Fireside this week! The ACOUP schedule might end up being a little unstable for the next few weeks as the coincidence of illness, the dense part of the teaching semester and unexpected travel are playing havoc on my schedule. I can only promise that we will finish the series on the failure of Hellenistic armies, but that it may be a bit before we do.
For this week’s musing, I want to muse briefly on the seemingly perennial ideology of isolationism, in the context of the United States. Isolationism as an ideology is, of course, mostly a luxury for large and powerful countries; by contrast, as the famous Estonian internal foreign ministry memo noted, “the most important lesson is simple: time is short and time will not wait for small nations.” But the United States is a big country and big countries are afforded greater latitude for folly in strategy. The notion has long floated around (and seems to have bubbled back to the surface lately) that due to a great gift of geography – the Atlantic and the Pacific – the United States is uniquely positioned to take a position out of the fray of geopolitics and to focus solely on itself. It’s a tempting notion, only slightly hindered by the fact that it doesn’t seem to have been true.
In fact, the United States has never actually ever managed to avoid being pulled in to any ‘general’ European war (that is, a war involving most, if not all, of the great powers of Europe).
This trend arguably begins before the creation of the United States, given that the Thirteen Colonies were a key battleground in the Seven Year’s War, which is often known in the United States as the ‘French and Indian War.’ But more properly, we might say this story really begins with the Wars of the French Revolution (1792-1815). Arguably we ought to split that into the Wars of the French Revolution (1972-1802) and the Napoleonic Wars (1802-1815) but it makes no difference to our analysis because either the United States got dragged into both wars once or into the one longer conflict twice.
The American failure to avoid being drawn into the early wars of the French Revolution wasn’t for lack of trying. George Washington had made it a major policy of his administration to avoid being dragged in and indeed famously warned in his farewell address against ‘entangling alliances’ for exactly this reason. And you can see the wisdom in the advice – even by 1796 it was already obvious that being pulled into the cauldron of the French Revolutionary Wars might break the young and small United States. The wisdom of that policy was so clear that the next two administrations (Adams and Jefferson) both tried to follow it, despite being opposed on most other matters of policy.
The thing is, their efforts failed.
The problem was trade – the American economy at this point relied quite a lot on seaborne trade which the war was disrupting. In order to avoid a war and formalize trade relations with Great Britain, Washington had supported the Jay Treaty (1794) in which, among other things, in order to avoid having the Royal Navy block American ships, the United States agreed to abide by Britain’s anti-France maritime policy – mostly because, without a significant navy, the United States really had no other choice anyway. Revolutionary France, however, viewed the agreement as a betrayal, tantamount to the United States entering the war on the British side and so in 1796, French privateers began attacking not just American ships but indeed any ships they found in American waters.
This became the problem of the (John) Adams administration (1797-1801) who tried to negotiate his way out of the mess, but efforts were derailed by the considerable corruption of Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand (a spectacular figure we must discuss sometime) leading to the XYZ Affair and the failure of negotiations. So instead Adams was forced to dispatch the United States’ small, but extremely plucky navy to the Carribean to fend off French privateers and warships, leading to an undeclared war – but still a war – we call the Quasi-War (1798-1800). The U.S. Navy’s plucky frigates managed to show that the United States might actually have some teeth, which aided in negotiations and Adams managed to extricate himself from the mess in 1800, but not before the United States had lost some 2,000 merchant ships and the French had lost 4 proper warships (the largest bring the frigate L’Insurgente) and more than a hundred privateering ships.
The Jefferson administration followed. His plan was to keep the United States out of what were now the Napoleonic Wars by simply refusing to trade with anyone involved until everyone agreed to respect American neutrality, first the Non-Importation Act of 1806 and then the Embargo Act of 1807 and then the Non-Intercourse Act of 1807. The result was failure: the trading bans hammered American business far worse than they pressured Britain or France or anyone else. Both belligerants continued to put pressure on the United States, while American merchants not looking to go bankrupt ignored the act. Meanwhile the Royal Navy, under pressure to keep crew levels up under the strain of sustaining a massive blockade of basically all of Europe had begun pressing crew off of American ships, violating U.S. sovereignty and enraging the American public, all of which led to the War of 1812 under the Madison administration, which can be understood as the North-American theater of the larger Napoleonic Wars.
Oh-for-two.
We then get a long period without a general European War through the rest of the 1800s. The closest it comes is probably the Crimean War, which involved the Ottomans, Britain, France and Russia, but none of the states of central Europe (that is, the Germans or Italians), which we don’t generally regard as a general European war as a result. Instead, the next general European War is, of course, World War I.
I needn’t rehearse that entire narrative here. Suffice to say that, after years of trying to stay out of the war – indeed, Woodrow Wilson got reelected with a campaign slogan of, “He Kept Us Out of War” the United States ended up dragged into the conflict, motivated again by disruptions to trade, in this case by German unrestricted submarine warfare.
Driven by the perceived failures of the post-WWI peace, Americans went into the 1930s quite adamant that they would avoid the next major European War. But even before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war on the United States just a few days later, the tensions pulling the United States into the conflict were significant and once again based on the United States’ strong economic connection to Europe. The United States Navy had, in fact, been conducting ‘neutrality patrols‘ to protect American shipping beginning in 1939 and that effort escalated as German U-Boat attacks mounted. The alternative would have been burning down the Anglo-American trade relationship and in the process self-destructing a decent portion of the American economy, an obvious non-starter.
In short, then, the Atlantic and the Pacific have never yet protected the United States from involvement in a general European War. NATO and the broader post-WWII security architecture was constructed on the realization that this sort of crude isolationism had been repeatedly tried and had repeatedly failed and that instead the best way to keep the United States out of a global conflict would to avert a global conflict, by careful and deliberate foreign policy.
And it worked! The period from the end of WWII to the present has been the most peaceful period in human history, the ‘long peace.’ It has also – as a result of that peace – been a period of rapidly rising prosperity globally.
But more narrowly, that decision was predicated on a realization that attempting to retreat behind the Atlantic and the Pacific was a fool’s gambit: far too much of the American economy reached out beyond those oceans either in imports or exports and the United States was far too tightly culturally entwined with many other countries as well. Attempting to sever those connections – to shift to ‘autarky’ (where a country’s economy is largely self-contained) – would impose economic costs that American voters were profoundly unwilling to accept (without necessarily freeing the United States of security costs, since it could no longer rely on allies to share that burden). American policy in Europe has never been one of pure charity, but rather in the post-WWII era was borne out of a realization that the United States had to proactively intervene in order to prevent yet another major European conflict, because such a conflict would almost certainly draw in the United States, whether we wanted it or not.
On to Recommendations!
I want to start by recommending a fantastic series of substack posts by Joel Christensen (sententiae antiquae on Twitter) pulling out short, moving passages from the Iliad. Each passage is presented with translation and discussion and I think they’re all thought-provoking, good reminders of why the epic has so captivated readers over the centuries. Especially thought-provoking, I thought, were, “You’re Gonna Die Too, Friend” (from Book 21), “Laying My Burdens Down” (from Book 22) and “A New Widow and Her Orphan,” a treatment of Andromache’s bitter lament in book 22 that the audience knows is even darker than she yet realizes.
And while we’re on the darkness of war and loss, this study by Larry Lewis of the Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence at Center for Naval Analyses on the practical results of the Israeli Defense Forces’ ‘Civilian Harm Reduction’ efforts does with much more rigor what I attempted more briefly a few firesides ago: assessing the IDF’s tactics to determine if they are, in fact, as careful at avoiding excess civilian casualties as they claim. He comes to a similar conclusion: Israel is, in fact, distressingly tolerant of high civilian casualties in Gaza and while the operation to destroy Hamas was justified by Hamas’ attacks, the methods Israel is using are resulting in more civilian death than is necessary.
