judah-grunstein.bsky.social
Editor-in-chief of World Politics Review. Spent more than a year in Provence. Used to be an American in Paris. Currently bringing coal to Newcastle.
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/
@wpr.bsky.social
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These are all great points, but:
1. It's rude and counterproductive to begin a discussion by claiming your interlocutor has an infantile reading on what you want to discuss.
2. You will not find the word "victims" in my thread, because I did not use it or argue this was the case.
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I think that is more clearly perceived in and by the states of the Majority World than in the West. And that, too, is a big part of the problem.
Unfortunately, instead of solving it, it seems like we're looking backward toward already failed approaches.
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To be clear, the great-power battles over socio-economic models and the Majority World's struggle for economic development have been and continue to be interwoven and mutually entangled.
In many ways, they are not two histories, but rather two sides of one history.
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When you really see that clearly, the rest becomes not so much anecdotal or irrelevant, but tragic.
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Also, the caveat I added to the end of that piece is important: All of Trump I's militarist moves had a big DoD demand-side component.
The same goes for the Signalgate anti-Houthis campaign, and there's also an enduring "bomb Iran" constituency in the DoD.
That's a separate problem from Trump.
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Yes, I know. But even so, India-Bangladesh remains the pinnacle.
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The starting point for Trump, as always, is Obama: “I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars” (i.e., not in the national interest) and the Nobel Prize speech citing just war theory.
Trump rejects both the standards by which US national interests have been judged and just war theory.
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For now Israel is offering Iran the choice between surrender and regime change. But ultimately it will have to accept some vision of regional co-existence, or else be forced to repeat the exercise periodically, a region-wide version of mow the grass that neither Israel nor the region can afford.
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It could be that Israel wants to impose the Lebanon model on Iran: a weakened state that becomes the arena of rivalry for outside powers without exporting transnational threats and instability.
But Iraq and Syria are the flip side of that model, where the threats and instability traveled widely.
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Because, just as in the Palestinian territories, no one will invest in countries knowing that Israel retains the right to raze the product of that investment at any time.
The cynical reading is that this is the point of Israel's campaign against Iran, and in many ways it is.
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The more serious way to put it is that in attacking Iran, Israel has expanded its military veto from the occupied Palestinian territories and the weak states on its borders to the entire region.
But for Israel to be included in the order that emerges form this campaign, it must set aside that veto.
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The joking way to put it is that Netanyahu served up a plate of humble pie to all the commentators (again, myself included) who were arguing that Israel was losing its place in a region where the prioritization of economic statecraft required stability and peaceful if suspicious co-existence.
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This new edition of the New Middle East was characterized by the uneasy and fragile modus vivendi taking shape between the Gulf states, Turkey and Iran.
It was in many ways facilitated by Israel's military reordering of the region.
But that same military-only approach made Israel the odd man out.
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The experience in the cinema at the time was world-altering in terms of the quantum leap in special effects, especially for a 9-y.o. kid.
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For a state against another state that's willing to call the bluff and absorb the necessary pain, yes. But I'd say Oct. 7 created a comparatively unique incentive structure and risk tolerance for Israel.
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Add Iran and you have a band from Lebanon to Syria to Iraq to Iran.
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I was just thinking about Lebanon as the model: an arena where outside states to meddle with internal politics, without the risk of cross-border spillover and fallout.
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"Residents of Tehran will pay the price" is also fairly concrete inculpatory evidence for Katz to be charged with war crimes.
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Stay tuned for @carriealee.bsky.social's WPR column tmw!
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Think of the dinosaurs gathering for a feel-good summit, not realizing a meteor is about to hit.
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This photo is the political equivalent of a mass extinction event waiting to happen.
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There was some talk last year when it looked like Harris might win and Scholz was still German chancellor that it would make for the shortest G7 sunnit cohort on record.
But Merz is a giant (1m98), Carney is average height and Trump was tall before he started shrinking.
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For Israel, the sequence of Biden's restraint on Iran (as well as his veto of a preventive campaign vs Hezbollah immediately after Oct. 7) followed by Trump's permissive approach ended up being fortuitous.
By contrast, Hezb and now Iran both got caught off guard when the tempo abruptly changed.
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But part of Iran's calculus in accepting the US-led de-escalation was the assumption that the US would continue to veto a unilateral Israeli air campaign.
That assumption clearly did not price in the wild card introduced by Trump.
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In that counterfactual the war would have been immensely more destructive, esp for Israel. But the US almost certainly would have entered it on Israel's behalf.
The prospect of such a US intervention are what drove Biden's post-Oct. 7 policy, esp wrt de-escalating Isr-Iran tensions.
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The sidewalk TV interviews of students waiting to go in are priceless also.
This was from my son's year, when they had then-PM Edouard Philippe in the studio, too. His best friend is the one who says he'll use Sartre's "condamné à être libre" for philo because "ça passe partout."
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The way the country relives the trauma of taking the bac through Le Monde's coverage every year is one of the wilder aspects of French culture. They not only publish the lit and philo questions minutes after the proctored exam begins, but also have "corrigés" (sample response essays) ready to go.
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So to turn back the tide of reaction, we'll need to mobilize and exercise power.
But in order to do that, we'll also need to begin articulating a new narrative that competes more effectively with Trump's, which we know from past experience leads to a dead end.
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This longer excerpt is also relevant.
Instead, what we got was the moral bankruptcy of the US and European response to Gaza, which only further tarnished a liberal internationalist narrative that, though still compelling, can no longer support the weight of its contradictions.
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It's why I ended this piece from 2022, by saying, "unless the West offers a vision of how power should operate ... that differs substantively from that of Russia and China, the global order it is seeking to defend will never be secure or stable."
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That reinforces for me the fact that fundamentally what we are seeing right now in the US and Europe is a clash of narratives between a generally progressive but often hypocritical liberal internationalism that has lost its steam, and a reactionary cult of action and force that has gained vitality.