Israel faces the most dangerous operational and strategic environment since the Yom Kippur War, maybe even since its War of Independence. Drones and medium-range missiles from hostile Arab forces on its borders make parts of its territory unlivable w/o being invaded. This isn’t like past conventional wars or the wars of attrition which the Israelis heroically and ably fought, and won. Its Arab enemies’ goal - backed by Iran and also Erdogan’s Turkey - is to destroy it by a thousand cuts and make as much of Israel unlivable as they can.

Since its independence, Israel’s core doctrine - beginning with Ben Gurion’s Periphery Strategy to Oslo to even the Abraham Accords/Iran - has been to make its implacable enemies in the Middle East come to terms with its permanence. / The theory went that the Arabs who tried to prevent Israel’s emergence and with whom Israel fought so many wars (and their allies) would eventually, colloquially speaking, get tired of losing, accept Israel’s permanence and negotiate a good faith deal to end the conflict. /

WWII in Europe was inevitable and unavoidable, and it didn’t matter what the western powers did or wanted to do to prevent it. It was inevitable and unavoidable because Stalin and Hitler were politically and ideologically committed to engineering wars of imperial conquest. WWII historiography imo has still not fully come to terms with that reality, which explains the outsized focus to this day on appeasement, Munich, whether Britain and France should’ve intervened in Spain, etc. - it would have happened regardless.

The Chinese have three thousand years of Sun Tzu and Confucianism against whatever we are offering right now. Add to that Xi’s neo-Maoism where political objectives are prioritized over economic costs and technocratic efficiencies. 1/2

https://twitter.com/elbridgecolby/status/1651245191217442816

Honestly in Xi I am seeing echoes of where Stalin was in the late 1920s, when he actively cleared the path for Hitler and the Nazis to come to power knowing this meant sacrificing what was by then Europe’s largest Communist Party - the KPD.

Another corollary to the below is that Disraeli, Bismarck, Metternich, Cavour, Gorchakhov, Andrassy and the other giants of European diplomacy in the 19th Century (I sadly doubt that many at top table in DC today could tell you who most of these people even are) cut their teeth /

https://twitter.com/bryvkin/status/1651350648342847490

In a true multipolar world of great power politics - a world of ad hoc alliances and coalitions of convenience, where war was a continuation of politics by other means and diplomatic isolation was sometimes worse than death. /

Why do I keep coming back to Disraeli as the model for American foreign policy today? His acquisition of a majority stake in what became the Suez Canal Company and management of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877/78 are what American planners should look to re: Russia and China now. Sadly too many in our well settled foreign policy establishment would have felt more at home with Gladstone’s Midlothian Campaign. Gladstone, in his time, urged a humanitarian military intervention in the Balkans against the Ottomans and later invaded Egypt.

Worth noting again that the global nuclear non-proliferation regime as we once knew it went on life support when the Kremlin annexed Crimea and engineered the war in Donbas, and completely ended last February with the full-scale Russian invasion. A world in which the nuclear powers use their arsenals for blackmail or as an umbrella for aggression rather than strictly for deterrence (which was the accepted norm during the Cold War w/n such powers’ spheres of influence) is one we haven’t really experienced.

The history of the world is mostly a history of empires, kingdoms which functioned like empires and states which made deals with empires to not be subsumed by them. It’s not whether you had an empire or not, but what your empire’s legacy was that matters. This is what the new left (which made excuses for the empires of the old left) doesn’t seem to understand or refuses to. They start with a set of ahistorical premises and go on to reach inconsistent, illogical and sometimes contradictory conclusions.

Russia is moving toward being a subordinate resource depot for the Chinese as Putin’s western isolation grows. The Chinese have their own territorial scores to settle with Russia and prefer to use Putin as an anti-western spoiler. There are ppl in Moscow uncomfortable w/ this.

https://twitter.com/elbridgecolby/status/1650585734598782982

I don’t think enough effort is being made by our senior officials to establish even back channel contacts with those members of the Russian elite who would prefer Moscow to return to more of a balancing role between the U.S. and China rather than where Putin has positioned it.

Everyone wants to build their own brand and promote it. It’s just business. Tucker Carlson went through many phases in his career — he was headlining Ron Paul’s Rally for the Republic back in 2008. His brand was a mix of long-held views and what appealed to the new right. / Many things I agreed with him on and was drawn to his being the only person in major media to raise them and other things, including the Ukraine War, I disagreed with him on. All in good faith. He has a brand to maintain and an audience to appeal to. That’s business. /