On a less deadly note, I wrote recently in Foreign Policy about how “The History Crisis Is a National Security Problem,” noting how U.S. security relies on a steady supply of historians to various parts of the Departments of Defense and State as well as an educated citizenry prepared to understand the questions being put to them in elections (as noted above!). It is my hope that an article like this might also serve as a model for other historians to use when reaching out to the policy communities connected to their fields – to explain that history education in the United States is in distress and to connect that to the issues policy-makers (with funding dollars) care about.
For this week’s book recommendation, I’m going to recommend Patrick Alan Kent, A History of the Pyrrhic War (2020). It is, I will grant, generally a little pricey in soft-cover for such a slim volume, but quite useful as a detailed source- and campaign-study of the Pyrrhic Wares that walks the reader through what we can know in an understandable manner, similar in this respect to the older but also excellent two volumes by John Lazenby covering the First and Second Punic Wars. Particularly valuable is that Kent puts the differences in the sources and the scholarly judgements about reliable up front in the text, making note when the sources differ and why he has opted to trust one and not another. In particular, he stresses how the narratives of our sources are shaped by how they position the Pyrrhic War as an event – as the late great war of what is effectively Rome’s ‘heroic’ era, before the start of the more ‘historical’ period with the First Punic War in 264.
Kent’s project here is not purely descriptive, however. Instead while covering the ins-and-outs of Pyrrhus’ campaigns in Italy and Sicily, he aims to demonstrate (and I think does so quite effectively) that the notion that Pyrrhus was for grand conquests as an ‘Alexander of the West’ of sorts is a later elaboration by our sources to puff up Rome’s achievement in fending him off. Instead, Kent argues that Pyrrhus’ aim was more limited: to pull the cities of magna graecia into his control and use their resources, likely for further campaigns back East aiming at control of Macedonia proper. Kent points out that for all of the rhetoric in our sources about Pyrrhus’ grand aims, his actual actions seem bent towards this more limited design than grand dreams of conquest in the west.
The book is well written and very accessible for the lay-reader and brisk to read at an economical 142 pages. It includes two maps in the front-matter, one of southern Italy and one of Sicily, which do a good job of placing the various battles and sieges in geographic relation to each other (though I might have wished for a few more maps, for instance a map outlining different areas of settlement, e.g. Samnium vs. magna graecia vs. Latium and Campania, etc).
Been a while since I studied the Crimean War but was Austria not a declared belligerent? If I remember rightly they entered late and somewhat reluctantly on the allied side, under pressure from Britain and France, and may not have sent any troops. But the effect was that the Russians understandably saw it as a tremendous betrayal, torpedoing what had been the key alliance helping to prop Austria up.
Sardinia/Piedmont was also engaged and had a more active role, again on the allied side, I think?
yes, I’ve absolutely seen the Crimean War described as a “general European war”, not least because it involved the most powerful countries. which makes leaving it out here kind of problematic.
OK, I’ve had the chance to look this up and while Austria was officially neutral during the war it was absolutely entangled in it, involved in all the negotiations (on the allied side), its troops used as nominally neutral occupying forces when Russia withdrew from Ottoman provinces, its garrisons subsequently used (both actively and passively) to dissuade Russian attack.
I had always understood the Crimean War as, while relatively contained in terms of actual theatre, in practice a general European war at the political level, involving all but one of the European great powers, plus Sardinia (as the top “non-great” European power)
While it’s known as the Crimean war, and most of the famous events happened in that area, arguably the politically decisive theatre was the Baltic. There the predominantly British and French forces sieged down a few important forts, generally blockaded everything, putting most Russian garrisons along the entire coastline in a logistically untenable situation because their resupply was largely naval, as well as exposing them to defeat in detail (as happened to the aforementioned forts), and potentially exposing the Russian capital, St. Petersburg, to attack.
I would like to counter this. The British and French forces did conquer the Westernmost fortress of the Russian empire, the Bomarsund Fortress in the Åland Islands. This was a strategic defeat for the Russians, as the fort was supposed to become the naval base from which the Russians could have dominated the Baltic, and have launched an attack on the Swedish capital and its surrounding archipelago. Destruction of the fortress largely nullified the Russian threat against Stockholm. In addition to this major victory, the fleet destroyed a couple of undefended coastal towns. (Where defence was organised locally, the attacks were repelled. These were not serious fleet actions but small skirmishes.)
However, on the Gulf of Finland, the combined Anglo-French fleet was largely inefficient. The main base of the Russian fleet, Helsinki, which was protected by the Sveaborg fortress, was left intact. In 1855, the combined fleet was able to bombard the fortress for a week with impunity, as they had longer firing range than the fortress. However, the immense firepower only resulted in some 180 casualties, and the guns of the fortress remained rather intact. The fleet was never able to invade the fortress or the city behind it: the archipelago was mined and blocked with sunken ships, and a circumventing movement via the countryside would have taken the invading troops out of the range of the naval fire support, and into the range of strong Russian ground forces.
There never even was an attempt to attack Kronstad fortress. Honestly, I am not aware that the logistics situation of Russian units would have been untenable. There is no record, in the Finnish literature, about food shortages or similar during 1854-55.
Strategically, the war in the Baltic was a stalemate. The Russian side lost all foreign trade, which was a major loss. Militarily, the Anglo-French side was incapable of taking the war to the shore, and actually threatening St. Petersburg. If the Swedish had joined the war, and conducted an invasion of Finland, the situation might have changed, but Sweden was quite careful in its policy, and the Finnish intelligentsiya chose not to support the Swedish cause. The most important Finnish opposition leaders, Topelius and Snellman, took a prominently pro-Russian position, and there was no movement to raise a rebellion in support of a Swedish invasion. (This was not just out of love for Russians: the idea was to build a separate Finnish nation, not to return being Swedes.) The population at large remained very loyal to the emperor, and the Finnish units fought unswerwingly. The last unit to surrender at Bomarsund was a Finnish one.
and if the French hadn’t backed out when they did, British naval mobilization to un-contain the war, (“The Great Armament”) and the receptiveness of additional powers to joining the war would have made it very general. the Crimean War seems to have been almost an abortive general war in many respects, as though the July Crisis had been contained to some of it’s principals.
Yes, our host most likely meant Austria, as Italy was not really a great power at that time (…or, as a matter of fact, existing as *Italy* at all), and Austria was one of the prominent non-belligerents.
If Prussia and Austria didn’t fight in it, it wasn’t a general European war.
Perhaps the economic involvement in the current conflict in Ukraine could serve as a benchmark. We generally assess the conflict in Ukraine as one where NATO countries are indirectly involved but not directly involved. Economic commitment to Ukraine has averaged roughly 0.25% of GDP (rising over time) across the NATO block so we could look at past conflicts to see if intervention in the conflict exceeded this level.
Going by some google search (so large grain of salt applies!), Britain spent about 20 million pounds a year on Crimea out of a gross national product of around 700-800 million pounds. That’s about 10 times the Ukraine commitment which sounds like active participation. But compare that to the Napoleonic Wars where spending was easily exceeding 40 million pounds on an economy half the size. At over 10% of GDP we can see that Britain was much more deeply involved in the Napoleonic Wars then the Crimean War. Then in both world wars, defense spending exceeds half of GDP by the last couple of years of each conflict although it takes a while to camp up. So we could reasonably say that British commitment in the world wars was at least 10 times higher then Crimea.
