Israel has two concepts at the core of their defense strategy that are now in conflict with each other.
Both are due to being significantly more militarily powerful than any one of their neighbors for about 50-70 years now.
Since their stunning victory in the 6-day war in the 60s, their military concept has been based on being much more powerful than any one enemy, and being able to defeat enemies one by one (“defeat in detail”) rather than taking on all their enemies at once.
Firstly, Israel always massively overreacts. As a rule and intentionally. Kidnap 300 hostages, they kill 45,000, raze your city, and starve 2 million. Massively disproportionate and that’s the point. You scratch them, they murder your entire family. The rationale being you will think twice before scratching them, even if they’re stealing your home.
Secondly, Israel wants to avoid multiple conflicts at once. Their strategy of massively over-reacting to being scratched works best when they can bring their full might against one enemy at a time. If they have to take on two enemies, then their ability to wipe out their foe is halved. So at all costs they want to avoid more than one conflict at a time. Note how they’re somewhat putting the brakes on Gaza now that the Iranian conflict is gaining steam.
These two concepts rely on Israel being much stronger than any one or even any two or three of their opponents which for our entire lives and likely our parents entire lives that has been true.
The decline of the unipolar world order and the rise of the Russia-China entente means having Uncle Sam in your corner no longer guarantees that you’re the strongest player in town.
And the emergence of the “axis of resistance” means Israel isn’t as easily able to take on one enemy at a time because the other players in the region have gotten wise to the fact that if they face Israel 1 by 1, like bad guys in a Kung Fu movie, they will likely lose. So they’re cooperating. They’re often simply described as “Iranian proxies” in the western media but this isn’t accurate, they aren’t mere puppets but rather a group of state and quasi-state actors whose ideologies and interests are closely aligned and who therefore find they’re able to easily cooperate and coordinate. Hezbollah is closely allied with Iran but they don’t take orders from Iran. It’s more like NATO. France doesn’t directly take orders from the USA but obviously the US is the senior partner, likewise Hezbollah are not under Iranian control but Iranian generals play a coordinating role.
Israel is facing a shifting world order where Iran’s de facto alliance with Russia and China and Iran’s domestic military capabilities make it a very serious player.
Israel is facing a world where instead of being able to regularly beat up the local threats by invading Lebanon or Gaza in rotation every five years to “mow the grass” and “preemptively” destroy threats by killing all the young men, now those groups are beginning to coordinate to prevent Israel from simply rotating between them.
When Hezbollah comes to help Hamas by shelling northern Israel, Israel’s geopolitical fundamental of massive overreaction demands that Israel now absolutely smashes Hezbollah.
But Israel’s geopolitical fundamental of taking on enemies one at a time demands they focus on Hamas first and come for Hezbollah later.
When Iran gives Yemen intel and supplies weapons to Hezbollah, overreaction demands they strike Iran but if they’re fighting Hamas and Hezbollah then their doctrine demands they can’t focus on Iran.
Additionally, they just don’t have the power to take on Hamas, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran at the same time. Israel is strong but they aren’t that strong. But since the geopolitical world order is shifting and the power of the US empire is declining, they also see that their window of opportunity for taking on Iran is closing.
They have these competing and outright conflicting geopolitical doctrines and geopolitical interests which is leading to this chaotic mix of responses.
When they say a caged animal is the most dangerous, this is why. Fear and aggression mix and conflict, resulting in dangerous unpredictability.
How it’s played out here:
Israel absolutely cannot afford a direct fight with Iran, but Israel cannot afford to allow itself to be seen to not react or under react to Iran scratching it, else it permanently loses the carefully cultivated deterrence value of being known to always massively overreact that sits at the heart of its defense doctrine and national self-image.
So they strike Syria and Iraq instead of striking Iran.
The doctrine of taking on one enemy at a time demands they avoid striking Iran. But the doctrine of always over reacting resulted in them taking on multiple more enemies instead.
Doctrinal chaos is making them panic. Fight or flight response meaning they flee from a fight with Iran while picking a fight with the weaker friends of Iran.
Doctrinal confusion between wanting to massively respond to the Hezbollah threat while avoiding a fight with Hezbollah resulted in conflicting reflexes and so they targeted the Iranian generals coordinating the groups.
In summary -
They desperately want to avoid fighting all these groups but their fundamental military demand is to massively overreact to any threat. So now that these groups are coordinating they are experiencing doctrinal panic and striking everyone in a limited way as a unworkable and geopolitically bipolar compromise between wanting to strike all their enemies at once while wanting to avoid fighting all their enemies at once.
