Photograph Source: Dan Scavino – Public Domain
Over the last few weeks, much has been made about the supposed split between Netanyahu and Trump. Like much else about the operation of both regimes, it’s hard to say how much is serious and how much is political theater, but as always, the real decisions are being made by state department teams on both sides in a manner that is not accessible to immediate media evaluation.
What has shocked many people is that they mistakenly believed Israel and AIPAC dictate US foreign policy, so this appears to them like some sort of unpredictable change. In reality, it has always been Washington in the driver’s seat, with Israel acting as a sort of permanent mercenary presence in the Middle East—surrounded by hostile neighbors, it must do the dirty work of the only country capable of supplying it with the seemingly bottomless resources required to maintain the military preeminence and security dominance their society demands. It should be noted that American state department prioritization of Israel as a permanent ally in the region really only solidified after its performance in the 1967 war, although Eisenhower’s administration began a necessary pivot towards Israel as early as 1958, with interest in a secure ally in the region really becoming apparent during the suez crisis. The results of the Six-Day War in 1967 confirmed American intelligence assessments that Israel was the one reliable base for unfettered US support in the region in the face of secular Arab nationalism and the waning capabilities of both the British and French governments to maintain their colonial dominance over the region.
We would do well at this juncture in history not to mistake palace infighting for genuine conflict. If anything, with the appearance of a split, the leadership of each country can benefit from appearing to have to come to the aid of the other once tensions arise. Although Washington surely benefits the most from a public relations split designed to place the US Government on a perch of nobility, supposedly trapped in the whirlwind of an Israeli regime that it cannot control. In reality, the US can control Israeli policy by simply turning off the tap of advanced weaponry, intelligence assistance, economic aid, and crucial diplomatic support on the global stage.
Thus, their refusal to have done so shows clearly their desires for the trajectory of this present stage of the ongoing ‘conflict’. This is why prominent thinkers including Noam Chomsky have always referred to Israel as a sort of modern day “efficient Sparta” in the American empire; as the Spartans functioned for Greek power in the ancient world, so Israel functions as a besieged and therefore justified aggressive force in a region whose control the west has always seen as central to global energy and shipping dominance. It’s exactly the presence of this Israeli military asset that’s at the forefront of shifting Middle East dynamics today.
THE MIDDLE EAST & THE NEO-COLD WAR
With the war mostly expected to wind down in Ukraine, the Middle East is becoming the leading front in the Neo-Cold War between the American and Chinese empires, with the major Gulf Powers themselves existing in a deeply uneasy non-aligned fashion despite deep economic and military ties to the West. The geopolitical situation could best be described as the US and Israel looking to expand the Trump-led Abraham Accords (and Israeli normalization) to include not only the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain, and Sudan, but also the leading regional and OPEC power in Saudi Arabia, as well as Syria who Turkish and Western mercenaries recently conquered from Assad, the Russian and Iranian puppet who had just signed strategic and economic agreements with Beijing last year.
The US essentially wants to integrate Israel into an alliance system with the Gulf Cooperation Council—all Western allies with American boots on the ground for security and defense purposes (IE to offer a service for resource extraction). They, more or less, want to create a regional NATO-like alliance to contain the expansion of Iranian power. Which means the expansion of Chinese and Russian influence in a region well known to be the key to global hegemony given it supplies over 1/3 of the world’s energy. They’re doing so by arming the Israelis as they hammer Iran’s proxy network, while also engaging in diplomatic initiatives to foster Israeli peace with American allies in the region. The US have even been directly partaking in the military adventurism themselves, alongside their British mercenary and junior partner, from Syria and Iraq down to Yemen.
