macgregor had been speaking about how long it took the US army up to snuff before the Gulf War, and how unrealistic it was to expect Ukraine to be able to fight on equal terms with Russia. That leads Davis to pivot to the Israeli situation and to question the preparedness of the IDF for warfare in Gaza. Macgregor addresses that very briefly but pivots almost immediately to geopolitics:

DD: I don't want to miss this last point here because it's about to really hit the fence again [37:54] in terms of [the fact] that it takes 10 years to form an army before it goes into combat. What are your thoughts on what [the] Israeli Defense Forces are facing if they do, in fact, launch an incursion into Gaza?

DMac: The Israelis are confronted with a very unsavory requirement, and that is to go in and root out the enemy in Gaza. They are assembling a force of 470,000 men, which is larger than the regular army of the United States, and it will certainly take tens of thousands of combat troops to do what they want to do. Unfortunately, these are reservists and in many cases they haven't had as much training as the reservists did in 1973, when they were called up to fight. They're going to take a lot of casualties if they do this, but there's something else that needs to be borne in mind. Right now the Israeli leadership is ruled by emotion. They are understandably horrified by what happened. Everybody is. ... But the people at the top need to be rational. Reason must triumph over emotion. They need to look carefully at the consequences of their actions, because the Middle East is not the Middle East that it was 20 years ago and this is a an ugly event. But if the Israelis go in there and ethnically cleanse Gaza, throwing all of these millions of people under the bus, so to say, especially in the onset of winter, it'll never completely happen because the region will go to war with them. Everybody keeps focusing on Iran. As [Jake] Sullivan said, [Iran] had no role in triggering this. We need to understand that Qatar funds Hamas, not Iran, and then, secondly, Qatar also funds Turkey, and the Turks are the real power, that's the 800 pound gorilla in the corner in the Middle East. And Mr Erdogan is watching this unfold very carefully. You recall, it's a few years ago there was an incident in which the Israelis seized a ship carrying aid to Gaza. That was a Turkish ship, and two Turkish citizens, at least two, were killed. The Turks have not forgotten, and I would watch my northern border carefully. It's not only Hezbollah. It can be worse than that. And let's hope that Egypt remains neutral. I hope the Israelis do nothing to change that, because that's vital to Israeli survival and national security.

DD: Yeah that's that's one of the things that really concerns me: that this has the potential to really explode. We've got to keep this contained and get it over with as [40:25] quickly as possible or it's going to be bad--much worse for Israel and bad for us as well.

There remains much that is unclear, particularly with regard to how Israel could have been—seemingly—taken by surprise in this way. If that’s what happened. Tom Luongo has articulated a possibility that I’ve been turning over in my mind. That the Netanyahu government allowed a Hamas provocation in the hope of using this as a false flag against Iran. This took the US by surprise, but … what took Israel by surprise was the sheer extent of the Hamas operation. The reality is that Israel knows just as well as the United States that Hamas—a Sunni outfit that has, in the past, stabbed Iran’s ally Syria in the back—is not backed by Iran but by the Sunni government in Qatar. The fact that Sullivan had to put a stop to Netanyahu’s mongering of war with Iran seems telling to me.

But it’s also clear now that Netanyahu, in this hypothetical scenario, has bitten off more than he can chew. Instead of the usual limited but devastating remote attacks on Gaza, Hamas placed Netanyahu in the position of being forced to threaten a full invasion that Israel’s military is not really prepared to carry out. Thus the delay in the invasion. We can speculate on Netanyahu’s goals, but one way or another it’s difficult to see a good ending.

This has put the US in the position of attempting to accomplish something that it is no longer able to do on its own—defuse a Middle East powder keg, this one set in motion by our supposed ally, Israel. The US is recognized, as President Putin of Russia has said, as a dishonest broker that cannot be trusted. The record of carnage that the US has visited upon Ukraine and its sabotage of an ally’s pipeline is a warning to any country tempted to align with America. Everyone outside the US, and certainly in the Middle East, understands that the Neocons who control US foreign policy are partisan supporters of Israel. As a result, Middle Eastern countries have turned to Russia and China for mediation to prevent a wider war that nobody—least of all, perhaps, the US—wants.

Thus, when the hapless Blinken went to Riyadh to seek help from the Saudis, he was once again left cooling his heels for hours before being granted access to MBS. Meanwhile, the Saudis and Iranians had already spoken at the highest levels and agreed on a common strategy. Blinken was left to come out of his meeting and call on China to intercede, to use its influence to help extricate the US from the the embroglio that Netanyahu—who famously stated on videotape that he “knows” America and that America is “easy to move”—has landed us in.

The big result from this is that BRICS—or significant elements of BRICS: China, KSA, Iran—is being transformed into more than just an economic actor. M. K. Bhadrakumar addresses the consequences, in which the US loses big time:

US faces defeat in geopolitical war in Gaza

After providing historical background and chronicling the diplomatic moves that have largely sidelined the US, he concludes:

Suffice to say, a coordinated Saudi-Iranian strategy backed by China is putting pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire and to de-escalate. The UN’s backing isolates Israel further.

…

Going forward, the Arab-Iran-China axis will raise the plight of Gaza in the UN Security Council unless Israel retracted. Russia has proposed a draft resolution and is insisting on a voting. If the US vetoes the resolution, the UN GA may step in to adopt it. 

Meanwhile, the US project to resuscitate the Abraham Accords loses traction and the plot to undermine the China-brokered Saudi-Iranian rapprochement faces sudden death.

As regards the power dynamic in West Asia, these trends can only work to the advantage of Russia and China, especially if the BRICS were to take a lead role at some point to navigate a Middle East peace process that is no longer the monopoly of the US. This is payback time for Russia. 

Own goal, Neocons!

Now, as the US flounders for a constructive position, it’s reaping the results of its incessant saber rattling at the rest of the world. China is taking a strong stand that supports Arab and Muslim humanitarian concerns:

"Israel's actions have gone beyond self-defense," Mr. Wang claimed, urging the Israeli government to stop what he called “collective punishment of civilians in Gaza,” according to the readout from China's foreign ministry.

The US is adopting its fallback position of projecting military power through carrier battle groups. But it is losing the war for global opinion.