Firstly, Israel always massively overreacts. As a rule and intentionally. Kidnap 300 hostages, they kill 45,000, raze your city, and starve 2 million. Massively disproportionate and that’s the point. You scratch them, they murder your entire family. The rationale being you will think twice before scratching them, even if they’re stealing your home.
This is the “Communists will kill three generations of your family if you oppose them” propaganda, except it’s real. It has always been liberal projection.
I should clarify that Israel cannot afford a direct fight with Iran without full US backing but it could attempt to ignite a war if it believes the US will be forced to defend it, which is plausible and at least some faction of Israeli defense intelligentsia see that as a viable play and might hope to ignite that conflict as “the big one” they want to fight while the US is still nominally the top geopolitical dog.
Do you have any sources for further reading on this? Or is this something you’ve concluded yourself? I figure now is probably the best time to read up as much as possible on this sort of thing.
Mearsheimer always has good takes. He’s treated as a pariah these days because at the start of the Ukraine war he was saying “the west is provoking Russia and Ukraine will lose” which was verboten wrong think so since then he’s been treated as a crank, but he was fucking right and before then he was highly respected. He’s also an anti-China hawk and is explicitly pro- US imperialism so his angle is very interesting for coming from a perspective of “US power is declining and this is what the US is doing wrong in terms of maintaining its power.”
He writes a lot but also he gives many interviews so for his views on very recent events you have to search him on YouTube.
He’s an interview where he discusses among other things the balance of power tensions in the Middle East between Iran and Israel
Big Serge is a transphobic chud who has excellent insight into the military aspects of geopolitics. He has written about how disproportionate overreaction sits at the core of Israeli defense policy, and how that reflex is no longer viable but that for ideological (he argues even eschatological) reasons, Israel can’t give it up and it’s forcing Israel into a corner.
You can also see western intelligentsia acknowledging the issue, that the “divide and conquer” strategy Israel has employed for generations now has run its course, has failed in the face of the their opponents beginning to coordinate.
I also saved this article from an Indian general which analyzed the issue mostly because it was fascinating to see an Indian take that was level-headed and focused on the viability of Israel’s strategy, pointing out that a strategy that relies upon disproportionately overreacting means Israel needs to always be much stronger than its enemies, which dooms the doctrine to failure since Israel needs to be exponentially more powerful than its threats and that is simply not sustainable. That the psychology of Israeli deterrence means the next response is always more violent than the previous and if you keep doing this decade after decade you reach the point where your capacity to inflict violence doesn’t meet your desire to inflict violence.
There’s also an amazing article I read talking about the Roman Empire and how, as it declined, it was forced to use more military force. I can’t find it now but I wish I saved it.
The thesis was that when a power is strong, it doesn’t need to use its strength since it’s enemies know they will lose so they don’t try. But when a power declines, now it actually needs to use its muscle.
The essay used the example of Jerusalem being destroyed by the Roman’s in the year 70. The Roman Empire at the height of its power faced an inconsequential threat from some religious zealots rebelling, but this was Rome at the height of its power so it used an absolutely profligate display of force to take out the rebels. Four legions were sent to Jerusalem and instead of simply laying siege to Jerusalem and starving them out, they wanted to demonstrate the degree of overmatch to send a message. So they built a sand ramp to climb the walls, enter the city, kill everyone, and the first wave of the modern Jewish diaspora began as their leadership were expelled from their capital.
This was contrasted with the conquest of Dacia centuries later. Rome had been able to rule with remarkably little use of military power for centuries because it was so much more powerful and so when Rome was powerful they didn’t need to conquer Dacia since Dacia would always do what Rome wanted anyway. It’s much more economical to have your enemies fear your power than to have to use your power.
But as Roman power went into relative decline, now Dacia wasn’t scared and so Dacia made the mistake of acting against Roman interests and Rome was forced to conquer Dacia. Rome still kicked Dacia’s ass and won that war but this was a real drain on resources. Rome won the war and reached its territorial zenith, on paper stronger than ever, but this was really a sign of weakness since it was a sign that the threat of Roman power was no longer a deterrent.
The article was fascinating in arguing that frequently deploying military power for its deterrence value is a sign of true weakness even if victorious. Being in a state of having to frequently employ military power is expensive and draining and a sign of imperial decline.
Interesting stuff for sure. Always good to examine non-marxist sources on these sorts of things, even repellent people can still understand something like geopolitics or the US empire collapsing (even if their angle is “this is a bad thing and we should reverse course”).