Western adversaries, meanwhile, are intent on using Iran as their headway into the Middle East, while also consolidating power in the Red Sea region by establishing Russian naval positions in Sudan and possibly Eritrea. In addition to Russian mercenary forces (aka Moscow’s Africa Corps, formerly known as the Wagner Group) using Egypt for staging operations into Libya, as well as Libyan ports themselves being used for logistical support. Not to go unmentioned is Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran all backing the Ethiopian regime’s genocidal actions in Tigray to consolidate power near vital trade choke points. Throughout the Israeli-Hamas War in Gaza, other Iranian proxies, from Iraq to Yemen, have also revealed key weaknesses in American and Western defense posture in the region, including especially where the US has traditionally relied on presumptive partnerships to allow the exercise of lower investment soft power, all highlighting clear openings for Chinese and Russian power to further establish itself in the greater Middle East.
A key aspect of China upending American control of not only the Middle East but indeed the world economic system as its own influence expands, is to drive a wedge between the vastly important US-Saudi relationship. This relationship is really what affords Washington such monumental influence over the international financial system and global trade. The Saudis exist as an extension of American financial interests, given that they’re the world’s second largest oil producer (US is the largest) and its leading exporter globally. The US Dollar (USD) is what the Saudis, and other energy producers, largely conduct business in, a situation many refer to as the ‘petrodollar’, having provided the backbone of the stability to the global economy since 1944 as its reserve currency. It’s far easier to invest export earnings in USD given it’s the most widely traded currency globally, with most major financial institutions deeply dependent on it and its basis in crude oil, making it the easiest to use and, for close to a century now, by far the most reliable currency in which to hold value. Governments around the world all buy US treasury bonds because they are low risk investments backed by the faith and credit of the US Government and USD.
In recent years there’s been an increasing trend of geopolitical rivals to the US conducting more business in alternative currencies. In particular the Chinese yuan or renminbi, although China has also been considering a common currency backed by BRICS countries to reduce reliance on G7 or Western currencies. Chinese relations with Gulf Powers, and Saudi Arabia notably, have strengthened considerably in recent years. Especially in terms of economic development. China is the world’s leading oil importer and will surely seek greater access to energy supplies from the Middle East in coming years. China also helped mediate the reintroduction of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, prompting much concern from Western sectors of the American empire about Beijing flexing its soft power in the region. Washington has even launched its own proposed trade corridor with the EU, India, and Gulf Powers in response to the growing Chinese influence in the Middle East. Dubbed the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, it’s generally been viewed as a potential rival to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative that’s designed to transform global trade away from the American dominated system.
Where these geopolitical tensions go is anyone’s guess, but Chinese policy will surely be to expand its own economic integration with Gulf Powers while attempting to manage any future upticks of violence in the region that’s sure to involve the Western barbarians in Washington who are increasingly behaving in a brazen and dangerous manner. China is wisely attempting to play the role of peace broker in stark contrast to American aggression across the Middle East. This will certainly afford Beijing a significant propaganda edge in their quest to wrestle control of the Arabian peninsula from the American empire, but the Middle East is a region in perpetual conflict—largely by design—and with sectarian tensions that will not be easily resolved. Hence, lots of violence is surely on the horizon and military action is sadly where the US Government excels the most—making it increasingly likely to be the modality it leans on the most strongly as its other levers of control begin to fail.
None of the more non-aligned Middle East powers—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Egypt—want to get too involved in this Cold War that could ultimately stunt their own development and derail efforts at regional hegemony for themselves. Hence their courting of both sides in this increasingly volatile conflict for global hegemony. For the time being, these powers will remain formally in the Western and G7 camp, relying on US and European economic/military aid to allow them functional control of their societies, while expanding relations with BRICS powers (of which China is the most significant) in the hopes of strengthening their industrial production and economic development. That’s how you become a dominant power; courting all factions and growing your productive forces.
The way world powers control their domains is by creating a system of agricultural, industrial and increasingly technological domination that ultimately leads back to the imperial home base. It’s what the American empire did in the Western hemisphere, what the Russian empire did in Northern Eurasia, and what the Chinese empire is doing in East Asia and Africa. In order to do this, you must subdue and force other regional governments into doing your bidding, using threats of diplomatic, economic, and/or military power.