This is all very rough but I’d say that in Crimea Britain was only dipping it’s toes in the conflict. If one of the primary belligerents was so lightly involved, I’d say it’s not a general European war.
For the purposes of Dr. Devereaux core argument (that “the US can’t stay out of large European wars because we depend on trade with Europe, which such wars disrupt”) the questions should really be: “Did the Crimean war significantly affect cross-Atlantic trade in such a way that the US should be said to have an interest?”
If the answer is no, it doesn’t falsify his thesis, just his hook/presentation for it. Which is something it is still fair to complain about, this blog is named “pedantry” after all.
Part of the problem is that isolationists (and others) seem to conceive of US involvement as an either/or question– either we’re involved in a conflict or we’re not. In reality, it’s a spectrum of different degrees and types of involvement.
World War II is an instructive example: The US was involved in the conflict from the very beginning, siding with the Allies in our decision to trade with them and lend them money while respecting their blockade of Germany (& other Axis powers as they increased in number and became more coordinated). We later escalated to providing military equipment, initially under the limited “cash & carry” policy and then under the more expansive Lend Lease Act. At times, our involvement resembled a limited undeclared war, such as when US forces took over for British ones in the occupation of Iceland or when US warships began shooting at U-boats along the Atlantic routes. And finally, of course, we escalated to a declared, full-scale war after Pearl Harbor.
You can do the same analysis for virtually any conflict that has occurred while the US has existed. The takeaway is that involvement isn’t an on/off switch but a spectrum of possibilities. When conflicts arise, the correct question is not “should we get involved” but rather “how should we get involved, and under what circumstances should we escalate.”
Have you read the book “Special Providence” by Walter Mead? In it he posits that there are essentially four schools of thought that Americans have about foreign policy, which he named after individuals who sort of best represented them: the Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and Wilsonian schools. Your position that there can be different degrees of involvement in conflict sounds like (if I remember correctly) the Jeffersonian school, where the idea is to try to prevent full-blown conflict by metaphorically turning up or down the heat in places as needed. The position of involvement being more binary is more like the Jacksonian school (to which I find I subscribe, upon self-reflection), where you stay out of war as long or as much as possible, but when you do go to war, you hit as hard as you can with everything you’ve got to force a decisive peace as quickly as possible. (It’s been a while since I read so I don’t unfortunately remember the other two schools as well and might be misremembering, I should really read it again.)
I bring this up not to be argumentative or posit that the school of thought I find myself in is the only correct one; indeed, the main thrust of the book is that the US’s foreign policy over its history has been relatively (even remarkably) successful precisely because these four positions have always been represented in government to various degrees, and that the interplay between them has, on average, charted a better course than any single one of them would have in isolation. I just found it a rather interesting read and a way to get an overview of various broad American (though probably not uniquely American) views towards foreign policy.
I bring this up not to be argumentative or posit that the school of thought I find myself in is the only correct one; indeed, the main thrust of the book is that the US’s foreign policy over its history has been relatively (even remarkably) successful precisely because these four positions have always been represented in government to various degrees,
“Relatively successful”, maybe. “Remarkably successful”, with Wilson laying the groundwork for WW2, large swathes of post-colonial Africa falling to various dictatorships, the Arab Spring and consequent destabilisation of much of the Middle East, and the expensive and embarrassing failures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan?
How did post-colonial Africa and the Arab Spring end up on the US foreign policy tally sheet? That smacks of holding the US responsible for everything that happens in the world. I’d put those failures on the residents of those territories, not whatever prodding the US might have done.
The US (a) pressured colonial powers to grant their colonies independence ASAP, leading to a decolonisation scramble with little preparation for what came afterwards, and (b) has regularly interfered in the affairs of countries in both Africa and the Middle East ever since. And remember, the post I was replying to calls (or rather, paraphrases a book which calls) US foreign policy “remarkably successful”, which implies quite a high bar for what the US should have been able to achieve.
And how much was the US responsible for decolonisation in the first place?
The only example I know of of the US exerting real pressure to get a colonial powers to grant colonies independence was on the Dutch during their war in Indonesia; in which case Indonesia would obviously have gone independent anyway even if the US had done nothing. (Though without US meddling the Dutch might have prevented the Indonesians from annexing West Papua.)
Unless I’m misunderstanding something, can you double check Italian involvement in the Crimean war? Piedmont did join the war, essentially to try to get food karma from Europe to make Italian unification happen.
Typo: “(1972-1802)”
Picturing Robespierre & Napoleon in disco outfits
Ah yes, the French Revolutionary Wars. Wars so Revolutionary and so French that they lasted 170 years and ran backwards in time.
They ran forwards in time, and then backwards in time. That’s what made them revolutionary.
Pretty Percy! Also commanding and masterful unlike friendly Ollie.
“Israel is, in fact, distressingly tolerant of high civilian casualties in Gaza and while the operation to destroy Hamas was justified by Hamas’ attacks, the methods Israel is using are resulting in more civilian death than is necessary.”
So tell me, Bret. Do attacks by the state and government of Israel justify a Palestinian effort to destroy it? What is your answer?
I can’t speak for our host, but my assumption is that he agrees with the conclusion of the piece he links to, which recommends:
“The IDF has an opportunity to reexamine its overall approach in Gaza. Possible steps include recording and tracking civilian harm, making comprehensive assessments of civilian harm, with attention to the causes of harm and the effectiveness of precautionary measures, and considering additional steps they can take to reduce risk to civilians while maintaining effectiveness. This should also include greater transparency regarding civilian harm incidents. The IDF should seek dialogue with countries that are actively learning and striving to better mitigate harm to civilians, including the United States and the Netherlands, and with civil society organizations that may be able to support more accurate and neutral assessments, such as Airwars.
Countries that provide military support to Israel can also help encourage and support efforts to better protect civilians. This can include providing expert advisory support on civilian harm mitigation, providing capabilities and information designed to strengthen mitigation efforts, and tailored conditionality—a combination of proactive and reactive measures to promote Israel’s will and capability for civilian harm mitigation, both in Gaza and in the longer term.
A key lesson over the past two decades is that it is possible for governments and militaries to do more to protect civilians in war. That is what civilian harm mitigation is: a comprehensive, learning approach to identifying and mitigating risks to civilians in ways that both reinforce effectiveness and provide better outcomes to civilians in war zones. Civilians in Gaza and Israeli citizens deserve more from their government and their forces than rhetoric about being the gold standard. They deserve the commitment of a government and professional military to do what they can—and to ask for support—to genuinely protect civilians in war.”
“I can’t speak for our host”
The only relevant part of this post.
Given that the quotation is from an article Dr. Devereaux just praised, its content is at least somewhat relevant.
Of course not. On a moral level it’s always wrong to destroy a nation, because nations are full of civilians and you can’t destroy a nation without borderline genocidal levels of violence against those civilians.
And even setting morals aside, it’s just a non-starter in practical terms.
Do you think the October 7 attacks were good for the people of Palestine? Was there ever any way they could’ve been good for the people of Palestine?
Palestine is not capable of destroying Israel. And no matter how bad life in Palestine gets, a failed attempt to destroy Israel can always make it worse.
You are misreading the question by conflating “state and government” with “nation”. Change the wording from “state and government of Israel” to “the Likud government of Israel” if that makes things more clear for you.
State and nation are often used as synonyms, particularly on this issue. I thought you wanted Israel gone entirely, as many people do. If you’re just calling for regime change, then I’m sorry for the misreading.
In any case, the practical concerns remain exactly the same. These weren’t rhetorical questions, I really do want answers:
Do you think the October 7 attacks were good for the people of Palestine? Was there ever any way they could’ve been good for the people of Palestine?
