Russia specialist Doctor Gilbert Doctorow share his analysis on US-Israel relations.
Yesterday afternoon, on my first day ‘back on the job’ following a two week vacation, I appeared on two of the widely viewed interview programs to which I have been privileged to be invited these past several months:
‘Dialogue Works’ hosted by Nima Alkhorshid and ‘Judging Freedom’ hosted by Judge Andrew Napolitano.
My discussion with Alkhorshid was an hour long and dealt with many issues. However, the key issue was how to understand the relationship between Joe Biden’s America and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel in the developing regional war in West Asia. This is what I focused attention on in my article on these pages yesterday presenting the link to the show.
It is commonplace to say that U.S. policy is being guided by the Israeli lobby and that Netanyahu is leading Collective Biden around by the nose. My counter-intuitive argument was that the reverse is true, and that this is not the result of arbitrary factors of their respective personalities or of the alleged Israeli AIPAC control of U.S. foreign policy. No, what we are witnessing is a second current example of U.S. striving to maintain its global hegemony by provoking and fueling proxy wars against its main adversaries with the help of nominal allies who are being destroyed in the process.
Case Number One of such a proxy war has for the past two years been U.S. assistance to Kiev in its delusional pursuit of a war to reconquer the Crimea and Donbas, which are now in Russian hands. This war was fueled by Washington to deal a humiliating strategic defeat on the Kremlin and, hopefully, to so stoke domestic discontent as to bring down the ‘Putin regime.’ So far, the war has only strengthened Russia, as its military has become battle hardened and victorious, suffering casualties that are most likely one fifth to one tenth those that Russia has inflicted on the Ukrainian forces and their NATO advisers. This war has cost the United States well over one hundred billion dollars in financial and military equipment deliveries to Kiev. On the positive side of the ledger, the proxy war approach has kept Washington at arm’s length from what is in effect a war on the state leading the Global South in opposition to U.S. worldwide hegemony.
Now we see same game plan being pursued by Washington in West Asia/the Middle East, to hammer at Iran and its Axis of Resistance allies, who pose the greatest regional challenge to U.S. dominance there and to retaliate for the series of humiliations that Washington has experienced in the region over the last two decades. Israeli claims following their successful attack on Hezbollah headquarters in Lebanon last week that they now see a once in fifty years opportunity to reshape the politics of the entire Middle East reflect precisely the delusional thinking of Dick Cheney, George Bush and others responsible for unleashing the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The present day U.S. proxy in the Middle East is the state of Israel and Washington is providing its most advanced defensive (anti-missile systems) and offensive (mega-bombs) weapons plus essential real-time satellite and AWACS reconnaissance data enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its assassination bombings in Lebanon. Now the United States is about to enable some kind of escalatory attack by Israel on Iran itself that may lead to all-out regional war.
My appearance on ‘Judging Freedom’ a few hours later yesterday also devoted a lot of attention to this question of dog wagging the tail or tail wagging the dog to describe Israel-US relations today.
Read the entire article on substack https://gilbertdoctorow.substack.com/p/a-debate-with-john-mearsheimer-about
Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Since 2008, Mr. Doctorow has been regularly publishing analytical articles about international affairs on the portal of the Belgian daily La Libre Belgique. From this material he produced four collections of essays, the most recent of which appeared in October 2017: "Does the United States Have a Future?" Mr. Doctorow’s next project will be a memoir of his corporate service in Moscow in the wild 1990s. Mr. Doctorow is an American citizen and a long-time resident of Brussels, Belgium.