The Roman example does sound interesting, though I do hope America’s decline period doesn’t last as long as the Romans. Though direct 1:1 parallels between the two are always a bad analysis and usually really incorrect.
“Decline of the Roman Empire” takes are always suspicious because the US empire simply isn’t the Roman Empire and the world we live in isn’t that world so whenever anyone suggests a historical determinism about how empires rise and fall according to a schedule you can safely discard their opinion.
But the take about Roman Jerusalem compared to Roman Dacia is an interesting one in that it makes a point about the utility of deference and when you actually have to use your military to deter your enemies that means you aren’t deterring your enemies.
Which is the same point the Indian general makes, that the fact Israel is constantly deploying its military to “deter” its enemies demonstrates the complete failure of the policy.
Israel only has to lose once and it’s Joever but they’re committed to risking it all every 5-10 years, and they simply won’t win every time.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to imply that’s what your analysis was saying, more my own comment about it. People using “The Roman empire fell because of X” sort of arguments are usually white nationalists trying to blame the wokes or wamen or something (and claim that if their personal bugbear isn’t dealt with it will cause the collapse of “the west” as well).
And this talk of Israel’s “deterrent” also brings to mind their “invincibility” of their Iron Dome and things like that. It isn’t enough for them to be stronger, they have to be invincible for their own narrative to work. And of course, as you say, they only have to lose once and it’s all Joever. We’ll see if that starts now, or within the next few years, but it does seem like they’ve arrived at the beginning of the end at this point. They can’t do anything to prevent their decline.
Yes a ton really but I haven’t compiled them. I have a work meeting I can slack off during today and so ill use that time to dig up some links that give context and viewpoints.
Good assessment, it really shows that the October 7th attack is the real lynchpin of the resistance strategy as Israel’s war strategy really did not account for Palestinian resistance from Gaza of all places.
Thanky 420.stalin. good assessment. But only thing missing is that Israel is literally a proxy state. I mean sure there’s the US liberty rest in peace and all that but it’s integral to US geostrategic interests so they don’t really have carte blanche. Or do they. That my comrades is the question
Israel has two concepts at the core of their defense strategy that are now in conflict with each other.
Both are due to being significantly more militarily powerful than any one of their neighbors for about 50-70 years now.
Since their stunning victory in the 6-day war in the 60s, their military concept has been based on being much more powerful than any one enemy, and being able to defeat enemies one by one (“defeat in detail”) rather than taking on all their enemies at once.
Firstly, Israel always massively overreacts. As a rule and intentionally. Kidnap 300 hostages, they kill 45,000, raze your city, and starve 2 million. Massively disproportionate and that’s the point. You scratch them, they murder your entire family. The rationale being you will think twice before scratching them, even if they’re stealing your home.
Secondly, Israel wants to avoid multiple conflicts at once. Their strategy of massively over-reacting to being scratched works best when they can bring their full might against one enemy at a time. If they have to take on two enemies, then their ability to wipe out their foe is halved. So at all costs they want to avoid more than one conflict at a time. Note how they’re somewhat putting the brakes on Gaza now that the Iranian conflict is gaining steam.
These two concepts rely on Israel being much stronger than any one or even any two or three of their opponents which for our entire lives and likely our parents entire lives that has been true.
The decline of the unipolar world order and the rise of the Russia-China entente means having Uncle Sam in your corner no longer guarantees that you’re the strongest player in town.
And the emergence of the “axis of resistance” means Israel isn’t as easily able to take on one enemy at a time because the other players in the region have gotten wise to the fact that if they face Israel 1 by 1, like bad guys in a Kung Fu movie, they will likely lose. So they’re cooperating. They’re often simply described as “Iranian proxies” in the western media but this isn’t accurate, they aren’t mere puppets but rather a group of state and quasi-state actors whose ideologies and interests are closely aligned and who therefore find they’re able to easily cooperate and coordinate. Hezbollah is closely allied with Iran but they don’t take orders from Iran. It’s more like NATO. France doesn’t directly take orders from the USA but obviously the US is the senior partner, likewise Hezbollah are not under Iranian control but Iranian generals play a coordinating role.
Israel is facing a shifting world order where Iran’s de facto alliance with Russia and China and Iran’s domestic military capabilities make it a very serious player.
Israel is facing a world where instead of being able to regularly beat up the local threats by invading Lebanon or Gaza in rotation every five years to “mow the grass” and “preemptively” destroy threats by killing all the young men, now those groups are beginning to coordinate to prevent Israel from simply rotating between them.