Nation-states, or any governing entity, all function with the economic and strategic interests of highly concentrated power in the state or organization itself at the forefront of its planning. These interests sometimes align themselves with friendly governments, while at other times they may be at odds. For example, while the Israelis and Turks have been publicly sparring over Israeli policy in Gaza, due to Ankara’s support for Hamas and other militant Palestinian groups, they find themselves aligned in Syria where both opposed Assad and the expansion of Iranian power. This is why Turkish proxies in the new Syrian regime have been cozying up to the West for sanction relief and investment in exchange for Israeli normalization. While Israel and Turkey both want to become leading regional hegemonic powers themselves in the future, in Syria they’ll ultimately coalesce under the blanket of the leading world power in the US who both rely on for economic, military and diplomatic assistance, and whose influence and interests in the Middle East far outweigh any others at the moment.
The gravest concern right now is the threat of a wider Middle East war that the region, and the entire world, cannot afford to occur. While American and Western propaganda is intent on painting the Israelis as the sole source of wanting to widen what’s come to be known as the ‘Middle Eastern crisis’, it should never be forgotten that this conflict will not expand into a wider war, likely centered on Iran, unless the fascists and plutocrats in Washington want it to. The Israelis cannot successfully attack and destroy Iranian nuclear facilities without direct US military support. Hence, the IDF will not, and simply cannot, fight Iran on its own.
The strategy for the US Government is clear: bully Iran to its knees in the hopes of achieving a diplomatic breakthrough via maximum pressure sanctions and overwhelming military force in areas under Tehran’s imperial banner (Palestine, Southern Lebanon, Western Yemen, and previously much of Syria), while achieving Israeli normalization and expansion of relations with Saudi Arabia and other regional allies to counter emerging Iranian ties to Gulf Powers and that of any Chinese and Russian headways being made in strategically vital countries on the Arabian peninsula. In other words, expand Israeli integration into the region while reducing Iran’s, thereby weakening or blunting Chinese and Russian influence in the Middle East.
AMERICAN PRIMACY & ‘GREATER ISRAEL’
The real threat to a wider war emanates from the quest for a greater Israel, which really has little to do with Israeli history or the way Israel developed. It was a politically marginal, idealized goal that perhaps played some minor role in driving Israel’s initial expansionist energy, but was never really taken seriously, perhaps until now. For the US, it is simply an extension of manifest destiny. If the goal of a greater Israel motivates real estate developments, and more importantly oil and gas exploitation in Gaza, deportations of whole populations, taking of territory in Syria and southern Lebanon, and perhaps even the creation of concentration camps to isolate undesirables from across the Middle East, then the footprint of American hegemonic control in the Middle East would be expanded and secured like never before, with a reliable ally in charge, an oath having been made together in the blood of the Palestinian people.
This is not intended to sound dramatic, although its consequences are dire, but to underline that applying international law would require leading members of both countries to be arrested by the ICC or the ICJ—which will never happen—so now both sides are bound to prevent the application of international law to themselves throughout the region at least.
Since Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister, he has been seeking quite openly to create what is often called ‘Greater Israel’. So what is ‘Greater Israel’? The phrase that is frequently used to describe this aim is ‘from the Nile to the Euphrates’—if taken seriously, an insane and viciously imperial goal that makes the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ appear pale in comparison.
Throughout the genocidal assault on Gaza, IDF soldiers have been seen wearing arm patches on their uniforms which show a Greater Israel that includes all of the Levant, most of Syria, and much of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. This patch matches maps which have been circulated by Israeli authorities and in their media for years at this point.
