• queermunist she/her
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    4 months ago

    this is also a fairly interesting stat here. So there is some level of popularity here.

    That’s popularity for US troops enforcing a peace agreement, not attacking Israel’s enemies in the region. Quite the difference!

    The US has historically had a policy of self preservation, as do most states.

    Yes, and support for Israel is about self-preservation. That’s why I called it the 51st state! Israel is incredibly important for power projection into the Middle East and North Africa, for controlling the movement of migrants out of Africa into Asia, for controlling a huge portion of the worlds oil and gas supplies, for controlling trade through the Red Sea and that region of the Mediterranean, and as a live-testing laboratory for border controls and prisons and policing and public surveillance systems. Protecting Israel is a matter of self preservation, and that matters more than the existence or lack-thereof of popular support. Israel matters more than whatever voters have to say.

    It might be true that this stuff negatively influences america, but i don’t really think it matters on the grand scheme of things. This is certainly more admirable than a lot of stuff that russia does, and most certainly a lot of things that go on in china.

    It’s not just that it negatively impacts the US, but rather, it has revealed that the so-called “rules based international order” doesn’t actually exist. That has impacts on countries domestically, as voters think long and hard about whether they can trust the US, whether they really should sacrifice so much to oppose countries sanctioned by the US, and it even calls into question whether they should even follow international law at all. That’s bad for the US because it relies on this international order for stability and legitimacy.

    This is especially important with the decline of the US dollar hegemony and the rise of the BRICS as a parallel world economy. Suddenly there’s options for countries like Iran or groups like the Taliban, whereas before they were totally locked out. One of the best control mechanisms for enforcing the “rules based order” is collapsing, and it’s happening at the same time as the legitimacy of that “rules based order” is collapsing. These things will feed back into each other, I won’t be surprised if we see other countries in the Middle East or North Africa change their alignments completely towards China and restart relations with Iran.