When Hezbollah comes to help Hamas by shelling northern Israel, Israel’s geopolitical fundamental of massive overreaction demands that Israel now absolutely smashes Hezbollah.
But Israel’s geopolitical fundamental of taking on enemies one at a time demands they focus on Hamas first and come for Hezbollah later.
When Iran gives Yemen intel and supplies weapons to Hezbollah, overreaction demands they strike Iran but if they’re fighting Hamas and Hezbollah then their doctrine demands they can’t focus on Iran.
Additionally, they just don’t have the power to take on Hamas, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran at the same time. Israel is strong but they aren’t that strong. But since the geopolitical world order is shifting and the power of the US empire is declining, they also see that their window of opportunity for taking on Iran is closing.
They have these competing and outright conflicting geopolitical doctrines and geopolitical interests which is leading to this chaotic mix of responses.
When they say a caged animal is the most dangerous, this is why. Fear and aggression mix and conflict, resulting in dangerous unpredictability.
How it’s played out here:
Israel absolutely cannot afford a direct fight with Iran, but Israel cannot afford to allow itself to be seen to not react or under react to Iran scratching it, else it permanently loses the carefully cultivated deterrence value of being known to always massively overreact that sits at the heart of its defense doctrine and national self-image.
So they strike Syria and Iraq instead of striking Iran.
The doctrine of taking on one enemy at a time demands they avoid striking Iran. But the doctrine of always over reacting resulted in them taking on multiple more enemies instead.
Doctrinal chaos is making them panic. Fight or flight response meaning they flee from a fight with Iran while picking a fight with the weaker friends of Iran.
Doctrinal confusion between wanting to massively respond to the Hezbollah threat while avoiding a fight with Hezbollah resulted in conflicting reflexes and so they targeted the Iranian generals coordinating the groups.
In summary -
They desperately want to avoid fighting all these groups but their fundamental military demand is to massively overreact to any threat. So now that these groups are coordinating they are experiencing doctrinal panic and striking everyone in a limited way as a unworkable and geopolitically bipolar compromise between wanting to strike all their enemies at once while wanting to avoid fighting all their enemies at once.
This is the “Communists will kill three generations of your family if you oppose them” propaganda, except it’s real. It has always been liberal projection.
I should clarify that Israel cannot afford a direct fight with Iran without full US backing but it could attempt to ignite a war if it believes the US will be forced to defend it, which is plausible and at least some faction of Israeli defense intelligentsia see that as a viable play and might hope to ignite that conflict as “the big one” they want to fight while the US is still nominally the top geopolitical dog.
Do you have any sources for further reading on this? Or is this something you’ve concluded yourself? I figure now is probably the best time to read up as much as possible on this sort of thing.
Mearsheimer always has good takes. He’s treated as a pariah these days because at the start of the Ukraine war he was saying “the west is provoking Russia and Ukraine will lose” which was verboten wrong think so since then he’s been treated as a crank, but he was fucking right and before then he was highly respected. He’s also an anti-China hawk and is explicitly pro- US imperialism so his angle is very interesting for coming from a perspective of “US power is declining and this is what the US is doing wrong in terms of maintaining its power.”
He writes a lot but also he gives many interviews so for his views on very recent events you have to search him on YouTube.
He’s an interview where he discusses among other things the balance of power tensions in the Middle East between Iran and Israel
https://www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-interview/2024/02/john-mearsheimer-israel-ukraine-middle-east
Big Serge is a transphobic chud who has excellent insight into the military aspects of geopolitics. He has written about how disproportionate overreaction sits at the core of Israeli defense policy, and how that reflex is no longer viable but that for ideological (he argues even eschatological) reasons, Israel can’t give it up and it’s forcing Israel into a corner.
https://bigserge.substack.com/p/the-age-of-zugzwang
You can also see western intelligentsia acknowledging the issue, that the “divide and conquer” strategy Israel has employed for generations now has run its course, has failed in the face of the their opponents beginning to coordinate.
https://archive.ph/qz0xj
I also saved this article from an Indian general which analyzed the issue mostly because it was fascinating to see an Indian take that was level-headed and focused on the viability of Israel’s strategy, pointing out that a strategy that relies upon disproportionately overreacting means Israel needs to always be much stronger than its enemies, which dooms the doctrine to failure since Israel needs to be exponentially more powerful than its threats and that is simply not sustainable. That the psychology of Israeli deterrence means the next response is always more violent than the previous and if you keep doing this decade after decade you reach the point where your capacity to inflict violence doesn’t meet your desire to inflict violence.
https://wavellroom.com/2021/09/13/israels-cumulative-deterrence-strategy/
There’s also an amazing article I read talking about the Roman Empire and how, as it declined, it was forced to use more military force. I can’t find it now but I wish I saved it.