The question is not about practicality, and practical concerns are not relevant for our purposes.
It is about “justification” in whatever sense Bret uses it in his claim that Israel is “justified” in trying to destroy Hamas. The meaning here could be open to differing interpretations, but this is a statement (and wording) he has repeated multiple times both on Twitter and this blog, so I think it’s about time he explains exactly what he means by “justified”.
Let me add that I am not calling for any political action by this question, neither “Israel gone entirely” nor even “regime change”.
The question is a question. It is being asked to see where Bret stands on this particular point.
You cannot separate morality from practicality. In politics, trying to do so reliably leads to either ineffectiveness or atrocity or both.
And if you want to know exactly what Bret means by “justified”, better to ask that directly than to ask about destroying Israel / its government.
So, are you going to answer the questions I asked? I answered yours…
I have no objections to talking about other issues in this conflict. But as I have pointed out several times, this thread has a specific purpose. I will post to clarify my original question, but I don’t want other distractions here.
The October seventh attacks were awful for Palestine, awful for Israel, and great for Hamas the organization. Israel did precisely the wrong thing, operationally.
Israel’s actions are based on the UN Charter, Chapter VII, Article 51:
Israel’s justification for the invasion of Gaza rests upon the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023. Israel’s claim is that, without an invasion of Gaza, it might remain vulnerable to further such attacks in the future, therefore it must neutralize the entirety of Gaza as a military threat.
If you believe that Israel is unjustified in invading Gaza, then please suggest alternative actions the government could take. Because, otherwise, that position teeters on the edge of justifying the Hamas attack on October 7th by dint of condemning any response.
Meanwhile, Israel just stole another 10 km^2 of West Bank land, bisecting the territory. https://archive.is/71Qkm
“Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, announced the seizure of 10 square kilometers (3.8 square miles) of Palestinian territory in the West Bank on Friday. The move marks the single largest land seizure by the Israeli government since the 1993 Oslo accords, according to Peace Now, a settlement watchdog group.”
Settler colonialism at its finest.
” Israel did precisely the wrong thing, operationally.”
dcmorinmorinmorin, if I had been running Hamas, I would definitely preferred it if Israel had done nothing, or dropped a few bombs and then given up.
Then I could repeat my own attacks. One such attack would achieve nothing, but multiple attacks can led to people moving away from the border region, which Hamas would almost certainly see as a victory.
Ad9 which is irrelevant to the situation. Israel could also have responded by undergoing targeted raids, precision strikes, and by establishing international security cordons, while eliminating Hamas leadership. Inaction is bad, but reprisal is, in fact, worse. Hamas will never be able to overun Israel with raw force, but an international coalition of Arab states? They could do it. And the more monstrous Israel is the more likely that happens.
The Arab states have made their position clear: they don’t really care.
That is just a straight up falsehood with no backing in either ideology or fact, guilders. Israel’s response has already torpedoed peace talks, condemnation has been swift, the Arab public is turning even more against Israel… it’s manifestly clear that isn’t true.
The Israelis doing anything other than nothing would have elicited the same response that we’ve seen from the Arab states, even your delusional “precision strikes and targeted killings” alternative.
Oh, so now there is an Arab response? I thought you’d just said there wasn’t one? Now it was inevitable?
You have no actual beliefs. You’re rapidly oscillating between “no one cares” and “everyone who cares just hates Israel”. That’s incompatible with believing either.
Do you want to try again? Pick a new position? Maybe everyone who cares just believes Hamas lies (that the IDF believes too)?
Whomever you’ve outsourced your critical thinking to is abusing your trust. Rewrite the last line, allow for Israel to be in the wrong, and reassess.
Literally every piece of evidence available suggests that the destruction of the Israeli state would be accompanied by the deaths of as many Israeli citizens as the victorious Palestinians could get their hands on, so in this case I’d say the conflation is justified.
I have a strong feeling you’re not asking in good faith. However, it’s an interesting question.
On the one hand, Israel did not ask for this war. They’ve been remarkably lenient with Hamas and Palestine–if a group had engaged in decades-long terrorist attacks on the USA, we’d have responded much more quickly and harshly than Israel has so far. And humans notoriously do not like our children being harmed. Further, it’s important to remember HOW they have been attacked in the past–not by official, regulated, identifiable armies, but by terrorists who are indistinguishable from the general population right up to the point where they kill a hundred people. To Israel, I have no doubt their methods seem necessarily, even justified.
To Palestine and Hamas, it’s an existential war. They brought it upon themselves by attacking Israel (though given the restrained reactions from Israel in the past, I doubt they expected this level of response–though they clearly had been preparing for it for a while), but it remains an existential war. Obviously any group that isn’t actively committing mass suicide would view its extermination as unjustifiable. And Israel hasn’t exactly taken a live-and-let-live stance on Palestine, so I’ve no doubt Hamas views their actions as merely part of asymmetric warfare.
(Yes, I’m fully aware of the fact that I’m glossing over a tremendous amount of complexity here. If you want to delve into that fully it would take several books; anything either of us says is necessarily a gross over-simplification.)
From an outside perspective, it’s even more complicated. Russia only has a few allies right now, and a major one (Iran) is both shooting at ships in the Red Sea and funding Hamas’ efforts against Israel. It’s exceedingly doubtful that this is unrelated to other current Russian activities. Attacking somewhere else to draw off forces from the real goal is a standard gambit after all. If that’s what’s happening, we may be obliged to accept reprehensible behavior on the part of an ally, as the cost for achieving a larger strategic objective. This is not an infrequent occurrence in warfare–see the USA allying with the USSR in WWII.
As for the moral side of it, as Bret is fond of saying, war is bad and we need to do less of it. The ONLY justifiable war is a defensive one. That said, this is a tremendously messy conflict because neither side is playing by the standard rules. Hamas is using civilians as human shields and violating the conventions of war by hiding among the civilian population as a standard course of action; Israel is basically committing genocide. Both sides are guilty of atrocities here, and it’s a pointless exercise to try to determine who’s worse or who’s guilty of driving the other one to such measures.
“did not ask for this war” is an interesting take on Israel occupying Palestinian land, controlling access to Gaza, continuing to steal West Bank land…
Well, they certainly didn’t want this specific war.
It is, however, true that the Israelis have done plenty of things the Palestinians might very reasonably view as provocations. Things they quite simply shouldn’t have done.
The trouble is that responding to a provocation tends to end badly if the people provoking you have you surrounded with overwhelming firepower.
And it’s very hard to discuss why this damned war won’t seem to end without understanding that the Israelis, fairly or unfairly, feel that the October 7th attacks were not something they directly provoked or sought out, and that it has badly weakened any lingering positive attitudes towards a peace settlement that might still exist in Israel.
From a very Palestine-centric perspective, Hamas is striking out to avenge wrongs committed by Israel. From a more neutral perspective, Hamas is getting a lot of people nominally on its own side killed, and in the process has provided considerable ammunition to Israel’s own “peace is impossible anyway” crowd. Which is not to approve of the anti-peace group, but when the anti-peace groups on both sides both refuse to put the guns away and step back from the abyss, then disastrous war becomes unavoidable.
You’re conflating Israel and Likud and Hamas and Palestinians. The reasoning you’re ascribing to Hamas in particular is simply incorrect, terrorist groups are famously not aligned with the best interests of their host populations. If Hamas leadership could get the entire population of Palestine killed and in doing so ensure Israel was destroyed they’d do that instantly. They’re both idealogically motivated and detached from the population and even their own soldiers on a practical level.