Since the beginning of his first term, Netanyahu has openly aimed to topple the governments of seven countries which he sees as hostile to Israel and supportive of the Palestinian national cause—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan. Over the course of the last three decades we have watched as the US has sometimes actively and sometimes passively acted to realize this goal. The invasion of Iraq was the keystone event—in the chaos that ensued, violence spread like a plague throughout the Middle East. There are several instances of well armed US-backed forces chaotically retreating and abandoning large amounts of ordinance, tanks, armored vehicles, and so on—the most prominent examples being the rapid retreats as ISIS split off from al-Qaeda, which provided them with much of the weaponry they used to institute their reign of terror. It is not credible that the US military accidentally abandons so much ordinance, especially not so frequently—even the defeated Germans managed to destroy their tanks and armored vehicles as they chaotically retreated. So one must conclude that, at the very least, the leadership did not consider it a priority to leave the region without advanced technical means of war left behind that are primarily to be produced in the US/West.
There is ample documentation to show that orders came from the White House immediately upon the invasion to round people in Iraq up, essentially at random, and torture them—there was a meeting with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and others (with George W. Bush notably absent, likely to sustain probable deniability) where they discussed which methods of torture (which they renamed ‘enhanced interrogation’) would be used on the detainees—and that the CIA repeatedly requested these methods be abandoned, as torture produces false confessions and dead end leads which were making actual intelligence and counter-insurgency operations more difficult. It is precisely this random targeting of the civilian population that created ISIS and fed other “terror” groups—violence is bred by violence, torture and humiliation, and obviously not by religion or culture. It is no coincidence that al-Baghdadi—who, as Trump emphasized, died ‘like a dog’—was radicalized during his torture in Iraq at the hands of the American empire.
We have watched for over two decades as schools, hospitals (the vicious assault on Fallujah is one of the great crimes of this century, celebrated by the New York Times as it was occurring), and pharmaceutical plants (al Shifa in Libya) have been destroyed. Often, these schools are replaced with Madrassas backed by Saudi money (that is to say, American money in the hands of its mercenaries)—on the condition that they teach a curriculum based on Wahhabism. So first the US attacked people throughout the Middle East, then helped fund their radicalization (Saudi money being American money), and then invaded their countries, committed grave war crimes, committed unspeakable violence and acts of humiliation against the civilian population, and then withdrew rapidly, leaving behind the armaments and weapons that would inevitably fuel violent internal conflicts.
In the midst of all this chaos, people across the Middle East began to rise up in the Arab Spring. People everywhere generally want to live in peace, but as Thomas Jefferson stated in the Declaration of Independence, considerable and ongoing intolerable oppression will eventually result in an uprising (‘when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security). As always, the US state department used this uprising to its own benefit, supporting it in places where they wanted regime change (such as their initially failed support of the uprising against Assad, this failure being due mostly to Russian/Iranian intervention and support for the regime, although, as noted, recent events have seen militant groups funded and supported by the US and its allies finally realize this goal, allowing Israel to expand further into the occupied Golan Heights) and abandoning people to the resulting repression where they didn’t want regime change, such as in Egypt.
During this time, the US toppled the Gaddafi regime, which has resulted in Libya going from one of the few African success stories, with rising literacy and infrastructure development, to a country with open slave markets. Gaddafi, like American foe Saddam Hussein, was a war criminal and profiteer himself; but their crime to the US was always independent development. The US supported them as long as they were simply killing people. It was Gaddafi’s pan-Africanism and being the defacto head of the African Union (AU), as well as Saddam’s invasion of US-backed Kuwait to wipe out Iraqi debt and establish Baghdad as a major regional power, that were always the real threats to American empire. That Gaddafi and Saddam were murderous dictators was always well known. It was their refusal to bow to US dictates that did them in.
Somalia and Sudan have also collapsed into chaos, with Somalia having a barely functioning government and much of the country in a state of chaotic civil war. In Sudan, the war on Darfur/South Sudan being waged by the Sudanese government is one of the most violent conflicts of the century, with daily reports of atrocities against civilians, including women and children. In these cases, the US has taken a more passive role, simply allowing events to unfold primarily without as much overt intervention as in Ukraine and Gaza.
