Commentator

Israel, US Election, Ukraine

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a ‘Commentator’ post. This is a discussion of international news based on reading from a wide range of sources.

Best,

Sam

ISRAEL’S GEOPOLITICAL GAMBLE

Well, give the Netanyahu administration credit for flipping the script. The story for 2024 has been about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with the world, the US included, steadily losing patience with Israel’s war. When it finally seemed as if there was little else to achieve in Gaza, and some kind of cease-fire-for-hostage-release deal might be worked out to bring the war to its grinding close, Netanyahu instead went in the opposite direction — invading Lebanon, striking at the nerve center of Hezbollah’s operations, and daring Iran to attack him.

Right now, Netanyahu is riding high on that strategy. It’s become clear that Iran’s strikes against Israel are largely window-dressing and that Hezbollah is weaker than expected — with Hezbollah fighters largely melting away in the face of Israel’s attack. From the American center-right, an old familiar tune can be heard again — i.e. that the conflict in Israel isn’t really about the insuperable difficulties of the Israel/Palestine problem but is about Israel being ringed by adversaries and those adversaries being part of a global axis of anti-American, anti-Western interests. “The war Israelis are fighting now — the one the news media often mislabels the ‘Gaza war’ but is really between Israel and Iran — is fundamentally America’s war, too: a war against a shared enemy; an enemy that makes common cause with our totalitarian adversaries in Moscow and Beijing,” writes Bret Stephens in The New York Times.

Tunnel shaft in southern Lebanon

The minutes of a pre-10/7 Hamas meeting, shared with The New York Times, more or less bolsters Netanyahu’s geopolitical assessment. The idea is that Hamas was in conversations with Hezbollah and Iran about the attack, but that both Hezbollah and Iran were coy about lending support. Sinwar, in the end, chose to go forward with 10/7 — effectively sacrificing the people of Gaza — in the hopes of eventually bringing in Hezbollah and Iran. It follows from there that the way to deal with Hamas is to neutralize its benefactors — strike a blow right at Hezbollah; and prove Iran to be a paper tiger — and Hamas’ will to fight may collapse.

That’s becoming the sort of default consensus in both Israel and the US, but I can’t quite buy it. The feeling is that we’re replaying 1967 all over again. Israel has its battlefield triumphs — the pager attack, the Nasrallah assassination, the Lebanon invasion — but then Israel finds itself once again with the civilian problem, controlling a hostile population in Gaza without any plan whatsoever of how to ensure long-term stability. “We have destroyed Hamas, we have destroyed Hezbollah, now what? Do we continue as the occupiers?” said former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has been a voice of reason throughout this conflict. “We have to decide, what do we want? To occupy [Palestine] for ever and to fight with them for ever?”

Ehud Olmert. Voice of reason.

What has struck me since the beginning of the conflict — and is reinforced all the more with the reporting I read — is that anybody else occupying the Israeli premiership would have acted very differently from Netanyahu. Anybody else would have tried to negotiate for a wider hostage release at some time during the past year. Anybody else would have yielded to significant US pressure (not to mention the condemnation of the rest of the world) for increased humanitarian aid to Gaza and for a cease fire deal. Anybody else would have pulled up well short of the direct confrontation with Iran.

That bifurcation in vision comes through acutely in Franklin Foer’s deeply-reported piece in The Atlantic. Foer follows the US foreign policy crew over the course of the past year and finds them just talking to a brick wall with Netanyahu — with an ever-escalating sense of apprehension that Netanyahu simply isn’t interested in a rational resolution to the conflict.

There really were many off-ramps that could have been taken. There was little question that Israel had to retaliate after 10/7, but that retaliation could have stopped, as Yossi Klein Halevi put it, with “the restoration of Israel’s deterrence.” There was an off-ramp early on when Hamas expressed a surprising desire to exchange a large number of hostages, an off-ramp after the occupation of Gaza City, an off-ramp before the occupation of Rafah, an off-ramp with the cease-fire negotiations this summer — which effectively ended when Israel assassinated Haniyeh, its negotiating counterpart in the talks. “This is starting to sound like just basically smashing your way around the entire Strip indefinitely,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told the Israelis at the end of 2023 of the approach that Israel instead adopted.

That basic dynamic is unchanged although with the stakes now raised even higher. “If you go after Iran, we’re not going to be with you. Not a joke,” Biden said to Netanyahu in April — which now seems like another empty vow. Israel appears ready to launch another strike against Iran, and the US will, it almost goes without saying, just doggedly follow Israel’s lead.

