Coward that I am, Hamas's crimes are so horrific that I cannot bear to read about them, much less view videos. This is much worse than 9-11, not only in the sense that the killings are much larger relative to population, but also in the send that of being much more up close and personal, with the kind of gratuitous sadism impossible in the more impersonal act of crashing a plane into a building.
To anyone who says that Israel should strike back against Hamas, but not target the people of Gaza in general, I can only say, that would be great. Any idea how? Hamas is sufficiently rooted in Gaza that plucking it up will necessarily cause massive collateral damage. Any number of people have also commented that Gaza is extremely densely populated and that fighting there, much less an long-term occupation will be extremely difficult. That is why Israel withdrew in the first place.
The Iranian government has threatened to intervene if Israel invades Gaza. Since Iran is two countries away, it seems a safe assumption that such intervention would not take the form of ground troops. It could take the form of an attack by Hezbollah, or by proxies in Syria, or even by firing missiles at Israel. Scary stuff.
Naturally Trump has blamed Biden and at least some people have suggested Trump is to blame. The obvious answer is that not everything is about us. But I think that is only partly true. There has been considerable continuity in US policy toward the Middle East. We have been trying for a long time to normalize relations between Israel and Arab countries. Jimmy Carter brokered a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Bill Clinton brokered a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. And, to give the devil his due, Donald Trump was highly successful at brokering a normalization of relations between Israel and the smaller Gulf states, as well as Israel and Morocco. The Biden Administration followed up on these successes and was preparing a normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Hamas attacks appear to have been planned to thwart such an outcome, and to have been successful. So, yes, to that extent this is about us, and would probably have happened if the Trump Administration had been on the verge of a similar success. That Hamas was able to derail the process so easily raises disturbing questions about just how solid it was to begin with.
Israel's general improvement in relations with Arab countries has taken place against the backdrop of a strong rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and also serious democratic backsliding by Israel. These things are probably related. Clearly, Israel and Saudi Arabia were moving closer largely in response to a shared fear of Iran. And I am inclined to think that democratic backsliding by Israel facilitated the improvement. Israel because less of an alien entity, less of a living moral rebuke to Arab countries and more just another country. Israel and Arab countries could reach a cynical accord -- Arabs would ignore Israel's violation of human rights on the West Bank and Gaza in return for Israel ignoring Saudi Arabia's much worse violations of human rights in Yemen, or Morocco in West Sahara.
And all of this places undermines the narrative some people are presenting, that this is a confrontation between liberal democracy and an Axis of Autocracy. Israel, after all, has been backsliding from liberal democracy for the past 20 years. That would also mean including Saudi Arabia and its satellites among liberal democracies, a suggestion I am not willing to credit. It is really the same criticism that we regularly had during the Cold War -- just because our opponents are evil does not necessarily mean that our allies are good.
And here is where Donald Trump really does matter. While I believe that Hamas would have acted to derail normalization regardless of who was in the White House, the invasion of Ukraine is another matter. I suspect it would not have happened, or would have happened differently. And no, not because, as Trump claims, he told Putin he would nuke Moscow if Russia invaded Ukraine. Obviously I can't prove or disprove their private conversations, but by all accounts, Trump was generally hostile to Ukraine for very Trumpian reasons -- Ukraine had opposed him as President. Nonetheless, I do think Putin would have been reluctant to jeopardize his friendship with a US President. At the very least, he would have waited until the US withdrew from NATO (as Trump wanted to do) before invading, and the invasion would no doubt have been easier.
I do think that a new Cold War has been brooding for some time -- with the terrifying possibility of turning into a hot war. Trump postponed it for a time, and hoped to avoid it altogether, essentially by switching sides and backing autocracies over democracies. To be clear, it is hard to say whether Trump disliked democratic governments because they were democracies or because they were allies. He was decidedly opposed to the whole idea of having allies, which he saw as encumbering our freedom of action.* So whether he wished to switch sides, or merely to sit it out is not clear. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that any leader who does wish to back democracy against autocracy will have to contend with a new Cold War -- or worse.
*It is my suspicion that what so-called isolationists really oppose is not so much war -- they had no objection in the past to regularly intervening in Central America and the Caribbean, and have no objection to invading Mexico now -- but to having allies because allies force us to take other countries into consideration.
No comments:
Post a Comment