Commentator

Israel/Iran, Ukraine, Trump

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ISRAEL AND IRAN ON THE BRINK

So how close are we to a Mideast-wide war?

My guess is not particularly. The Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus; the Iranian strike on Israel; even the expected Israeli counter-strike on Iranian targets seem to still be within the realm of realpolitik tiki-taka. As a Russian general allegedly put it in a conversation that made its way back to Seymour Hersh, “The Iranians just want to prove that their dicks are as big as anyone else’s.”

They, so to speak, shot their wad with the strike on Israel — and there is little indication that Iran really wants more from this exchange. As Sohrab Ahmari puts it in The New Statesman, “The Iranians were determined to save face and give a deterrent impression, but without getting into a war they probably know they can’t win.”

But the onus is on Israel and what Israel decides to do with the opportunity that has more or less been handed to it. Foreign Policy notes that Israel has a modicum of international sympathy back on its side: “Instead of the U.N. Security Council discussing a cease-fire in Gaza, it is debating condemnation of Iran.”

What would seem to be called for is a round of low-grade tiki-taka. Foreign Policy lays out the menu of options (this is how the logic of proportionate warfare works) and the options that rise to the surface would be something like a cyberattack against Iran or an assassination of a Quds Force commander in the Middle East.

But the logic of the Netanyahu administration is different and seems always to lead to the most-extreme available option. The right-wing Jerusalem Post, for instance, interviews four senior Israeli military figures, all of whom advocate some macabre response against Iran. “I think Israel has no choice but to respond, it must respond,” says former Shin Bet chief Yaakov Peri ominously.

Even Benny Morris, the much-respected Israeli historian, lays out with surprising openness what Netanyahu’s strategy may well be at the moment. “Some Israelis hope that an Israeli assault on the Iranian nuclear installations would somehow suck the Americans into the conflict and that they would then ‘finish the job,’” Morris writes.

That’s a sobering, and terrifying, chain of calculations. That Israel is fixated on deterring Iran’s nuclear program. That Israel is in better standing with the international community if it is engaged primarily in nation-to-nation warfare, as opposed to the attritional fighting in Gaza. That Israel can bolster its alliance with the Americans by compelling the U.S. to follow up in a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. And that — although Morris does not say this — a gambit like a strike on nuclear facilities in Iran would, at the expense of wider war, help to ensure Netanyahu’s political survival. As Murtaza Hussain writes in The Intercept, this set of brutal calculations is very much on the mind of U.S. leadership — with senior foreign policy figures “privately expressing concern that Netanyahu is trying to drag Washington into a broader conflict.”

Netanyahu’s less-than-scientific analysis of Iran’s nuclear program, 2012

In an amusing take for Foreign Policy, Jonathan Lord of the Middle East Security program comments, “There’s the people who are playing chess, the people who are playing checkers, and the people who are eating the pieces off the board.” That leaves it somewhat to the imagination who’s playing chess and who’s playing checkers, but it’s very clear who’s eating the pieces off the board. Netanyahu, since the start of the conflict, has been fixated on force and on Israel’s going it alone. Now that he has his excuse, it may — through a narrow logic — make sense to him to escalate the war immensely and to drag the U.S. in behind him.

I don’t actually think it will happen. The U.S. seems to be putting its foot down. Somewhere in the midst of all his tactical calculations, Netanyahu must realize that escalated conflict with Iran, or with Hezbollah, is not worth it and has impossible-to-anticipate ramifications. I imagine that the logic of deterrence and proportionate warfare more or less prevails. But this is an immensely dangerous moment. Netanyahu (I hesitate to say this) is reminding me more and more of Putin, a figure who has been in power too long, who trusts force at the expense of all other means of statecraft, and who has a tendency to confuse his own political well-being with the interests of the nation. Putin gambled on a conflict with Ukraine that made a strange kind of sense to him, if to no one else. Netanyahu, cornered politically and in international perception, may be thinking along similar lines — that wider war with Iran gives him a way out of more local inconveniences.

THE GRINDING WAR IN UKRAINE - AND THE NEGLECTED PEACE DEAL

There are several eyewitness accounts out from the Ukrainian front lines. Der Spiegel visits the Azov Brigade. The New York Times embeds with members of the International Legion. Luke Mogelson of The New Yorker has an operations-center view of an offensive operation in Kupyansk.

All the pieces tell the same story — a grinding, interminable war, with the Ukrainians gradually running out of men and material. “We’re losing. Not badly, but steadily,” one Ukrainian officer tells Mogelson.

There is a great deal of consternation by Ukrainian soldiers over how the war is being conducted. The government seems determined to project calm and confidence — even if that is at increasing variance with what is actually happening on the front lines. As Christoph Reuter writes for Der Spiegel, “Maintaining normality in the country at the beginning of the war was also a gesture of defiance, of not allowing oneself to be panicked. Today, though, it feeds the illusion that the fronts are stable, that the war is being adequately managed and doesn't require any personal involvement. But the country is slipping apart.” One of the soldiers Mogelson talks to compares it to the disjunction between the front and daily Ukrainian life that had been in place since 2014: “They’re building a wall between the two worlds again,” the soldier says.

