Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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The only way to defeat the Houthis is to just starve the population until so many die that support for them either falls or the whole movement crumbles. Unfortunately that would be a war crime and millions of civilians would die, which is also what limited the joint UK-US action there. Plus nobody really wants to have to pacify Yemeni Shias afterwards which everyone knows would be an endless insurgency. Egypt doesn’t want to get involved because the people sympathize with Hamas anyway and the army faction don’t want to risk almost getting overthrown by the MB (ie Hamas’ affiliate) again, plus there was that whole failed war in the 60s that left long scars.
Israel’s war aims were fake PR goals for the plebs, nobody in the IDF believes that Islamist insurgency is going to be destroyed in Gaza, or that Hezbollah can be conventionally defeated without US boots on the ground. They can bomb South Beirut into a crater but 250k civilians would die, it’s unclear how deep the Hezb bunkers might go and they have now spread a lot of assets and senior leadership across Southern Lebanon so no decapitating strike is possible there either, plus the resulting attack on Tel Aviv would deal a big economic blow to Israel (whereas Lebanon is already and will remain a basket case) even if casualties were manageable, while Hezbollah doesn’t give a fuck about the Lebanese economy.
Judging by Vance and Trump’s extreme pro-Israel position so far, the Israelis seem to be trying to prolong this until January, after which they can provoke a big Hezb-Iranian attack and trigger some kind of US response.
I don't think the US has another Middle Eastern adventure in the tank at this point. Between Europe, Asia and the last 20 years they're tapped out. Trump might try but the end result will surely be another quagmire and Chinese hegemony. There is no CIPAC, China is much more likely to favour the oily lands and their pals in Tehran over their great rival's proxy.
If I were in charge of Israel, I'd start settling my conflicts quickly.
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I've thought this for a while about both the Yemen war and everything about Palestine. If aid was cut off these states would not only starve, but they would be robbed of a significant source of income from what they skim off the top of aid shipments. To say nothing of the Iranian military aid mixed into the humanitarian aid.
We did worse to the Belgians in WW1, but now we can't lift a finger to protect our own interests.
Herbert Hoover and the United States averted the Belgian famine, there's no "we".
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