Much of the recent focus has been on Israel for obvious reasons, but no one listens to us anymore. From Iran to Russia to China to even potentially close allies like India, we watch as the world burns and global power realigns.
Last week, Israel shocked the world by executing a massive aerial bombardment on neighboring Lebanon, where one of their arch enemies, Hezbollah has developed a stronghold. The target of their attack was the terrorist group’s leadership and in that regard, they were enormously successful, killing the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and other top commanders. The strike followed a never before seen effort to embed explosives in Hezbollah’s pagers and walkie talkies, causing chaos, confusion, and death in the ranks over the past couple of weeks. It preceded ground assaults and promises of another wave in the immediate future. Incredibly, it occurred as the Israeli Prime Minister was addressing the United Nations at the annual global assembly in New York City, where Benjamin Netanyahu delivered remarks that were all too potent in retrospect. “There’s no place in the Middle East that Israel cannot reach,” he stated in a reality that would become apparent shortly after, even as delegates from some Arab nations and others were walking out of the chamber. After claiming that Hezbollah had fired 8,000 rockets and missiles at this country since allied Hamas mounted the biggest massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust on October 7 last year, he warned that “Israel has been tolerating this intolerable situation for nearly a year. Well, I’ve come here today to say enough is enough.” Apparently, his country was interested in doing more than issuing bold declarations, backing these statements with targeted, high-intensity kinetic action, but what they weren’t interested in was informing the United States beforehand. Instead, subsequent reporting indicated that they only chose to inform the Biden Administration of the pending assault only after the planes were already in the air and we could do nothing to stop it. This shouldn’t be altogether surprising when President Joe Biden himself addressed the assembly earlier in the week and insisted no one wanted a wider regional war and he was tirelessly pursuing a cease fire agreement, even as the wider war was unfolding for all to see. Since then, Prime Minister Netanyahu hasn’t said so directly, but these events make clear he’s refusing to follow his US counterpart’s lead, barely even consulting with this closest and most powerful ally. He might mouth platitudes in public about the importance of the relationship, but when it counts, he’s doing what he believes is in the best interest of Israel and Israel-alone, and that those interests radically deviate from the Biden-Harris approach. In their view, Israel should simply have endured a barrage of almost 250 rockets and missiles per day, forever in the service of some warped definition of Middle East peace.
Clearly, Prime Minister Netanyahu has explicitly rejected that view in just about the most dramatic way imaginable, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Even normally friendly CNN analyst, Stephen Collinson agreed yesterday, writing, “Israel’s expected ground incursion into Lebanon will drive home a new strategic reality of a year of war — the once-mighty US is powerless to rein in its ally or to influence other major belligerents in a fast-worsening regional crisis.” As he saw it, “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government on Monday launched the next stage of its onslaught against Hezbollah with what the Israel Defense Forces called a ‘limited ground operation’ into Lebanon — despite weeks of requests from Washington for restraint and familiar (and spurned) calls for de-escalation.” He continued to characterize this development as a “humiliating pattern for the US on repeat,” describing it as “American impotency” that “has played out repeatedly.” “Netanyahu often acts first and consults the US later, even when his actions are certain to buckle American diplomatic efforts and compound fears the US will get dragged into a disastrous regional war. The US was not informed in advance, for example, about the Israeli airstrike Friday that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah even though its global shockwaves were bound to be severe. This Israeli approach has often made the Biden administration appear a spectator rather than an active player in events, as should befit a superpower. Months of grueling shuttle diplomacy by Secretary of State Antony Blinken have mostly drawn a blank. And the US has incessantly pushed for a Gaza ceasefire that neither Netanyahu nor Hamas seems to want.” From there, Mr. Collinson rightly concluded that this “is not just a diplomatic embarrassment. Any time an American president is publicly spurned, there is a cost to their personal prestige and perceptions of US global power. And the likelihood is growing that Biden, who came to office professing to be a foreign policy expert, will leave the White House in a few months with a raging Middle East war set to stain his legacy.” He does not, however, continue to the next logical step, generalizing the phenomena beyond Israel, either to Hamas backed Iran, Iran itself, or to an even broader view including Russia, China, and, unfortunately, India. Sadly for us all, this certainly appears to be the case and the US is increasingly ignored around the world. While Iran itself has kept a relatively low profile since their first ever attack on Israel directly earlier this year (at least until yesterday, when they launched rockets while I was writing this), the terrorist state’s proxies have continued to unleash havoc in the region. Hamas and Hezbollah have gotten most of the coverage, but the Iranian backed Houthis continue to attack shipping in the Red Sea, launching some 80 strikes in less than a year. The last one was just yesterday, when ABC News reported, “An explosive-loaded drone crashed into one ship Tuesday in the Red Sea as a missile exploded against another, the British military and private security officials said, marking the latest suspected attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels.” US bases, particularly in Syria, continue to come under fire from other proxies as well. The last attack was in August, following one in July. To date, four soldiers have been killed – all while President Biden has repeated his “don’t” mantra, as ineffectively as ever.