In Sudan, they’ve been steadily expanding relations with the post-Omar al-Bashir regime. He was a longtime ally of Moscow and Beijing who conspicuously faced a coup that toppled him in 2019 which surely had CIA fingerprints involved to some degree. The Russians and Chinese are the leading imperial powers in Sudan, providing most of the weaponry to the Sudanese regime and its enemy in the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) who are both engaging in massacres. While Russian support has since shifted primarily to Sudan’s government, the Emiratis (who, again, are a gulf power acting on their own regional interests) have stepped up their support of the RSF. The Americans and Israelis, meanwhile, have attempted to push Sudan into accepting Palestinian refugees from Gaza in an incredibly cynical proposal to send them from one war zone to another. At present, Sudan is facing monumental internal struggles that will take generations to overcome. As far as subduing Sudan as one of the leading confrontation states to a ‘Greater Israel’, removing a puppet of China and Russia, in turn reaching normalization between Sudan and Israel, this has been a significant success in achieving that goal.
In the case of Somalia, the US openly backs a corrupt regime in power for its strategic location in the Horn of Africa and resource exploitation. Airstrikes, funding government massacres, and diplomatic support are crucial. While not exercising its veto to protect Somalia the way the US does its Israeli colony, Washington nonetheless runs diplomatic interference with regards to humanitarian and peacekeeping missions from the AU in Somalia. The US essentially provides pressure that prevents the implementation of a successful AU mission in Somalia, thereby giving the regime room to inflict massacres and consolidate power. Somalia’s regime, meanwhile, has openly drifted more towards Israel in recent years with its leaders announcing the intent to create concrete diplomatic relations with the Israelis. Somali people effectively and rightly view this as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause which Somalia had supported politically for decades.
In the case of the Sahel, and West-Central Africa more broadly which borders the greater Middle East, where Western hegemony is on the decline and Sino-Russian imperialism on the ascent, at this point the US/West will surely shift support from the regimes in power to funding rebel forces and violent militias directly when it suits their interests. In Mali, Burkina Faso, Gabon, and Niger, there’s been an imperial swap where the West is withdrawing and the eastern powers are entering to be the new imperial overlords. Even in Chad there’s been discussions of US troop withdrawals, in addition to the French exit, and less reliance on the traditional neocolonial powers. This all indicates shifting global dynamics and American disengagement from certain areas of the empire.
There is of course a clear geostrategic rationale for this new kind of disengagement, which in many ways echoes the transformation of direct colonialism to neocolonialism: the US has learned that when it uses traditional colonial imagery in its proxy wars, its image suffers even when it achieves its goals. Its goal in Vietnam was to destroy the country’s development capacity; its goal in Iraq was to destabilize a growing center of anti-American/Israeli militancy that threatened to pose a counterweight to Saudi Arabia throughout the Middle East; and its goal in Afghanistan was to prevent one of the other regional powers—Russia, China, India, Iran— from emerging with control over all those resources at the center of trade between west and east Asia.
Ironically, in the case of Afghanistan, the US withdrew in 2021 and allowed the Chinese and Russians to enter almost immediately with the Taliban easily conquering the US-backed regime in power that had no popular support whatsoever. Leaving all the weaponry and equipment behind in the withdrawal was most likely to ensure the arms end up in the hands of rebels and militants who will threaten the imperial interests of Western rivals who have begun their own looting of Afghanistan. Recent reports indicate roughly half the weapons left behind are entirely unaccounted for or have ended up with militant groups.
Americans across the political spectrum, as well as many people around the world, view these campaigns as losses. If your goal is to simply bomb a country, then why claim you want to conquer it, only to have your bombing viewed as a failure? Of course the US had more maximal objectives, but those were never really pursued seriously at the top echelons of power. So what do you do if you wish to be a power broker in a region without remaining as an occupying force, and contain China, Russia and Iran from stepping into the power vacuum that would result from a traditional, planned withdrawal? By leaving chaotically, and leaving behind high tech American military equipment which could otherwise not be snuck into the region.