Hence this war is a strategic victory for Hamas. Legitimately, they could lose 99% of their manpower and win absolutely. They’re insane; rational only in the sense their actions achieve their goals.
It’s a huge distinction, and one that completely changes the tactical and operational situation.
Likud, meanwhile, want Palestinians dead for the pleasure of killing them. For context, the organizations that formed the pre merger ideological core of Likud were described as basically just idealogically Nazis, but Jewish, in 1948. By a group of Jewish political scientists. Including Einstein; he signed one of those public letters to that effect. The Israeli right are Nazis and Hamas leadership are zealots. They both wanted this and benefit from it.
Hmm, that reminds me of something I had once read on the Times of Israel. Apparently, a Likud member had once said he was glad that the holocaust happened, because he considered the Eastern European Jews who died in it as ‘leftist traitors’; for some mysterious reason he was not kicked out of his party…
So, I admit it does make more sense than most invocations of Godwin’s Law.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/likud-court-restores-member-who-said-6-million-more-ashkenazim-should-burn/
The Israeli right wing funded Hamas. They’ve also been involved in terror attacks since before Israel was founded; Likud and the IDF are institutional successors to Zionist militas which were just outright terrorists. Bombing British garrisons, attacking hotels, throwing IEDs into crowds, that kind of terrorist.
And a. We have been facing decades long terrorist attacks and haven’t responded with a tenth Israel’s genocidal hate, and b. Israel isn’t and has never been the slightest bit lenient towards either Arab governments or peoples. There have been dozens of not hundreds of extrajudicial murders by Israeli settler militants, police, and soldiers against Palestinians every year for the past eighty years.
It’s unquestionable that Israel is almost fully culpable here. They started the conflict, perpetrated most of the massacres, reject all peaceful solutions, have engaged in political operations to create a radical opposition, and have both the power and tools to do better. Palestine as a state doesn’t. It is not meaningless to say that.
And finally; Hamas knew precisely what they were getting into and what they wanted, and it’s this. This conflict has done more to legitimize the Palestinian cause and radicalize friendly populations than anything in thirty, fifty years. The organizational leadership is playing directly out of the red book or US army manuals, and in those commiting terrorism is a tactic designed to incite reactive atrocities, and succeeds if it radicalizes civilians and legitimizes the resistance in response. The current famine in particular is fatal to peace in the region, likely for decades already; if Israel continues cutting off food until everyone dies it’ll basically ensure peace doesn’t happen for a century.
Israel could also have responded using tactics from those same manuals and accomplished all of its goals. The operationally correct response is to conduct precision strikes in Hamas leadership to realign the organization, conduct raids into Gaza to retrieve hostages and deplete Hamas resources, and wildly distribute aid to civilians while increasing infrastructure spending in Gaza. You then either kill your way through Hamas until their leadership is more moderate, or create or empower a political rivals that’s more idealogically and politically aligned with you. Israel even has a pre built alternative, the PLO.
At no point is a siege of Gaza, unguided bombardment campaign, or mass ground invasion called for. That’s not how counter insurgency works.
It is, however, how a far right authoritarian government achieves it’s idealogically and political aims. In that sense infuriating the entire world and staining the conscious of the entire Israeli population is great.
Wow. That was a giant pile of half-truths and outright lies.
I think the part about counterinsurgency doctrine is right. This isn’t how you do counterinsurgency. It’s how right-wing authoritarians imagine “crushing rebellions” by drowning them in fire,” but it generally does not end an insurgency.
I don’t think Netanyahu and the Israelis view this as a counterinsurgency operation. They have no intention of trying to hold the territory after this–they want their people back, and they want Hamas gone. I suspect, if you asked, they view the war in Gaza as a punitive expedition.
(And let’s be real here–left-wing authoritarians also like the “drown them in fire” approach to rebellion.)
Everything I said is the complete and unvarnished truth as I understand it. Refute it if you disagree.
Sorry. I don’t provide detailed arguments to people who use words like genocide to describe events that aren’t anywhere close to the definition thereof.
“It’s how right-wing authoritarians imagine “crushing rebellions” by drowning them in fire,” but it generally does not end an insurgency.”
Worked for Assad in Syria. Worked for Putin in Chechnya. Worked for Lenin and Stalin. Worked for Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. If you want to win a war, killing the people who oppose you often works.
If the Israelis had killed off all the Palestinians in the past, they wouldn’t be killing any Israelis in the present, would they?
Just because a tactic or strategy doesn’t always work doesn’t mean it never does.
“It’s how right-wing authoritarians imagine “crushing rebellions” by drowning them in fire,” but it generally does not end an insurgency.”
Lots of insurgencies end by being drowned in fire, as long as the drowning is wholesale and brutal enough.
right at the start of the 20th c, for example, the Germans successfully ended an insurgency in Namibia by driving the subject population into the desert where 80% of them died, and that quite effectively ended the insurgency (although Germany lost that and their other colonies a decade later due to WWI anyway).
Same with the Native Americans in North America and really, innumerable other insurgencies. Insurgencies which succeed are the exception.
There’s a point there, but it’s not a good one. One has to differentiate between industrial and preindustrial warfare, here, for reasons that have been thoroughly explained on this blog. The examples also only make sense if the group is marginalized, which is increasingly not true in a world without Internet. Marginalized groups have more resources than ever to reach out. Plus drones, the internet, and increasing global wealth means that if anything insurgency is becoming scarily easy through time.
It is also worth noting what generally ends up happening to genocidal nations. It’s shockingly rare that they survive long term or thrive; most tend to either devolve into internal regressive chaos or strike out until the wrath of the great powers smites them. Genocide scars a perpetrating people and nation.
But the bigger issue is just that, to be frank, that logic completely fails in Palestine. The surrounding Arab population knows that what Israel does to Palestine they want to do to them, and the sheer number of potential insurgents globally who feel fanatical kinship with Palestinians is great. Plus certain idealogically motivated insurgencies, like anarchists, cannot be ethnically cleaned, and those ideologies are both already regionally active and slowly resurgent worldwide
In other words, you don’t understand what he’s saying, so you resort to insults immediately. This isn’t Twitter, go make cringe posts of <140 characters there.
Really? US army manuals call for terrorism? I’m sorry, but, [citation needed].
US army manuals fully explain why and how insurgents do what they do. They’re presented from the perspective of opposing it, but you could just as easily use them as a guide, yes. And in those manuals, terrorism is designed to trigger reprisal as a primary goal.
The burden of proof is on you to establish that the purpose is terrorism. One might as well declare that all toxicologists are would-be murderers.
Sure, but they’re lying. The Russian government is more Nazi than Ukraine, and Ukraine has, at most, far right militas in their defense forces. That’s the sum total of nazis.
If their accusations were true it would at least suggest that hostility towards Ukraine was justified, although all particulars about if war is the correct response aren’t. But, again, it’s all lies.
Hamas is not a state
Neither is Likud. All of this argument in the thread here and everywhere else is dependent on a false framing, that the current war in Gaza is a conflict between a state and a terrorist organization. In reality, we have two corrupt ethno-nationalist political organizations who took control of their respective governments through a combination of demagoguery and deniable internal terrorism; these organizations have leveraged their respective control of state resources to kill and disrupt civilian populations. There should be no rhetorical defense of either group.
You seem to be implying that opposing crimes against humanity is the same as endorsing Hamas.
During WWII, Churchill made the policy decision that torture would not be used. If I praise Churchill for this policy, which I consider both pragmatic and humane, does that make me a Nazi sympathizer in your eyes?
IIRC, the postwar definition of torture included sleep deprivation and the stand-up, which were used by British interrogators during the war. And as espionage was a capital crime, spies were interrogated under threat of death.