The thesis was that when a power is strong, it doesn’t need to use its strength since it’s enemies know they will lose so they don’t try. But when a power declines, now it actually needs to use its muscle.
The essay used the example of Jerusalem being destroyed by the Roman’s in the year 70. The Roman Empire at the height of its power faced an inconsequential threat from some religious zealots rebelling, but this was Rome at the height of its power so it used an absolutely profligate display of force to take out the rebels. Four legions were sent to Jerusalem and instead of simply laying siege to Jerusalem and starving them out, they wanted to demonstrate the degree of overmatch to send a message. So they built a sand ramp to climb the walls, enter the city, kill everyone, and the first wave of the modern Jewish diaspora began as their leadership were expelled from their capital.
This was contrasted with the conquest of Dacia centuries later. Rome had been able to rule with remarkably little use of military power for centuries because it was so much more powerful and so when Rome was powerful they didn’t need to conquer Dacia since Dacia would always do what Rome wanted anyway. It’s much more economical to have your enemies fear your power than to have to use your power.
But as Roman power went into relative decline, now Dacia wasn’t scared and so Dacia made the mistake of acting against Roman interests and Rome was forced to conquer Dacia. Rome still kicked Dacia’s ass and won that war but this was a real drain on resources. Rome won the war and reached its territorial zenith, on paper stronger than ever, but this was really a sign of weakness since it was a sign that the threat of Roman power was no longer a deterrent.
The article was fascinating in arguing that frequently deploying military power for its deterrence value is a sign of true weakness even if victorious. Being in a state of having to frequently employ military power is expensive and draining and a sign of imperial decline.
Interesting stuff for sure. Always good to examine non-marxist sources on these sorts of things, even repellent people can still understand something like geopolitics or the US empire collapsing (even if their angle is “this is a bad thing and we should reverse course”).
The Roman example does sound interesting, though I do hope America’s decline period doesn’t last as long as the Romans. Though direct 1:1 parallels between the two are always a bad analysis and usually really incorrect.
“Decline of the Roman Empire” takes are always suspicious because the US empire simply isn’t the Roman Empire and the world we live in isn’t that world so whenever anyone suggests a historical determinism about how empires rise and fall according to a schedule you can safely discard their opinion.
But the take about Roman Jerusalem compared to Roman Dacia is an interesting one in that it makes a point about the utility of deference and when you actually have to use your military to deter your enemies that means you aren’t deterring your enemies.
Which is the same point the Indian general makes, that the fact Israel is constantly deploying its military to “deter” its enemies demonstrates the complete failure of the policy.
Israel only has to lose once and it’s Joever but they’re committed to risking it all every 5-10 years, and they simply won’t win every time.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to imply that’s what your analysis was saying, more my own comment about it. People using “The Roman empire fell because of X” sort of arguments are usually white nationalists trying to blame the wokes or wamen or something (and claim that if their personal bugbear isn’t dealt with it will cause the collapse of “the west” as well).
And this talk of Israel’s “deterrent” also brings to mind their “invincibility” of their Iron Dome and things like that. It isn’t enough for them to be stronger, they have to be invincible for their own narrative to work. And of course, as you say, they only have to lose once and it’s all Joever. We’ll see if that starts now, or within the next few years, but it does seem like they’ve arrived at the beginning of the end at this point. They can’t do anything to prevent their decline.
The Roman case studies are in the big segr piece you shared
Ah xD well then
Yes a ton really but I haven’t compiled them. I have a work meeting I can slack off during today and so ill use that time to dig up some links that give context and viewpoints.
Removed by mod
Good assessment, it really shows that the October 7th attack is the real lynchpin of the resistance strategy as Israel’s war strategy really did not account for Palestinian resistance from Gaza of all places.
this is exactly the level of detail i wanted for an answer and part of the reason i hangout here, thanks for the indepth explanation and more sources!
i take it the us will be forced divide their attention between the middle east and asia (russia + china) in the coming war then.
Thanky 420.stalin. good assessment. But only thing missing is that Israel is literally a proxy state. I mean sure there’s the US liberty rest in peace and all that but it’s integral to US geostrategic interests so they don’t really have carte blanche. Or do they. That my comrades is the question