Category: Military Page 6 of 12

Inequality Is Unnatural

On July 19, 2019

I’ve been reading UltraSociety, by Peter Turchin. Turchin’s a biologist who turned to mathematical models of human society, and he’s done interesting work, not all of which I agree with (or agree is quite as radical as he claims).

But one of the points he makes in UltraSociety, a point which has also been made by many archeologists and anthropologists, is that for most human existence we were radically egalitarian.

One of the great curses on understanding ourselves has been a tendency to compare ourselves to other primates, in particular chimpanzees, with whom we share most of our DNA.

But we aren’t chimps, and we don’t act like them. Chimps have terrible, terrible lives, ruled by fear, in despotic dominance hierarchies.

For most of our existence, we simply did not. One anthropologist, whose name I forget, once wrote that if aliens had observed humans 10,000 years ago, they would have assumed we were hopelessly egalitarian and wouldn’t be able to form a hierarchy even if we wanted to.

In normal human society (a.k.a., not what we have now, what we had during most of our existence), if someone started to put themselves above others they were first mocked, then ostracized and if that didn’t work, they were killed.

Being stronger didn’t matter, because as Turchin and others have pointed out, what makes humanity unique as a hunter and killer is the use of thrown and missile weapons. Even thrown rocks are deadly. Sharp, thrown objects like spears and javelins are deadlier; bows deadlier still.

Get out of place, don’t accept social correction, get dead.

It was that simple, and that’s how we lived for most of our existence.

So what’s going on now is unusual, and it takes a great deal of coercion to have it happen.

The fundamentals are only two: First, you must have an ideology which legitimates radical inequality (CEOs earning 1,000 times what normal people earn; politicians who send people to war and don’t go themsleves); second, you must have violence specialists who are better at violence than random people who get tired of being unequal.

This is also why periods with good weapons of assassination tend to be more equal (the pistol or even the concealed dagger). It is why Nixon, who ruled in a period of relative equality, went to visit protesters with only one aide, while modern Presidents live in fortresses and federal buildings are armored up. As a young man, I remember being able to walk through the first floor of the Department of Defense in Ottawa. You can’t do that any more. You can’t do it in most buildings. In the 80s, you could.

So, as inequality increases, so too must defenses against violence. This is true for domestic inequality and it is true for international inequality, now that it is possible for those who feel aggrieved thousands of miles from our countries can see that our country is responsible, travel to it, and inflict harm.

Turchin makes another important point, which cuts against Pinker’s “violence just keeps decreasing.”

Violence actually appears to have the form of an A. Before agriculture it was relatively low, after agriculture it increased until peaking around the time of the Axial sages, whose teachings tried to reduce it, and when those teachings were applied by various rulers, did. Thus, a long decline in the odds of dying by violence. (This claim comes with sharp local exceptions in time and place–exceptions which may prove, in the end, larger than the generalized decline. The story isn’t over yet.)

In the meantime, inequality isn’t natural to humans. It’s bad for us in every way possible (it shows up on every metric from health, to happiness, to stress, to how long we live), including to those at the top.

And maintaining it requires an ideology which pretends it is justified, and a cadre of violent men (and a very few women) who keep those who insist on being unequal from the normal, human, consequences of their actions.

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Why Elites Are Creating Surveillance States

By Ian Welsh

On June 3, 2019

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It’s commonplace now to note that China is a surveillance state.

But most other countries–including the UK and the US–are on their way. Cameras proliferate everywhere, virtually everyone carries a phone which is tracked constantly (and 5G networks will be so precise they can tell which room of a building you are in), and audio surveillance is increasingly being added. (That much of this surveillance is private, rather than government, changes little.)

AI + various recognition algos (face, gait, etc…) and cheap long term storage means that, increasingly, it is possible to know where people were, when, and store that information for years. Cameras and phones and other devices which listen in, plus access to all chat, phone, email, and other messaging means we know what they were doing and saying.

1984 was nothing on this. Big Brother couldn’t store information (no video tape even) and someone had to actually be watching the camera and listening in when you did something The Powers That Be didn’t like. If no one was watching, you got away with it.

The endgame, as I’ve been pointing out for years, is a society in which where you are and what you’re doing, and have done is, always known, or at least knowable. And that information is known forever, so the moment someone with power wants to take you out, they can go back through your life in minute detail. If laws or norms change so that what was okay ten or 30 years ago isn’t okay now, well, they can get you on that.