The same can also be said of Russia and its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, rather unfortunately. Despite claims that President Biden is leading and even expanding a more united free world than ever in the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression, the reality is that we have not altered his behavior in the slightest, either before or during almost three years of never ending conflict. It’s rarely mentioned at this point, but in the early days of the war, the Biden Administration repeatedly insisted that sanctions were going to prevent the war in the first place. On the eve of the invasion in February 2022, National Security Advisor Daleep Singh explained it at a press conference, “Sanctions are not an end to themselves. They serve a higher purpose. And that purpose is to deter and prevent. They’re meant to prevent and deter a large-scale invasion of Ukraine that could involve the seizure of major cities, including Kyiv.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted something similar at the time, “The purpose of the sanctions in the first instance is to try to deter Russia from going to war,” and Pentagon Secretary John Kirby echoed the thought, “We want them to have a deterrent effect, clearly.” When that failed, the belief was Russia would no longer be able to prosecute the war because they ran out of money. After denying they claimed deterrence was an option in the first place, President Biden himself claimed sanctions are what will stop President Putin in an interview with CBS’s Christina Ruffini, “Let’s get something straight: You remember, if you’ve covered me from the beginning, I did not say that in fact the sanctions would deter him. Sanctions never deter. You keep talking about that. Sanctions never deter. The maintenance of sanctions — the maintenance of sanctions, the increasing the pain, and the demonstration — why I asked for this NATO meeting today — is to be sure that after a month, we will sustain what we’re doing not just next month, the following month, but for the remainder of this entire year. That’s what will stop him.” Economists at the time were all convinced as well, “Western nations have responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a raft of sanctions intended to cripple the country’s economy, and economists suggest it could work,” the Swedish economist, Anders Aslund tweeted. “Essentially, the West took down Russian finances in one day. The situation is likely to become worse than in 1998 because now there is no positive end. All Russia’s capital markets appear to be wiped out & they are unlikely to return with anything less than profound reforms.”
This, of course, hasn’t happened, not by any measure. While economists and pundits continue to claim the Russian economy is on the brink of failure, their Gross Domestic Product began growing at the end of 2022 – with the sanctions on – and hasn’t stopped. In the first quarter of 2023, it shot up at 5.1% followed by 5.7%, 4.9%, and most recently 5.4%, far surpassing growth in the United States. The French publication, Le Monde, recently pondered “Why Russia’s economy is holding up, despite sanctions, inflation and labor shortages.” “‘Look at Moscow and its booming metro: Are we in an economic crisis, stricken by sanctions? No!’ More than two and a half years after the start of Russia’s ‘special operation’ in Ukraine, this anonymous Muscovite, who fits the typical profile of the affluent middle class, said he was torn between, on the one hand, his opposition to the Kremlin regime and the military offensive and, on the other, the fact that his daily life has remained almost unchanged in an apparently flourishing economy. The rapid development of Moscow’s public transportation system is just one example of this paradox. Since February 2022, economic sanctions imposed by the European Union and the United States have restricted Russia’s financial potential and reduced imports of Western technologies, including in the transportation sector. Nonetheless, on September 7, the capital enjoyed the luxury of opening its 16th metro line, which was inaugurated by Vladimir Putin himself. The Russian president’s message was twofold: Russia continues to grow, and Western sanctions are a failure.” A key reason for this, beyond how ineffectively these sanctions were structured and implemented, is the law of unintended consequences. While Russia has been barred from doing business with NATO and most of the Western free world, India, the world’s largest country and democracy, which should make it our chief ally in the region, has obligingly stepped into the gap, increasing, not decreasing trade with their neighbor to the north. Today, more oil flows from Russia than ever before, some 40% of India’s total imports, about $2.8 billion in July alone, and they have no plans to stop. As Reuters reported last month, “India is prepared to keep buying oil from Russian companies that are allowed to make such sales, since prices are cheap, oil minister Hardeep Singh Puri said on Tuesday. Western sanctions on Russia over its war with Ukraine have capped the price Russia can charge for its crude oil, and India is prepared to buy oil and gas at the lowest possible prices from anyone, Puri told Reuters in an interview at the GasTech conference in Houston.” “If an entity is not under sanctions, there is no question I will buy from the cheapest supplier,” he said, blithely ignoring that they are under sanctions, but since others are doing it, including another close ally, Japan, why shouldn’t they? Moreover, the relationship is mutually beneficial. India is busy selling Russian technology it can’t get from the West. This development has gotten little press coverage, but it’s a potentially disastrous global realignment, where the world’s emerging superpower India becomes more closely aligned with our adversaries, Russia, China, and Iran, than ever before, leading to a potential new world order.
In the meantime, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s lack of concern about what President Biden has to say and what America may do in response to his actions extends beyond the war as well. Earlier this year, the Russian President is widely believed to have ordered the assassination of a leading political dissident and critic, Alexei Navalny. As the European edition of Politico reported just this week, “Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny showed signs of poisoning before his death in prison earlier this year, Russian news portal The Insider reported on Monday, citing unpublished official documents leaked to the independent investigative outlet. Navalny, long seen as the main political opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, died in an Arctic prison in February, with natural causes cited for his sudden death. But the Russian authorities have been unconvincing in giving their version of how Navalny died while in prison. His supporters have accused the Kremlin of killing him, even as the Russian authorities have provided selective accounts of his death.” Whatever the case, President Biden himself claimed Mr. Navalny was poisoned almost immediately after it happened. “You know, like millions of people around the world, I am literally both not surprised and outraged by the news — the reported death of Aleksey Navalny,” he said from the Roosevelt Room on February 16. “He bravely stood up to the corruption, the violence, and the — the — all the — all the bad things that the Putin government was doing. In response, Putin had him poisoned. He had him arrested. He had him prosecuted for fabricated crimes. He sentenced him to prison. He was held in isolation. Even all that didn’t stop him from calling out Putin’s lies. Even in prison, he was a powerful voice of the truth, which is kind of amazing when you think about it.” What the President failed to mention, he’d specifically told President Putin not to do it under any circumstances two and a half years earlier. “I made it clear to him that I believe the consequences of that would be devastating for Russia,” he said. “What do you think happens when he’s saying it’s not about hurting Navalny, all the stuff he says to rationalize the treatment of Navalny, and then he dies in prison?… It’s about trust. It’s about their ability to influence other nations in a positive way.” This was even before President Put had invaded Ukraine, but he didn’t listen in either event. No one does, hence the missiles firing from Iran into Israel as I wrote this…
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 