My one real hope for the conflict has been for Israel to hold elections, for Gantz to win, and for the conflict to dial down. So long as Netanyahu remains in power, however, what we are looking at, fundamentally, is a complete absence of shared political theory between Israel and its Western allies. “In the Middle East, if you’re seen as weak, you’re roadkill,” Netanyahu told Biden immediately after 10/7, which seems to be the beginning and end of his statecraft. The perception of the world doesn’t matter, the risk of losing US support doesn’t matter much, and the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza certainly doesn’t matter. With virtually every step he has taken since October 7, Netanyahu has removed Israel from the community of nations and from the liberal order — and followed a logic of force.

Even outside of the humanitarian considerations, I just don’t believe that this is a viable strategy. As Ezra Klein writes in The New York Times, “[Israel does] not admit they are reoccupying Gaza, but it is clearly what they have done. Occupations get harder as time goes on. They have no offramp for this occupation. They have no theory of what to do after or next.” Essentially, Netanyahu has taken Israel off a cliff. He thinks he can manage the freefall by overwhelming Hezbollah, by calling Iran’s bluff, by boxing in Hamas, by giving the US no other option than to support him. Maybe he’s right, but the problem, once you’ve gone off the cliff, is that there’s no way back on.

THE INCREDIBLY BORING AND INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT US ELECTION

The one thing I wasn’t expecting to write at this time in October is that this is a boring election, but, in an election that couldn’t possibly be more consequential, it’s almost impossible to remain interested.

I’ve been all worked up about Harris not doing enough media appearances. She’s finally started to correct that, which is great, but now we have to deal with the other side of the coin — that she’s not very good at them. The 60 Minutes interview was very close to dead air. She accomplished the nearly-impossible and made Howard Stern dull. She seems to be so careful about not misstepping that virtually nothing human comes out of these interactions — and, unfortunately for her, being human is the name of the game in the new media era.

“Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”

The good news is that Trump isn’t doing that much better. He understands the power of new media far better than Harris does, but he seems to be having trouble focusing on the campaign (likely because it’s boring for him as well). The bizarre town hall of Trump no longer taking questions and just bobbing along to music sums up the campaign perfectly. And, I suppose, why not? What was he going to say really? Why not just dance for a bit instead?

And contestant #2

So that’s the election we have. Donald Trump’s dance moves and Kamala Harris’ word salads. Once again, I find myself really, really wishing that Biden had dropped out earlier or, if he hadn’t, that he hadn’t sent out that second tweet, that we had had a brokered convention and there had been at least some democratic input into the choice of a candidate. Harris is ok and she might win, but, I’m sorry, communication is a big part of the job…and if she can’t do that...

In the absence of establishing a clear narrative, the election becomes entirely about surfaces — and, as I argued a few weeks ago, it’s basically no more complicated than boys versus girls. Harris is leading with women by 14 points and trailing with men by 13 points. What it comes down to, really, is #MeToo — with MeToo acting as a dividing line within the society. Reporting for The Free Press, Rachel Janfaza writes, “And I found that while many young women forged a sense of identity and solidarity from the #MeToo movement following Trump’s 2016 election, many young men felt alienated by that same movement—and felt at risk of being canceled for sharing their true social and political preferences.”

That’s the kind of division that a canny politician and effective communicator would be able to overcome. Obama put together a strikingly broad coalition. One wouldn’t think that men are so far gone that they can’t be brought back into the Democratic fold, but Harris just doesn’t have a vision for them or way of reaching them. As Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life, told The Free Press, “You had a lot of millennial men who were very supportive of [Obama] and were pretty strongly Democratic in their identity, and this new generation of young men, Gen Z, simply doesn’t share the same attachments to the party.”

Harris’ difficulties with communication may loom very large, since Trump, as the campaign winds down, is also likely showing his true colors. He’s been a gentler, more sympathetic Trump than he was at the time he left office, but let’s not forget how vindictive he is. I don’t think he’d build a special floor of the Lubyanka to house Rachel Maddow and Maggie Haberman, but the thought has crossed his mind. “They are so bad and frankly, they’re evil,” Trump recently said of the Democrats. “They’re evil.”

The New York Times, covering the story, called up Ian Bassin who runs a group called Protect Democracy and he said somewhat limply of Trump’s comments, “It’s so fundamentally, outrageously beyond the pale of how this country has worked that it’s hard to articulate how insane it is.”

Which is — yes — the lame place I get to as well. What Trump represents is so ridiculous — an angry baby holding the political discourse hostage — that it’s hard to believe that it’s really still happening and hard to believe that he can’t be stopped. He is not that strong of a candidate. Build a coalition, communicate clearly, campaign effectively, and he can be beaten.

