Israel’s ‘War to the Root’ May Unravel America

Both Trump’s Iran war and the closely connected Israeli war for Jewish hegemony across the Middle East (termed ‘Permanent Security’ in Israeli military vernacular) are unravelling fast.

Iran is standing defiant in the face of Trump and Israel’s threats, leaving Trump gambling the entire US economy and its global strategic standing on conjuring up a decisive ‘win’ over Iran — however deceitful and Pyrrhic that ‘win’ might prove to be.

Trump has now arrived for the summit in China (reportedly with little groundwork preparation ahead of the visit). Possibly he relies on his usual hubristic notion — that China needs the US more than the US needs China — and he will tell Beijing that ‘you (Xi) have to instruct Iran’ that time is moving on, and that it should capitulate to the US.

Well that’s not going to happen. China supports Iran’s fight for sovereignty and shares with Russia Iran’s objective of seeing the US gone from the Middle East. They want instead a Gulf-led security architecture to replace the American one. Moscow concurs.

Maybe Xi — in politest of language, of course — will tell Trump, rather, that it is Washington that should concede to Iran. The longer he delays, the harder any US course correction will prove to be.

In any event, despite the innate Trumpian hubris, the US President arrives in Beijing bereft of ‘big wins’ (if Venezuela is counted as a gimmick, rather than a strategic victory). Contrarily and more significantly, Beijing understands that the US hovers at the brink of an economic inflationary catastrophe, whereas China largely is insulated from the coming global energy shock and is in price deflation, rather than experiencing inflation.

Put bluntly, there is almost nothing that Xi wants from the US, but in the interests of harmony, they may buy some soya beans (to save US farmers) and perhaps some airplanes. (Even though soya beans are not really required by China, which has been purchasing them easily from Brazil).

Trump has taken with him to China an entourage of US oligarchs — presumably in the expectation that China will give him business valued in several ‘billions’; but China’s response may be somewhat scant. They are angry, reportedly, at the games the US Treasury Secretary has been playing with sanctions on Chinese firms, the seizure of Chinese oil tankers, and the obvious attempt by Trump to squeeze China out from the Western Hemisphere.

What looms in the backdrop however, is darker: America’s collapsing standing as the unipolar hegemon — and the consequential global instability. The Iran war has provided the world with an object lesson of a major world power stuck in a conceptual rut from the Cold War era. One that refused to see the writing on the wall of a tectonic change that required it to ‘move on’ from its ‘end of history’ complacency, though all the signs of a shift to another ‘way of war’ had been present since early this century.

The turning point came with the abundance of cheap and easily available tech components.

The US, as the Cold War began, chose a strategy of outspending the USSR – by going for high-end, high-cost weaponry – with a main focus being on air-power and mass aerial bombardment.

That approach, at the time, had seemed justified by the subsequent Soviet implosion. This collapse was presumed to have been triggered by the American maximal spend that had over-stretched the USSR (though the collapse is now well understood to have been more a matter of a more complex internal corrosion from within).

The paradigm of western reliance on a preponderance of air power delivered by hugely expensive airframes has been blown apart and demonstrated to be ineffective by Iran’s asymmetric missile and naval warfare using weapons costing a few hundred dollars versus US defence interceptors costing tens of millions.

The entire world can see the main lessons emerging from the Iran war: Firstly, that the western defence posture is as outdated as the dodo. The Establishment fell asleep, believing that the ever more billions of dollars ploughed into the Military Industrial Complex would give the US a military edge that crucially would also provide the underpinning to its dollar hegemony to print more money for more weapons.

In practice however, it yielded massive corporate corruption and functionally poor, yet hugely expensive, armaments.

Of course, it is horses for courses — but up against more revolutionary adversaries, it is the latter who are out-innovating and out-manoeuvring western powers. All can see it, and are already adjusting.

China can see how small, fleeter Iranian naval assets ran rings around the large lumbering naval vessels of the US Navy. The lessons naturally will be applied to Taiwan, should the US seek to exert naval pressure on China in the Taiwan context.

Russia too will have noticed how a carefully graduated and selectively targeted missile offensive provided Iran with deterrence vis-à-vis Israel. Moscow likely will be thinking in these terms in respect to missiles of British, French and German origin that have been striking deep into Russia, whilst using NATO airspace and intelligence facilitation.

The accelerating global perception of the US’ decline however, rests on more than just its failure to adapt to Iran’s asymmetrical war. More significant even than the sense of cognitive dissonance reigning in the White House is the perception that Trump is full partner to Israel’s predations across the region.