Surveillance societies are sterile societies. Everyone does what they’re supposed to do all the time, and because we become what we do, it affects our personalities. It particularly affects our creativity, and is a large part of why Communist surveillance societies were less creative than the West, particularly as their police states ramped up.

Surveillance societies also just suck to live in: paranoia, fear, little freedom.

So why create them? I mean in one sense the answer is obvious: Surveillance is control, and powerful people always want small people under their thumb, and small people can be sold on arguments like, “This stops crime!” and “Oh, think of the children!”

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But there are three specific reasons for this upsurge in the surveillance state beyond, “We can, so why not?”

The first is that elites have become very aware that modern military technology is mostly not in their favour. Iraqis fought the US to a standstill. The US military had to pay militias to let it leave. You don’t do that if you won. The Taliban is straight up winning in Afghanistan. The biggest and arguably the most expensive military in the world has lost to opponents who don’t have one percent of its budget. Israel lost to Hezbollah the last time it invaded Lebanon, and even lost the e-lint war.

The issue is that a big military like America’s can’t be defeated on the battlefield by rabble, but technologies of area denial (most notably IEDs) mean that large parts of any sizeable country can be made into no go zones. The state can’t rule them and neither can the militias really (because air power can be used to devastate them).

Meanwhile technologies like drones, and, I suspect, in the longer run, weaponized robots, are actually technologies that will be more useful to the weak than the strong. Bombers that cost a billion bucks and can only be made by huge firms or government organizations, and then require teams of specialists to run and maintain? Those are weapons of the strong.

But drones and weaponized robots and IEDs are or will be technologies that any competent mechanic/engineer will be able to make.

What is even scarier is that, as Bush and Obama made clear, drones are weapons of assassination. Like daggers and pistols in earlier eras, they make it possible to kill important people and are really hard to stop.

That will remain true as they disperse out to non-state actors, which is already happening.

They are also excellent weapons of sabotage. A few drones shut down Heathrow Airport, Britain’s most important airport, for days, without having to do anything beyond buzz about.

So, the technological soup to which we are coming makes assassination, sabotage, and area denial easy (as does cyber warfare). A single ransomware attack can shut down an entire bureaucracy, private or public.

The only way our elites can see to stop this is to know what everyone is doing all the time. Oh, there is one other way, but they are ideologically opposed to it.

The Rise of Inequality

The other way to stop people from sabotage, assassination, and insurgency is to make life good. People who are happy, expect the future to be better than the past, and have great social ties (love/friendship) don’t commit violence except when it is socially acceptable violence.

But this requires actually letting ordinary people have stuff: money and good futures. It means not treating them badly at work. It means sharing power (because there is no shared wealth without shared power over time). It also means, in an increasingly small world, actually giving developing country inhabitants decent lives–equality within and between societies.

If you are the richest rich in the history of the world, you sure don’t want to do that. Moreover, you are aware that you have so much, and that other people want it, and you are scared. Especially because you know serious disruptions to the social order will occur as climate change and ecological collapse worsen.

So, to keep your position, and save your lives when things go bad, you need a surveillance state. People have good reason to hate you, the smarter among you realize that, and know that only real, credible fear will stop them.

Remember, the surveillance state, combined with the technologies we’ve discussed, already means the state can easily kill and capture you. If they know where you are, who all your friends are, and everything you’ve done or do, it’s just a matter of visiting some violence on you, and they have plenty of violent capability. Finding you is the important part. The rest is easy.

A Grand Experiment in Cost

Traditional surveillance societies were expensive. The East German Stasi reputedly had one-third of its population spying on the other two-thirds. That’s ludicrous. It guts productivity, making the state poor. Combined with the creativity effects of surveillance societies, you will eventually lose to healthy, non-surveillance societies.

But what if you only had to pay a few percentage points of people to spy on the others, and, if necessary, kill or capture, the rest of the population. What if most of the work was done by AI, algos, and robots? Even better, this gets rid of the need to keep a large number of internal police and spies loyal, so you need a much smaller class of people to keep your surveillance state running.

But wait! It gets better! (Worse.) What if these new technologies mean that you don’t actually need peons? What if you can do the manufacturing, delivery, and service jobs all with combinations of AI and robots. Who needs workers? Just give the peons a guaranteed annual income large enough for them to buy your shitty goods and services, stick them in sub-par housing, and run the society mostly without them!

Oh sure, the same technology could be used to create a utopia (luxury-automated communism) but why do that? That would mean you wouldn’t be the richest, most powerful elite the world has ever known.