UKRAINE AS AN INDICTMENT OF BIDEN’S FOREIGN POLICY

Nobody’s doing much reporting on Ukraine at the moment. The sense is of a grim, indefinite war that long ago exhausted everybody’s patience. Le Monde has a profile of Ukraine’s parliament that depicts even the parliamentarians as desperate to resign.

Meanwhile — and this really may be encouraging for Ukraine — Russia’s recruitment seems to be slowing. The Russian frontline is now full of older contract fighters — much to the consternation of the younger soldiers. “It’s just old guys heading into battle,” a Russian soldier says in a video shared with the Russian independent site Verstka. “What’s our command thinking?” Another soldier, in a message, said, “They keep sending us reinforcements, but half the people arriving are over 50, maybe even older. And not all of them even make it to their positions.” The influx of the ‘grandpas’ seems to be accompanied by North Koreans — as many as 10,000, claims the Kyiv Independent, which claimed also that, upon arriving on the battlefield, many of the North Koreans immediately deserted their posts.

Russian “grandpa”

For pro-Ukraine analysts, the attrition on the Russian side underscores an argument, stretching back to the beginning of the war, that Russia is not nearly as powerful as it appears and the West has been negligent in failing to more proactively support Ukrainian offensive operations. In an interview for

Nick Cohen

’s Substack, the strategic studies scholar

Phillips P. OBrien

excoriates US intelligence.

“On the rare occasions it studied Ukraine [pre-2022], the analytical community exhibited the widespread assumption that many Ukrainians really weren't Ukrainian at all but Russian speakers and therefore Putin sympathisers, who wouldn’t fight,” writes Cohen, paraphrasing O’Brien. “The intelligence community was dazzled by data, much of it fake, and ignored the messy realities of a dysfunctional regime. They failed to grasp the extent of Russia’s institutional corruption, its leadership’s incompetence, and the delusions that ran up the chain of command.”

This wasn’t just a tactical failure of intelligence, O’Brien claims. The US’ low confidence in Ukraine’s ability to defend itself contributed to Putin’s decision to invade — and continues to affect Western decision-making. Ukraine has already pushed through many of the US’ red lines — drones have hit Moscow, Ukraine has a wedge in Russian territory — and none of that has prompted Putin to go nuclear or even to more fully mobilize.

Paired with Foer’s piece on Israel, O’Brien’s critique of US foreign policy in Ukraine represents a scathing indictment of the Biden administration in its closing days. What the Biden team wanted above all else was to avoid entanglements — they wanted to get quietly out of Afghanistan, to avoid a major escalation of the Russia-Ukraine war, and to wind down the Israel/Gaza conflict, and they failed on all fronts. “I’ve objectively failed,” Foer has Sullivan thinking to himself in regard to the breakdown of hostage negotiations.

Follow that argument out and the current state of affairs comes to seem like an indictment of an ultra-cautious US foreign policy. The withdrawal from Afghanistan — I have little doubt — contributed to Putin’s idea that the US was weak and wouldn’t sufficiently support Ukraine. The attempt to scold Israel into humanitarian compliance has gotten nowhere. And the insistence on defensive warfare in Ukraine has resulted in a bloody, unremitting war of attrition.

I am less hawkish, though, than O’Brien and less convinced that the US really had any other options. Ukraine is in a very difficult geographical position from the US’ perspective, and keeping Ukraine from falling has seemed to the US Defense planners (as it has to me) like a heavy-enough lift. It seems that the Biden administration was more cautious than it had to be in insisting that Ukraine fight only on its own soil, but I find it a stretch also that concerted attacks in Russia would have turned Russian public opinion against the war and wouldn’t, say, have triggered a fresh round of mobilization.

And I’m also not really sure what the US could have done differently with regards to Israel. There’s some surprising regret implicit in the Foer piece that the US didn’t allow Israel to carry out a preemptive attack on Hezbollah soon after 10/7, as Israel wanted to do. In retrospect, a strike like that — similar to what Israel is doing now — might have given Israel the moral victory the population needed and reduced the perceived need for the much-bloodier urban warfare that Israel has been engaged in in the Gaza Strip. But I’m unpersuaded of that as well. The one clear regret with US foreign policy vis-à-vis Israel is that the US didn’t have a president with the force of personality to rein in Netanyahu. A really commanding, strong-willed figure might have been able to do that. But looking at what’s coming down the pike for us with Trump and Harris, that kind of command isn’t something that we’ll have anytime soon.