The US bequeathed Israel the same doctrine of air war dominance, underpinned by ultra expensive US air frames that were intended to give Israel a ‘qualitative edge’ in maintaining its regional primacy. Israel’s failure in Iran, of its flailing conflict with Hizbullah, and of the unfinished war in Gaza, are the evidence of the failure of the approach — not of success.

It is worth noting that before the Israeli shift toward the US ‘way of war’, the founder of the Israeli state and its first PM, Ben Gurion’s defence doctrine for Israel was different.

Ben Gurion emphasised that Israel was geographically a small state, with a small population and limited economic resources. In such circumstances, it would not be able to afford a large standing professional army. It would need a small professional army, supported when necessary by a large cadre of reservists.

Ben Gurion grounded his argument on the need for Israel to have, as well as a defence force, a strong economy to provide for the community and the state — all of which reinforced the need for a small army. He also assumed the Clausewitzian stance that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’ and not an end in itself, but a part of the political game.

In Israel, since 7 October 2023 however, as Israel military strategist Colonel Udi Evental, in a series of posts, has underlined — “the link between politics and war reversed itself by 180 degrees [since Ben Gurion’s time]”:

“Peace has vanished from the lexicon and become a term for weakness ahead of Election Day. The prime minister and his coalition, each for their own reasons, are digging in their heels in the hope that Trump will allow them to return to war in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, in order to continue “striking,” “destroying,” and “crushing”.

“The threshold of paranoia was crossed on 7 October” — Professor Omer Bartov has said “that Hamas’s attack, framed as a Holocaust-like act … gradually [became] the glue binding Israeli society. A historical event transformed into an imminent threat: Hamas are Nazis. [And] criticizing Israel’s [military responses] is antisemitic”.

Professor Bartov argues that 7 October caused Israelis to understand the Holocaust not just as something that happened in the past, but as “something always at the threshold; that here will be another Holocaust if [Israel] doesn’t meet every threat with full force and destroy it at the root”.

Israeli professor Professor Idan Landau elaborates that by adopting a stance of ‘Permanent War’,

“there is no end game; the Enemy is an undifferentiated mass of [various] guises of Amalek. The Gaza genocide has set a shocking new standard of indifference to civilian casualties: All targets are criminalized by association to your favourite Amalek (currently the IRGC), and we stopped bothering about substantiating this association with actual facts; declaring it so – makes it so”.

“Within Israeli security thinking, there has always been a latent current seeking to expand Israel’s security borders. To a large extent, the pre-emptive approach is an operational expression of this concept. Thus, a security-ideological coalition has now emerged in Israel, which utilises a defensive-preventive narrative to realise a messianic agenda of ‘Greater Israel’”, Col. Evental explains.

This frank account of Israel’s current policy lies at the heart of the greater catastrophe facing America — one extending well beyond the reputational loss from a botched, war of deliberate choice against Iran:

For Trump has partnered and closely associated the US with a genocidal and ultimately messianic Israeli-formulated ‘way of war’ to destroy Iran and the Resistance, and to consolidate the Israeli government’s ambition to displace or ‘destroy at root’ native populations. Its perpetration disgusts the ‘world majority’. This represents the greater cloud looming over America’s global reputation. Trump is responsible. ‘Permanent war’ is a form of war crime.

Netanyahu, in recent days, told 60 Minutes that the (permanent) war is not over, and that it must continue:

“I think [we] accomplished a great deal, but it’s not over because there’s still nuclear material, enriched Uranian that has to be taken out of Iran. There is still enrichment sites that need to be dismantled, there is still proxies that Iran supports, ballistic missile they still want to produce. Now we’ve degraded a lot of it, but all that is still there and there’s work to be done”.

Netanyahu doesn’t care.

He doesn’t care for the consequences for the US economy (apparently neither does Trump), nor for the political instability in the US that may result. He does not care either, for the Gulf States that will suffer and perhaps be destroyed if the US resumes the war in a massive way.

He cares only for a Hebraic hegemony (and his political survival) — even if (Gentile) America pays the burden of reputational and economic price.

The posts by Colonel Evental went viral in the Hebrew-speaking sphere. Evental argues that the only way to save Israel is to return to the Ben Gurion original formula — Israel must live within its borders and must understand that military action should be adjunct to finding political solutions.

https://conflictsforum.substack.com/p/israels-war-to-the-root-may-unravel