As members of the powerful elite, the problem of peons and minions revolting has always been the thorn in your bowl of cherries.

Finally, finally, technology offers a solution. A possibility of a permanent state where you never can, or will, lose your power.

Give it a little longer and make sure that you get access to the new gene-editing technologies (and the peons don’t), and you can even give yourself another permanent advantage by making yourself and your children actually, biologically superior to the hoi polloi.

The possibilities! The possibilities! If you can just hang on and get all of this into place, this could be the greatest age of aristocracy and autocracy the world has ever seen, and one that has no reason to ever end.

Ahhhhh.

It’s always good to be rich and powerful, but potentially this is the best era ever to be rich and powerful, with the best yet to come!

The Coming War with Iran?

By Ian Welsh

On May 7, 2019

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Image by Yuan2003

It may turn out that the worst thing Donald Trump ever did was hire John Bolton as his National Security Advisor.

Trump was already deranged on the subject of Iran, possibly because Jared Kushner is his son-in-law, and Jared is having a (presumably) platonic love affair with Saudi Crown Prince (and de facto ruler) Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud. Saudi Royals both hate and fear Shia Islam, in part because the regions of Saudi Arabia with the oil are Shia.

So Trump unilaterally left the nuclear weapons treaty with Iran, and the Treasury department has made it illegal for any country to buy oil from Iran. Since almost all finance in the world goes through US banks, the Treasury can do this. Only firms which don’t use the SWIFT system can avoid the Treasury’s grasp.

These sanctions are having a terrible effect on Iran, and one which will grow even greater as the final waivers expire. There will be smuggling, but even so, Iran will be starved of foreign currency.

The US has also declared the Iranian military to be a terrorist organization, the first time part of a foreign government has ever received that designation.

And a carrier task group has been sent to the region, specifically as a warning to Iran.

It is well known that the NeoCons, of which Bolton is a prominent member, want a war with Iran, to remake the Middle East. (This is part of the same project which saw Iraq destroyed, and which fuel US-led regime change aspirations in Syria. A little further afield, Libya, while not in the Middle East, was similarly dealt with.)

The issue, as Escobar points out, is that a new alliance is rising. Its key members are China and Russia, but Iran is part of it as well. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative is meant to create routes to Europe and a Chinese-led trade zone. It is meant to bypass the straits of Malacca (which the US can shut down at any time to strangle China), and the land parts will be a lot faster (though not cheaper) than sea transport.

Iran is a key part of this system.

Because other countries aren’t cooperating with the US when it tries to stop the B&R system (indeed, Italy just signed on), the US needs to actually destroy part of it.

Thus Iran.

This isn’t the only reason, needless to say, the NeoCons have wanted to destroy Iran for far longer than the B&R system has existed, but it is now an important consideration.

But what if Iran survives the sanctions? No one except the US is happy about the sanctions. Others may submit, but they don’t like it. The Chinese will do a huge end-run, as with the Russians. Even the Europeans are angry, and have created a “special vehicle” to avoid sanctions. (Consensus seems to be that it doesn’t do a good job and that if they’re serious they need to improve it.)

Because no one is happy, there’s going to be a lot of oil still sold. It may be enough to keep the Iranian government in power.

Then what?

Well, war, maybe.

The problem with that is that Iranians can shut down the Strait of Hormuz. There is no situation, short of nuclear glassing, in which the US can keep it open. That spikes the price of oil to hundreds of dollars a barrel, because, at that point, a quarter of the world’s oil cannot get to the market at all.

And that causes an economic and financial crisis, likely even larger than 2008, because it involves economic fundamentals.

So the question is whether or not Bolton, who is a true believer, can talk Trump into it.

And the answer is… I don’t know. Just don’t know.

But that’s a serious precipice on which we’re walking.

Even without war, this is a serious situation. The US’s continued abuse of its privileged position in the world payments system to sanction countries like Iran and Venezuela, even when other great powers disagree, means that the loss of that privileged position through the creation of alternatives is inevitable. It is already happening and only a matter of time before they become viable enough that major countries will simply be able to ignore the Treasury’s sanctions.

This is also true because other markets are large enough that access to the American market is no longer required. Especially if the EU comes onside with this, the ability to sanction is basically finished if the other great powers (and especially China), don’t agree.

This is, for the US, a late Imperial period. Don’t mistake it as anything else. And remember, very few countries manage to regain their pre-eminence or Empire. Britain lost one Empire and gained another, but it is an exception, and driven by a specific situation (first mover in the Industrial revolution) which has no modern parallel (no, the information revolution is not even a rounding error on the industrial revolution.)