Ukrainian officer with Azov Brigade

The critique is that Zelensky and the home front have been too focused on their visions for complete reconquest of lost territory and, meanwhile, it’s very possible that the line may just collapse. The obvious move would be to increase conscription, and Zelensky has been reluctant to do so for political reasons. But it’s not just that — the Ukrainians are also running out of weapons, and the front-line accounts are full of depictions of Ukrainian soldiers holding their fire so as not to burn through ammo.

From the perspective of the front lines, though, it’s a bit churlish even to think about questions like these. The embedded reporters find themselves with soldiers who have been at the front for so long that nothing else seems to have any meaning or existence. Mogelson — who, it must be said, is just on a different level as a war reporter — describes the sensibility of the Ukrainian soldiers he comes across: “Most of the veterans in the battalion had been so close to death so many times that they seemed to have accepted its company, and this acceptance appeared to have fostered uncannily placid demeanors.” But that apparent placidity and stoicism can give way eventually, and Mogelson quotes an officer as saying, “The worst thing is not the Russians. It’s when guys you trust and have fought with start mentally flagging. They fade out like a candle.”

Ukrainian soldier on cigarette break

That’s a tough metaphor for the Ukrainian cause, as it seems to be at the moment — fading out like a candle. What it depends on more than anything else is (of all the crazy things in the world) Speaker Mike Johnson and his ability to slip Ukraine aid past his own recalcitrant party. And, of course, what it really depends on is the November election. If Trump wins, with the current rate of Ukrainian attrition continuing, it would seem to be over: Russia dictates the terms it wants and Ukrainian statehood is at real risk. If Biden wins, then some kind of credible peace negotiation comes into view.

Foreign Affairs has an interesting, retrospective piece that gives some inkling of what a potential peace deal might look like. It turns out that, in March and April, 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators were nearer to brokering some sort of settlement than has previously been disclosed — “we were very close,” one of the Ukrainian negotiators puts it. This needs to be viewed somewhat skeptically — Westerners close to the deal thought that Putin was never serious about it; and critical provisions were never addressed.

But there was a basic framework, which was that Ukraine would be permanently a neutral, non-nuclear power — i.e. not part of NATO — but with its security guaranteed by great powers who would intervene militarily if Ukraine were ever attacked. This notion of guaranteed military intervention made the Western powers balk. Boris Johnson, in particular (at least this is Russia’s interpretation), torpedoed the negotiation process by urging Ukraine to fight instead. But the greater obstacle was suspicion of Russia’s motives. The Ukrainians were disconcerted at one stage to receive a draft of their communiqué that insisted that any intervention to defend Ukraine be unanimous — i.e. that Russia could potentially veto an intervention against its own invasion.

So, it’s not at all clear that the peace was ever there — or if Putin was just stalling for time after the setbacks in the initial invasion. But, as the Foreign Affairs writers note, “Putin and Zelensky surprised everyone with their mutual willingness to consider far-reaching concessions to end the war. They might well surprise everyone again in the future.” And there was more on the table than might previously have been suspected. As the Foreign Affairs writers put it, “The communiqué also includes another provision that is stunning, in retrospect: it calls for the two sides to seek to peacefully resolve their dispute over Crimea during the next ten to fifteen years.”

The willingness of Russia to even discuss Crimea indicates that there might one day be room for somewhat generous negotiations. At the moment, the war is going Russia’s way. The Russian economy is humming along. The West is divided and seems close to forgetting about Ukraine. But if the armaments shipments are restored to the necessary levels and the line holds and Trump is defeated, then it’s possible that the settlement (not Ukraine’s preference but maybe acceptable) looks a bit like the negotiation in April 2022 — Ukraine in a posture of neutrality, somewhat similar as Foreign Affairs notes to that of Finland in the Cold War, with entry to NATO closed but with robust security guarantees from the West and with the door to the EU left open.

TRUMP’S EIGHT WEEKS IN COURT

And the key to this whole geopolitical puzzle is sitting in a Manhattan courtroom, with his access to phones and computers cut off, napping frequently, and likely to face a conviction for his payments to Stormy Daniels.

I don’t really know what to make of the case. The legal experts polled in a New Yorker piece — including one who previously lambasted Bragg’s indictment — agree that the case itself is fairly strong and the odds on the side of a conviction.

But the real point here is the time Trump will need to spend in court — six to eight weeks in the middle of an election season, with Trump required to be in the courtroom four days a week. “A campaign’s most precious resources is a candidate’s time,” The New Yorker notes.

But, of course, The New Yorker’s analysis refers to previous election cycles and, in the Trump era, all bets are off. The trial will last for long enough that it can’t help but be a critical issue in the election season — Trump painting the trial as politically-motivated, the Democrats hoping to depict Trump, simply, as a felon. And, as The New Yorker aptly puts it, “The trajectory of American history may now turn on Bragg’s case.”

From the perspective of defeating Trump, I guess the trial is ok. Everybody knows that there’s a political dimension to it, but the case likely stands on its merits. It accords with the Democrats’ overall strategy of painting Trump as beyond-the-pale and Biden as an innocent alternative.

From a wider perspective, the whole thing with Stormy Daniels and the case is, of course, tawdry, disreputable, etc, and it occurs at a moment that couldn’t possibly be more important — with both Netanyahu and Putin, in their different ways, testing America’s will; with the survival of Ukraine, and a possible Middle East conflict, all at stake; and all depending on decisions made in Washington and in a Manhattan courthouse.