And as the British (and Americans) were happy with flamethrowers and napalm, they must have coated quite a few people with jellied gasoline, and then set fire to them.
We need to make a distinction between the nation of Israel, the people of Israel, and the government of Israel. Destroying a people is never justified, destroying a nation is the final resort given how much violence tends to translate to the people, and destroying a government is *very often* just.
It’s fully justified to destroy Likud utterly. Every leader in that organization is guilty of genocide. The entire group are basically just Nazis, the institutional descendents of what’s effectively the Zionist Taliban.
If it is necessary to completely occupy Israel and sever all of its institutional continuity to destroy Likud, then personally, I think that’s justified. We destroyed the nation of Nazi Germany after WW2, and it was right and just that we did so, even though it involved occupation. Israel is very nearly as bad.
And, of course, destroying the people is wrong.
“genocide”
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Are you kidding? Do you not understand that Israel has injured ten percent of the Gazan population and that starvation is literally weeks away from reaching terminal levels? Starvation is at level 4 by ipcc definitions, 5 is defined minimally as 2/10000 people dying of starvation a day minimum. That’s literally hundreds a day, and famine can easily kill ten, twenty percent of a population.
Israel has caused this intentionally and did it to s specific minority.
That’s definitionally genocide. Literally the definition.
Those numbers aren’t the result of genocide, they’re the result of urban warfare where the defenders deliberately dig themselves in behind their women and children.
As to starvation, the Israelis have done nothing to prevent food aid from reaching the Gazans besides the inevitable problems caused by trying to deliver food aid to a war zone.
Hamas caused this by attacking Israel, taking hostages, and refusing to release them. They could end this conflict in five minutes if they so chose–and the only way you can’t see that is if you think the October 7 attacks were justified, in which case I am extremely comfortable with dismissing any moral judgment you offer.
> That’s definitionally genocide. Literally the definition.
When I hear the word “genocide”, I think of historical genocides where soldiers entered a city and deliberately killed/enslaved every single civilian, usually over a period of days. Pick a different word when you’re talking about injuring 10 percent of the population.
Honhonhonhon that view implicitly requires stating that the Armenian genocide is not, in fact, a genocide, because most of the deaths occurred due to relocation into the Jordan desert and accompanying exposure and starvation. Or that the starvation conditions in the Holocaust were not part of the genocide. *And* that a population needs to be successfully killed off before you’ll call it a genocide. In other words, it’s incoherent.
I am not saying that the definition begins and ends at events with 100% casualty rate that occur inside a city. Of course you can stretch it. But there’s stretching and then there’s “10% injured”.
Guilders, you literally have no factual understanding of anything you are talking about about.
Starvation and mass casualties are not the inherent result of urban warfare, not on this scale and ratio. The total number of Hamas casualties is probably around 6000, and the highest estimate, taken from assumption ng all makes over 14 are militants, is 11000 last I checked. The minimum death ratio of non combatants to combatants is 2:1, and realistically it’s more like 6:1. Casualty wise it’s even more lopsided.
America routinely flips those numbers in even it’s more dirty battles. A ratio of six to one isn’t war, it’s genocide.
The Israelis have done everything possible to halt food distribution. You can confirm this by the fact food isn’t flowing, that the checkpoints are closed, that Israel has admitted it, and that they’ve been firing into crowds vis a vie the flour massacre. This is genocide.
And your idea that the conflict can end if Hamas surrenders the hostages is somewhere between naive and monstrous. Naive because you might believe the Israeli propaganda, despite the fact that they are literally saying the war won’t end until Hamas is exterminated. Monstrous because believing that propaganda after they’ve shot their own hostages, rejected deals to save them, bombed their locations, and are starving them reaches willful ignorance.
I have read enough counterinsurgency manual to know that if Hamas vanished today there would still be an insurgency tomorrow after the atrocities already committed. I urge you to do the same.
That was a lot of words to say “I have bought the Hamas line to the max.”
Aside from the points others have made here, do you think it might be a bad sign for your argument about the categorical illegitimacy of applying the term “genocide” to the Israeli assault on Gaza (to such an extent that you’ve refused to respond to another user in this discussion on the grounds that they applied it) when your position is directly contradicted by a preliminary ruling from the actual literal Hague?
No, because I don’t trust the Hague.
Any particular reason for that, or is it just convenient to reject the concept of international justice right now?
So what you’re saying is that the international legal bodies charged with adjudicating the question of “genocide” (by the very same sets of international conventions that established the concept of “genocide” in the first place!) are themselves so illegitimate that mere agreement with their (preliminary) judgment as to what is or isn’t “genocide” is inadmissible as a legitimate viewpoint worth responding to? In that case, why is it even worth your while to quibble over the applicability of the concept of “genocide” at all? Why not just argue that the concept itself is structurally flawed and encompasses two distinct sets of behaviors, one of which you think is legitimate (including what Israel is currently doing to the Palestinians of Gaza) and the other of which you think is illegitimate (including what Germany did to the Jews of Europe)?
For context, this is more or less what the historian and genocide scholar Dirk Moses has been doing in his recent work on the genealogy of “genocide,” but from the opposite direction: arguing that genocide should be discarded as an international legal term of art because it was deliberately framed by the states that established it in the wake of WWII (all of whom had some pretty massive skeletons in their own closets) to be too permissive toward various sorts of atrocities.
“destroying a government is *very often* just.”
That’s what Russian is saying about the “denazification” of Ukraine, isn’t it?
Since Bret (understandably) rarely responds to comments, I’d like to take a guess about what his position on this is. Notably, he has never called the destruction of the Russian government justified, even though he is strongly pro-Ukraine and has written about how much damage Russia causes to Ukrainian civilians. Given on what he has written, I suspect there are two reasons for this:
1. He believes a crushing military defeat in Ukraine would deter Russia from starting further wars. “War is bad and we should have less of it,” so if you can deter war with limited war goals, you should limit your war goals.
2. Russia has Nuclear weapons, so trying to destroy its government is way too risky.
Hamas has shown that it is unlikely to be deterred from starting further wars and doesn’t have nuclear weapons, so destroying it leads to a more peaceful world. Israel on the other hand is probably, like Russia, at least somewhat more rational in starting wars and could be deterred by military defeat (after all, Israel has largely resigned itself to Hezbollah on its northern border after failing to defeat them in 2006). And, well, Israel has nuclear weapons, which a government might use if its existence is threatened. So a war goal of destroying the Israeli government would be both unneccessary for peace and too risky, and thus unjustified.
Well, that is my guess about Bret’s opinion. Admittedly, the phrasing “justified by Hamas’ attack” makes me a little bit uncertain, but there is probably a hidden “in the context of previous actions and Hamas’ stated goals” in there.
If I got it right, there would be an interesting implication. Namely, if Fatah had a realistic chance of ending the occupation of the West Bank through a war and decided to try it, he would consider that justified and might look favorable on countries who support Fatah in that effort.
(As for my own opinion, I am sort of doubtful that justice is a thing that can exist, so I myself would hesitate to call a war justified. But on pragmatic grounds my opinion ends up pretty close to what I suspect Bret’s opinion is.)
On the other hand a critical refutation of this philosophy is that irrational autocratic countries like Russia or Israel may be so assuredly jingoistic that war is inevitable and nuclear war almost certain, so at the first opportunity overwhelming force must be justly used.
In other words, if Russia is crazy or bloodthirsty enough to invade Ukraine they are incapable of rational decisions and cannot be trusted with nukes. If an opportunity, tactic, or technology ever offers the possibility of nuclear victory with sustainable casualties it must be triggered instantly with the full understanding that war will happen one day anyway.