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Drones Are a Weapon of the Weak, #2

By Ian Welsh

On January 10, 2019

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So, I imagine how everyone heard how drones shut down Gatwick airport, and the police and military were helpless?

Then there is this nice thread from someone who fought ISIS in Iraq. His end conclusion is that trying to shoot down drones is hopeless, you have to find the drone operator and shoot them.

Though I could be wrong, it looks like right now the only technology which really works, is jamming. The problem is that wide-spectrum jamming shuts down more than just the drones. And jamming won’t work against autonomous drones.

Drones are too small and hard for humans to hit reliably. Real attacks involve swarms of fast moving drones.

And drones are cheap. I wrote back in 2012 that drones would be weapons of the weak, and in 2013 discussed how technology was changing the balance of power between weak and strong in war.

This trend continues. Governments may force drone registration and so on, but they are an easy, cheap tech to make with off-the-shelf parts. Currently, they can’t be stopped easily by conventional militaries, and it will be impossible to harden all targets against them in the perceivable future. They will make both terror attacks and assassinations quite simple.

I always thought the US was foolish for developing this technology. They made it happen much faster than it would have otherwise, and while initially it was (and still is) useful to them, in the end it will be a technology that terrorizes them and other powerful governments.

Combined with IEDs, drones make for a very potent insurgency/rebellion/area denial technology. The only real counter to them right now is indirect: Totalitarian surveillance states with the power to track the makers and users. Fear of this sort of thing is, in fact, part of what is driving the rise of surveillance states.

Especially, for the smarter leaders, the realization that drone assassinations are eventually going to be almost impossible to stop.

I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing in the long run. Scared leaders and militaries which aren’t invincible are a good thing. But there can be a lot of pain on the way to leaders learning that they can’t just ignore their followers without violent consequences, and a lot of that pain will hit ordinary people.

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Six Lessons From Genghis Khan’s Victories

By Ian Welsh

On September 19, 2018

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Genghis Khan, Photo by Francois Phillipe

Some years ago I wrote about the genius of Temujin—Genghis Khan.

I want to return to this, but take a different approach. Why was Temujin so successful?

“Hired A’s”

Yeah, I hate startup culture too. But, the bottom line is that Temujin’s main lieutenants were all brilliant too. Subodei is in the running for one of the world’s greatest generals. His main administrator was brilliant. And Temujin took people who were his enemies and made them his leaders, and they stayed loyal. That’s genius, and it’s the number one thing that made him great, especially because he let them do their jobs without getting in the way: He trusted them and didn’t second guess them.

Effectively Used Spies and Intelligence

Temujin cultivated merchants. He talked to them, he treated them well, he offered them real protection. Before he ever went to war with anyone, he knew their military, he knew any internal problems they had, from disloyal satraps to recently conquered and still restive people. He knew the geography, and so on.

He Prioritized Local Superiority of Force

Westerners have this weird idea that the Mongols were a horde. To the contrary, in all major campaigns of Temujin’s life, they were outnumbered. In many cases, this is true even after his death. Subodei’s invasion of Europe was against much larger numbers.

Temujin and Subodei used feints and threats and encircling movements to deceive their enemies. During the invasion of Afghanistan, for example, an initial attack burned down a large area, making it uninhabitable. The troops then withdrew. The enemy thought that, all the farms having been burned, no invasion could come through that area. Of course, then an invasion did.

This sort of attacking from directions that are assumed impossible was used all the time, and is routine for great generals. (Scipio Africanus and Hannibal, the two greatest generals of ancient times, used it to great effect.)

He also used detached columns to threaten areas that his enemies needed to defend. A small force, moving fast, would force enemies to run back to defend, even if the enemy was much larger.

He used multiple columns all the time, threatening multiple targets that had to be defended, forcing dispersion of enemy forces. Then he would bring his forces together and achieve numerical superiority against armies, that, in toto, were much larger than his.

It doesn’t matter if your enemy outnumbers you overall, if you outnumber them every time you fight them.

He Didn’t Attack Strong Positions or Waste His Own Troops

For example, he left the Chinese capital alone multiple times when he knew the Chinese army was still too strong to defeat. He didn’t order frontal assaults and waste his own troops. He would happily waste unreliable troops: Often, he would levy all men from defeated cities and towns and use them as the first wave attack against enemy walls, for example.

He Didn’t Trust Traitors

Temujin turned enemies into his chief leaders, but he did so after defeating them honestly. Anyone who betrayed their previous masters before defeat he did not trust.

