Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. The British newspaper The Times has called him “the most brilliant British historian of his generation.”
He just wrote a piece for The Free Press titled, “Israel’s Iran Strike–and America’s Strategic Weakness.” The sub-head reads, “Once again, Israel appears to have ignored Washington’s advice. Once again, that decision has paid off.” Here is a long excerpt from Sullivan’s article:
“The White House said don’t go into Gaza. Israel did, and in a sustained campaign killed a high proportion of Hamas fighters. Team Biden-Harris said don’t go into Rafah. Israel ignored those warnings, too, and in February liberated two hostages there. Ten days ago, a routine Israeli patrol in Rafah spotted the mastermind of the massacre, Yahya Sinwar, who was killed soon after. Washington said don’t send troops into Lebanon. Israel sent them anyway and in a matter of weeks has inflicted severe damage on Hezbollah’s positions there.
Biden and Harris said “Ceasefire now!” but Israel had no interest in a ceasefire that gave Hamas breathing space to regroup. Finally, the U.S. warned against Israel directly attacking Iran. An as yet unidentified U.S. government official even appears to have leaked Israel’s plans to Tehran—a scandal that ought to be front-page news. You know what happened next.
The past year has revealed many things—not least the moral confusion of many young Americans—but two major points stand out. First, Israel has pursued a strategy of targeted retaliation of impressive precision and effectiveness. Second, the United States has lost all but a shred of the influence it once had over Israeli policy. Fact: As a share of Israeli national income, U.S. aid peaked at 22 percent in 1979. It’s now down to 0.6 percent.
The political consequences are twofold. First, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has successfully outmaneuvered his critics at home and abroad, who wrongly assumed that, by relentlessly exaggerating the collateral damage of Israel’s campaign against Hamas, they would prevent Israel from exacting vengeance—and from reestablishing deterrence.
Second, the Biden-Harris administration has been left looking even more hapless in its national security strategy than Jimmy Carter’s did in 1980, when Ronald Reagan swept to victory with a promise to achieve “peace through strength.” The Iranian revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis, combined with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, had made 1979 an annus horribilis for Carter.”
A brilliant exposition, not surprisingly, and one to which I have nothing to add (maybe that’s a surprise).
From another Free Press article…Gad Saad is a professor at Concordia University in Montreal. He and his family escaped from Lebanon in 1975 in the midst of the civil war there. Here is one question and answer from the piece:
Bari Weiss: I want you to explain the connection between the ideology that you began to encounter in the mid-1970s in Lebanon and the identity politics that has subsumed so much of our culture here in the West.
Gad Saad: Well, Lebanon is the perfect exemplar of what happens when identity politics are taken to their nefarious limits. Everything is viewed through the lens of which religion you belong to. So it really is identity politics on steroids. And so I see certain political movements, whether it be in the United States or in Canada or in the West in general, that are very much wedded to that idea. One of the parasitic ideas that I speak about in the book is precisely linked, as you said, to identity politics. And I tell people, hey, watch out, because if you want that perfect example of what identity politics is in terms of how you organize society, Lebanon is the place. Syria is the place. Iraq is the place. Rwanda is the place. So it’s never a good idea when people who live under a supposedly unified nation are more tied to whatever identity marker first defines them more so than the country. What made the United States great is that I could be anything, but nothing was superseded by my commitment to American values. Once you erase that, once you eradicate that foundational value, you’re going to run into problems. It might take 100 years, it might take 500 years, but you will get the exact same final outcome.
In the US, identity politics doesn’t really run along the axis of religion, but the negative effects of it are the same. The woke identity politics idiots want EVERYONE to be judged SOLELY on the basis of which group(s) to which they belong and NOT AT ALL on their individual traits and accomplishments. Undoubtedly, that is a road to ruin.
This article is titled, “Israel’s strikes in Iran set the stage for future attacks and a change in US policy.” Here is an interesting passage from the piece, “Israel may have also attacked sites in Iran that the regime is unlikely to reveal to the public, some of which are secretive and related to the country’s nuclear project. One such target may have been in the city of Karaj, northwest of Tehran, where Israel struck a number of anti-aircraft batteries. Karaj, however, is home to the centrifuge industry of Iran’s nuclear system, and it is entirely possible that Israel’s strikes in the city were not limited to the missile systems.”
Here is another article about the strikes from the same source. Its title is, “IDF strike cripples Iran’s missile production, disables air defenses; regime ‘alarmed.’”
I was going to link to two pieces by John Cochrane, AKA The Grumpy Economist, but that will have to wait until another day. I will end today’s post with a photo of a funny sign sent to me by David Banner (not his real name).
I replied with an Economics “joke.” What is the price elasticity of life? On second thought, maybe that’s not really a joke.
#MullingOverMonday
#DeathToKhameini(s)