And as relevant to real discussion, for *Russia* that ship has probably sailed, but Israel has a smaller arsenal. If Israels government falls their nukes would only devastate all their neighbors, not wipe out a hemisphere.
Is that a refutation? Russia and Israel aren’t, as far as we can tell, irrational/aggressive to a level that would justify that. But if, for example, the Islamic State had come into possession of a couple of nuclear weapons and a nuclear power had know that these were in Raqqa, they might have indeed decided that a first strike was justified.
The problem with conducting such a preemtive strike is that, if there isn’t a broad agreement among other countries that this was the right step, they will now view you as highly dangerous to them. (On a conventional level I think the 2003 Iraq War, also a preemtive strike to prevent future wars, possibly had this consequence – I am of the opinion that Russia might not have turned hostile to the US if the US hadn’t started a war without UN Security Council support back then.)
Even if Israel was so aggressive and expansionist that everyone agreed it needed to go, Israel nuking its neighbors is the worst it can do, there is no greater evil you prevent by triggering that scenario. (But it might make sense if a country was significantly increasing its nuclear capabilities – with the caveats mentioned above. Btw this made me look up if Israel’s nuclear program played or role in the build up to the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, and apparently it did, mostly for Egypt. Which does make me a bit more sympathetic to the Egyptian motivation in these conflicts.)
To the first part; that is correct., and why development of nuclear weapons is causus belli. Your specific example is nonsense; Iraq never had nukes, the allegations otherwise we’re part of an all but confirmed conspiracy to profit politically and monetarily off the invasion, and Russia choose to be anti US long before then. If Iraq has been developing nukes after being definitively shown to be expansionist the invasion would have been just.
I think the key is if future nuclear programs or technological developments will increase the risk. If a war now can turn a horrific global conflict into a horrific regional one it’s good policy, if absolutely horrifying. It’s why im tenuously in favor of intervention in North Korea, which I see as a literally inevitable time bomb that will eventually explode and take out a significant portion of humanity if left unchecked.
I just don’t see the logic of leaving that problem to get even worse, and believe we’d refuse to act even if it were rational due to our political failures.
“irrational autocratic countries like Russia or Israel”
Israel is not and never has been an autocracy. And it is not obvious to me that either country is more irrational than, for example, the United States. They may be more aggressive, but that is not the same thing.
(And I’m not sure Israel is more aggressive than the United States. The US has a population ~ 30 times larger than Israel. If a Mexican army wanting to reconquer the former northern Mexico had invaded the US on October 7 and killed 30,000 Americans in one day, I imagine the US would have responded with some force.)
Israel has destroyed any possibility of peace for a generation in months, alienated their strongest ally, and been condemned by the entire world. They’re irrational. If the USA would also be irrational is irrelevant.
And Israel has repeatedly seen unilateral actions by its right wing drag it into large conflicts now. Maybe autocratic wasn’t right. Maybe it’s merely a jingoistic hierarchical military state rather than an autocracy, but there aren’t as many pithy ways to convey it’s similarities to Russia as a repressive expansionist power.
Since the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives they have not agreed to any support of Ukraine. Since then we have had a bunch of American government officials declare America’s undying support for Ukraine, while America cuts off support for Ukraine.
So the US government, considered as a whole, is either lying or irrational.
The Israeli government has done something you think unwise: that’s not proof of irrationality. It proves only they disagree with you. Such is life.
And making a big thing about how irrational Israel or Russia are is meaningful only if they are especially irrational.
Absolutely, The US Republican party, or more precisely MAGA, like all fascist parties, is deeply irrational and completely self destructive, in a way that should be prohibitive if political power acquisition and application.
That said Israel is almost precisely irrational in the same exact way, except they are both forced to actually adhere to real policy and more capable of causing attributable harm, so the destructive distinction is clearer.
Regardless it’s not actually a refutation of my point. It’s just a really, *really* good reason to *never* vote Republican or give them the slightest political support, in the same way the Israeli people need to toss BiBi into a fiery pit.
I think you’re reading “was justified by X” as “is cool and good because of X,” when (on past practice) our host usually means “justified” in this context as a much more limited “can reasonably/legally be defended on the basis of X, but is still very bad (because wars always are) and quite likely a bad idea (because etc) and also this war may be bad in its own special ways even though it was legal to start.”
There are many things that can be legally justified which are not moral.
Also look back to your old Just War theory, in which starting a war that you can’t win is never just. If there were a Palestinian body which had the military capability to win a conventional war against the state of Israel? Maybe! Since there is not, I have to judge the actions of various Palestinian groups against a sort of “civilian damage vs. contribution to some plausible theory of victory” rubric. Targeted attacks against random Israeli civilians fail that test. Assassinations of military or political leaders might not. Reprisals against settlers might not. Rocket attacks, as horrified as I am by bombardment of civilian population centers… also might not: given Iron Dome etc, there’s an argument that they might contribute to an IRA-style public perception of Palestinian power and help force a negotiated agreement, without causing so many civilian casualties as to backfire and make a peaceful end impossible.
Personally I think the answer is yes. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a war of annihilation. One side will have to destroy the other to end it.
I know it is an oversimplified version, but the root of the conflict is that there are two people that wont to live in the same place.
So, there are two possible solutions: a) to share the land or b) to get ride of the other people.
I think the actors have choose option b, so, no solution in the short (medium) term.
Iñigo L
To be picky: If the Israelis want to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians, and the Palestinians want to ethnically cleanse the Israelis, there is logically a solution in which both sides are ethnically cleansed, and the land resettled by other peoples.
Finally, a war in which both sides can get everything they want!
I have unironically heard this position in American evangelical culture ad9. They think it’d be great if Israel vanished while incidentally getting rid of a bunch of other people they don’t like. The entire purpose of the state, to them, is to be destroyed for prophesy.
One issue with isolationism is that it assumes that one can make this call unilaterally. However, in war it only takes one to tango. Even if the USA wanted to remain perfectly neutral in the Napoleonic Wars the British tendency to attack our ships (taking them as prizes, or seizing sailors off them) could at the time only be considered a violation of our sovereignty. You have to remember, a good portion of the people in both nations–including those in positions of power–remembered when the USA was British colonies. If we hadn’t insisted on our rights as a nation at the time, the rest of the world would have stopped considering us one. This would have had very serious consequences given the rules of war at that time, as it would have made our ships legal targets for the enemies of Britain, at least in the eyes of Britain’s enemies, whether we liked that attitude or not.
(This is of course an oversimplification; attitudes in all nations were varied at the time, and this was a really complicated question, especially since sailors of many nations may be on any given vessel regardless of what nation nominally ruled that vessel. The British had some justification for what they did, as we had justification for resenting it.)
It’s worth noting that Spain had a significant presence to our immediate south and England maintained colonies to our north. Whaling waters (deplorable, but a major economic activity at the time) were also heavily contested. The European conflict was not “over there”, it had already bled into our continent. For my part, I consider the Napoleonic Wars to be the first world wars, as battles in all corners of the world proved significant in the outcome. The notion that oceans protected us was naïve, as by that time oceans were more highways than walls.
The “World War” distinction is always a bit tricky, why would the Napoleonic wars count but not the Seven Years or 30-years war (or any of the long series of wars of Louis XIV) all of these were fought (to various extents) on all continents.
Usually the one I’ve seen described as the first ‘world’ war is the Seven Years War actually. Saw largescale combat on three continents.
“largescale combat on three continents”
The muslim expansion in VIII century also was done in three continents… Must we consider it as a World War?