None of this…

…is to deny his obvious advantages–like horse archers, among others. But contrary to what people think, horse archers were defeated often. Yes, they had the ability to break out and conquer far larger civilized nations, but most of the time, large, civilized nations kept them in their place.

Many of Temujin’s victories were over other horse archers: He unified tribes beyond just the Mongols and did so fighting troops which had the same horses and bows and so on that he did.

It was genius on three fronts that made Temujin into Genghis Khan. He was a genius general, who did not interfere with other generals (reading WWII history, and how hard Guderian, Manstein, and Rommel had to fight to get German high command to properly use blitzkrieg is instructive).

He was a genius leader, who could recognize other genius leaders and was able to earn their loyalty and not get in their way.

He made brilliant use of intelligence and planning. Temujin did not fight a war until he knew his enemies’ strengths and weaknesses better than they did.

Finally, he fought his enemies minds. He defeated the enemy leaders by out-thinking them, by making them react to illusions he presented, moving them and their troops around almost as much as he moved his own troops around.

The Mongols, absent a leader like Temujin, might well have broken out. But they would never have created the greatest land empire ever known to man.

Peace in Korea and the Trump Paradox

By Ian Welsh

On April 29, 2018

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So, North Korea and South Korea are discussing an official peace treaty to end the Korean war; the two countries have only been under an armistice. Kim Jong Un has met with his South Korean counterpart and has made noises about ending North Korea’s nuclear program in exchange for guarantees of peace.

It appears that the move to meet with Trump is still on and will probably happen.

When I wrote about this previously, a lot of people thought it was impossible because Trump is incompetent.

But it’s steaming ahead, though not yet guaranteed.

Which leads us to the Trump paradox: He won the primary and the election, yet he’s incompetent? He lived like a very rich man, even if his business is deeply dubious. He got most of what he wanted from life.

And he may get a Korean peace deal, something no President since the Korean war has been able to achieve (or perhaps didn’t want to achieve–in which they were wrong).

So what is competence? If you crush all your primary opponents and win the Presidency are you incompetent?

Well, yeah, about some things. Clearly Trump is incompetent in a lot of ways. But I recall an interview I read with Bannon (behind a paywall I can’t get past right now) in which the interviewer said to Bannon: “If you could get even Trump elected, could you get me elected,” and Bannon said (paraphrased): “No dude. Trump was a blunt instrument. He was able to do rally after rally, speech after speech, like a machine, far more than Clinton could do. For that sort of thing he had endless energy.”

In other words, at rallies and in whipping up crowds, Trump was the amazing energizer bunny of presidential candidates.

People keep underestimating Trump. The Clinton campaign went so far as to do their best to help him win the primary, assuming that he’d be easy to crush in the general.

Oops.

If a Korean peace treaty is signed while Trump is President, let alone if Kim gives up his nukes, that will be a great accomplishment.

Of course it could well be bullshit. It could fall apart. But we’re now closer than we have been in almost 70 years.

We could use a little more incompetence like this.

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Assassination Works Only Under Two Circumstances

By Ian Welsh

On November 19, 2017

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For years, decades even, the US has had a policy of assassination. Americans believe that if you kill the leaders, you kill an organization.

This is delusional. It only works when it almost isn’t necessary. How many times has the US killed the #2 man of the Taliban? Did killing Osama stop Al-Qaeda? Assassinating Yamamoto in WWII was not just meaningless, it was a bad idea (he wasn’t a great admiral, but he did oppose war with both the US and China.)

Assassination ONLY works when the organization is unhealthy OR when much of it doesn’t agree with the current leader but is following them anyway.

In a healthy organization, someone else just steps up and leads, and they’re about as good as whoever was there before. It’s not that leadership doesn’t matter, it’s that healthy organizations create lots of people who are capable of leading. Very few leaders are actually genius leaders; most of what looks like genius is leading a good organization, and know-how. Sometimes, someone is the first person to really figure out how to lead an organization, but if they’re good, they train successors, or people learn from watching them.

The second time it works is if there is a genuine disagreement in organization. Perhaps some are willing to make peace, and some aren’t, and if you kill a few of the key leaders who don’t want to make peace, you can get peace.

The problem with all this, however, is that it’s often hard to tell who is actually a genius leader and which people actually believe in the organization. A lower ranking leader, gunning for the first spot, is often not public about disagreeing with #1, and if he is, may be lying to get followers. It’s just hard to tell. As for genius: It’s rare, and people are good at faking it–until crunch time. Who was America’s last genius general put in real command? I am not aware of one from the last 20 years (Petraeus certainly wasn’t.)