By doing so, one assures first that the rebel fighters are collectively capable of resisting Russian or Chinese attempts at soft power, and of turning any attempt at military intervention into a disaster; second, that whoever emerges victorious will be able to defend their territory. Once whichever party has secured power, the US can resume arming them directly, sure that they have backed the right horse (because the race is over). And if things go badly, the equipment will be staledated and obsolete within a decade. This provides more demand for the military industrial complex, increasingly the only remaining budget portfolio capable of sustaining American industry in any truly meaningful capacity; and provides plausible deniability as well as operational flexibility when building coalitions during conflicts. This kind of flexibility has been prominently on display in the battles involving ISIS/ISIL, Al-Nusra front, Al-Qaeda, the YPG, Syrian National Army, and the rapidly shifting alliance structures between all these different groups and their great power supporters.
Now of course this must be seen in the broader context of what can be described as ‘neo-imperialism’. The ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—which should be one of the richest countries (in terms of resources it is), but due to exploitation by multinational corporations is one of the poorest places in the world—has cost ten million lives since it began (it seems little has changed since King Leopold II of Belgium ravaged the nation more than a century ago). The militias fighting this civil war do so with weapons manufactured primarily in the West, as well as in China and Russia. It is well known at this point that the French continued to arm the Hutu militias well after it was known that a genocide was occurring in Rwanda in 1994. Almost every conflict you can find occurring around the globe right now is either directly or indirectly funded and/or armed by the US and other Western powers against the imperial interests of China, Russia, and/or Iran who of course arm their own proxies to gain influence and control.
But to return to the quest for a Greater Israel—we are at a very dangerous turning point. Netanyahu was set to be tried for a laundry list of crimes right around the time of the October 7 attacks—warnings about preparations for an attack that were communicated by Israeli military observers to their superiors having been suspiciously ignored, as reported widely in Israeli media but then quickly forgotten—which is one of the reasons he defanged the Israeli Supreme Court in 2023 by removing its right of judicial review. It is of no small significance that massive protests demanding his resignation because of this action were planned for the week after October 7—all of which of course evaporated when the attacks occurred.
Netanyahu likely hopes to establish a legacy by doing as much as he can to conquer the regimes listed earlier, and to expand the borders of Israel and its sphere of influence as far as possible. He likely hopes that a legacy of sufficient gravity—like David Ben-Gurion or Menachim Begin—will result in right wing forces, which at this point rule Israel with an iron fist, intervening to save him from his otherwise likely fate of an ignominious end in a trial for his many crimes, all pre-dating October 7.
Ironically, he is committing the ultimate crime—genocide against the Palestinians—in the hopes of escaping justice for his many other crimes. He is now working as hard as he can to commit the other ultimate crime—war of aggression, the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. It appears obvious that the seemingly unbridled enthusiasm of the Biden regime for supporting this agenda has been replaced by an even more psychotic, violent, chaotic and unpredictable regime, with Trump and his sycophants repeatedly making deeply troubling public statements about their plans for Gaza.
We stand at the precipice of a broader Middle East war, with direct confrontation against Iran increasingly becoming a realistic possibility, although it would have seemed unlikely with any sane, restrained forces in positions of power. Unfortunately, in Israel and increasing with unbelievable rapidity in the US, these forces have been marginalized or silenced. A more likely scenario than direct confrontation with Iran is unfolding before our eyes in Syria—multiple militant groups funded by the US working opportunistically, taking territory where they can, their regional mercenaries and possibly the US military itself intervening with the age old excuse of “stability” (the same excuse Stalin used when fulfilling his end of the deal he cut with Hitler to split Poland between them, which at the time was a secret protocol in the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact). This “stabilization” has already cost lives, and is likely to become extremely violent should it face serious resistance, to say nothing of what might be done to noncombatants following occupation.
As we watch our leaders play political theater while they decide whether or not it is in their interests to begin a broader regional war, it is essential that organized resistance movements within Western countries work to overcome the overwhelm of constant assaults on civil liberties and human dignity, and act to restrain our governments from launching a war that would be so disastrous in its consequences that it will make the Iraq and Afghan wars look like minor conflicts by comparison.