Hannibals, Caesars, and Subotais are truly, genuinely, rare. Genius political leaders are truly rare as well. And genius politicians often are terrible leaders (not the same thing). You may want them in charge.

But the bottom line is simple: A good organization produces a surfeit of good leaders who agree with the organization’s mission. Decapitation only works on unhealthy organizations.

Managers in the US (the US doesn’t have many leaders) lead unhealthy organizations rife with disillusionment, designed to promote time serving managers who don’t take risks, who actively work to harm the rank and file of the organization, and who believe in nothing but themselves.

Such managers find it difficult to get anything done. They have to use fear, coercion, and lies to get the rank and file to follow orders, because their orders are usually both evil and against the rank and file’s self interest.

They know that managing organizations is difficult from their own experience, and they think that all organizations are like that.

But organizations like the Taliban or Hezbollah (not to conflate, I don’t regard Hezbollah as equivalent in many ways) actually believe in what they are doing. People join because they believe in the mission. Even large drug cartels have a belief in a mission and a winnowing of fools and poltroons that often (though not as often as belief organizations) allows them to replace leadership.

When real leadership meets real mission, people fall over themselves to join. They want to belong. They believe. They will work for virtually nothing. They will beg to be part of something bigger than them.

Most Americans have NEVER experienced this. They cannot understand it at a gut level. It is alien to them.

Assassination works only when organizations are unhealthy, and run by managers, not leaders, or during the early stages of a charismatic cult. (A healthy charismatic cult, like the early disciples of Jesus, will quickly create enough leaders to survive a decapitation strike.)

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Saudi Arabian Crown Consolidates Control as War Looms

By Ian Welsh

On November 5, 2017

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Right, so there is a purge in Saudi Arabia, with princes arrested for “corruption” (they’re surely corrupt, but in Saudi Arabia that’s like saying they drink water), but more importantly, the National Guard commander was arrested and replaced with the Crown Prince, and the navy commander was also replaced.

A new anti-corruption committee led by the Crown Prince will continue the purge.

This has shades of what’s been going on in China, where Xi Jinping is called the “Chairman of Everything,” because he’s in charge of every important committee. In Saudi Arabia, his counterpart is the Crown Prince.

Power is being consolidated. It is true that Saudi Arabia has unavoidable problems and larger challenges coming down the pike. The most important should be the price of oil, which can be expected to continue its relative decline over the next couple decades as electric cars and so on come online.

But they’ve also chosen many of their problems: The war in Yemen is a self-inflicted wound, as is the (related) confrontation with Iran.

The latter confrontation is barrelling ahead, and it is likely to be the next significant war, not North Korea. The resignation of Lebanese PM Saad Hariri (who lives part time in Saudi Arabia) is part of the clearing of decks for the next phase, which will be another attempt to take out Hezbollah.

We can expect the US to impose significant sanctions on Lebanon as part of this, justified by Lebanon supposedly being insufficiently democratic (it was Hariri’s job to make this plausible).

Lebanon not being Venezuela, this will likely not be sufficient and military action will be required.

Note that, in this effort, Israel, the US, and Saudi Arabia can be expected to act in cooperation.

This can and may well easily escalate into an actual war with Iran. As in Iraq before, the Saudis will want the US to do the actual dirty work, and Trump is eager to do it.

Iran is increasingly a Russian ally, and, as for Hezbollah, they appear to expect Syria to support them in any war with Israel, which is not unreasonable: Without Hezbollah support, Syria would have lost its war. Additionally, the usual reason for not fighting Israel doesn’t particularly apply any more: Syria is a smoking ruin already, though I’m sure Israel will try to demolish the capital. However, one suspects it will be heavily defended by Russian air defenses, however.

The entire mess is a clusterfuck waiting to happen. Absolute stupidity: Israel would be better off leaving Hezbollah alone (they have a lot more missiles than last time and are even more battle hardened); Iran is not an existential threat to Saudi Arabia, and; the US would have to be crazy to start another major war in the Middle East or even become involved in another one as it has done in Yemen (which should be none of the US’s business).

A lot of countries are acting directly against their own self interest. The only thing Saudi Arabia should be concerned with right now is handling the end of oil, and the prestige they might gain from defeating Iran will not be sufficient to save them from the consequences of a complete economic meltdown.

So this entire mess is, again, worth keeping an eye on.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.