Without a unifying political or military command, mostly. The seven years war had meaningfully discrete sides which were politically aligned, which was semi unique.
A better case would be the expansions of the Roman empire, although those were effectively based around a larger Mediterranean theatre, and the second main phase of the mongol expansion where they were involved in wars in china, India, the eastern Mediterranean, Japan, and Russia, all drastically different operational theatres.
Even then the mongol state was only nominally unified in this period. The political unity of the pre modern nation states and their global reach was slightly unique, even if it was still highly restricted compared to truly industrial powers.
A better case would be the expansions of the Roman empire, although those were effectively based around a larger Mediterranean theatre, and the second main phase of the mongol expansion where they were involved in wars in china, India, the eastern Mediterranean, Japan, and Russia, all drastically different operational theatres.
Those were all separate wars, though. The Mongols might have been fighting in Russia and China, but Russia and China weren’t allies and their conflicts against the Mongols were entirely separate.
Fair, but it is worth noting that even in WW2 the alliance between Germany and Japan was largely nominal. WW2 was really three conflicts, and of the powers involved only the USA and Britain were meaningfully involved in all of them. The definitions here are generally fuzzy.
From the British perspective, impressing men from American merchantmen was quite legal, and within the international law. The British law allowed the impressement of any British subject who had “used the sea”. Simultaneously, it didn’t allow for renounciation of the British nationality. You remained a Briton all your life, and there was nothing you could do to change the fact. Of course, this meant that the eventual US citizenship of any immigrant sailor who could be conceivably claimed as a Briton was meaningless.
The USA could have accepted this legal position without losing its claim on sovereignity. The right of warships to inspect civilian ships and to seize their fugitive nationals found on those ships was widely recognised at the time.
If my country did whatever we wanted with your country’s citizens, would you accept that it’s ok because our laws say it’s ok? If your government answers yes, then they look like a weak country that can’t defend itself.
If my country did whatever we wanted with your country’s citizens, would you accept that it’s ok because our laws say it’s ok? If your government answers yes, then they look like a weak country that can’t defend itself.
Under international law, dual nationals can’t use their citizenship of Country A to get out of being conscripted by Country B, where Country B is the other country of which they are a citizen.
In 1812, *most* American adults were former British subjects. If that made them still subject to British law, even outside of British territory, then the U.S. wasn’t actually all that independent. Since it was the position of the U.S. government that they *were* independent, they opposed British conscription of U.S. citizens.
In 1812, *most* American adults were former British subjects. If that made them still subject to British law, even outside of British territory, then the U.S. wasn’t actually all that independent. Since it was the position of the U.S. government that they *were* independent, they opposed British conscription of U.S. citizens.
Neither the British nor anyone else considered people who had been citizens of the Thirteen Colonies c. 1775 to be British citizens. Impressment applied only to Britons who’d moved to the USA after it gained independence.
A government doesn’t have any jurisdiction outside its borders. Specifically, it does not have a right, much less an obligation, to protect its citizens who leave the safety of her frontiers. When you travel abroad, you accept the fact that you are or may get under the jurisdiction of other countries.
Considering that Russia is justifying its wars of aggression partly with exactly the same rhetoric of “defending its citizens”, I really don’t buy into your argument. The impressement was just a cover for the actual US goal: conquest of Canada. In 1812, USA fought a blatant war of aggression, and happily, lost. Let us hope that the same happens to the Russians in Ukraine, and work actively to that end.
Correct, and note that today, the US still requires American citizens abroad to pay US taxes, which is nearly globally unique. The other state I know of that does this is Eritrea, which has North Korea levels of repression and uses this to compel refugees fleeing it to keep sending back money or else their relatives still in Eritrea will be conscripted for slave labor or killed. Renunciation of US citizenship in adulthood is deemed to be tax dodging and requires the former American to pay the US capital gains tax rate on their entire assets and not just on appreciation.
“The USA could have accepted this legal position without losing its claim on sovereignity.”
No, they couldn’t. To allow another nation to KIDNAP YOUR CITIZENS and FORCE THEM TO FIGHT FOR THE OTHER NATION, against nations that your own may in fact be on friendly terms with, is such an egregious violation of sovereignty that it would be impossible to maintain even the pretense that you are independent.
What you’re forgetting in your equation is that it’s not the USA or Britian making this decision–it’s France, and Spain, and Russia, and the various Germanic nations at the time, and the Dutch, and–well, to be brief, everyone else.
The reason the USA has sovereignty in the first place is twofold: First, the government is acknowledged within the boundaries it claims (mostly); and second, the international community accepts the USA as sovereign and independent. Remove that second in 1810, and we would immediately–whether we like it or not, and without any voice in the matter–get drawn in as not merely a British ally, but AS BRITAIN. Given the laws of war at the time, the effects of this would have been immediate and disastrous. As I said above, it would mean that any nation at war with Britain would have seized any American ships in port–private and military. American citizens would have been imprisoned or shot. American military personnel would have been treated as British soldiers (and given the nature of warfare at the time, a fair few would have been shot [or worse] as spies). They’d have no choice; by admitting that citizens of the USA are citizens of Britain (by allowing that they’re subject to British laws and service in the British military) the USA would have declared themselves an enemy! Whether the USA agreed with it or not, international consensus would be that we did not exist, or were merely a re-organization within the British colonial system.
It’s not enough to claim to be independent. Any number of “nations” have done that. You have to be recognized as independent by the international community. And if you refuse to act like an independent nation, the international community will not be kind. Sufficient examples abound in history to make the notion that it’s possible a non-starter. (Several from this time period are included here, including one of Napoleon’s own relatives. This is not hypothetical–examples were available to the USA to study.)
Secondly, the whole bloody point of a revolution is to declare that you’re no longer subject to the laws of the people who governed you in the past. To say “Oh, but those laws, yeah, we’ll obey them and allow you to enforce them” would have been political suicide–either to the politicians or to the nation, one or the other. Citizens of the USA were not citizens of Britain, and a very large number of people died to make it so. If the USA had left open that door it would have been kicked in. Remember, we’re talking about a war in which the British sacked and burned our capital; this was not a minor ado in the hinterlands, but turned into almost an existential war for the USA.
I think you DRASTICALLY under-estimate what it means to revolt, both for the parent and daughter nation. In 1812 that wound was still very raw; to allow the British to enforce British laws on American citizens would have been to abandon the Revolution. For those loyal to the USA it would have meant that all they worked for was for naught. For those loyal to the British, it would have meant that there were a whole bunch of traitors that needed to decorate nearby trees. The path of least bloodshed, once “Britain recognizes that the USA is independent” is off the table, was to force Britian to recognize our independence–again. Any other path would have lead to…well, look at Ireland.
Third, the USA tried to play nice. Deserters and criminals were turned over to Britain. If either nation had a desire to gracefully bow out of this competition before bullets started flying, they had ample opportunity. The USA went as far is she could without losing face with the international community, and the British didn’t stop. I don’t mean to paint the USA as angels and the British as devils here; it’s really complicated, and the USA was hammering out its stance on such issues, making it worse than it normally would be. But these people weren’t morons, and olive branches were offered. They were just refused.
No, they couldn’t. To allow another nation to KIDNAP YOUR CITIZENS and FORCE THEM TO FIGHT FOR THE OTHER NATION, against nations that your own may in fact be on friendly terms with, is such an egregious violation of sovereignty that it would be impossible to maintain even the pretense that you are independent.
As I pointed out above, under international law, dual nationals can’t use their citizenship of one country to get out of being conscripted by another, and yet we still have independent, sovereign nations. Empirically, then, your argument is false.
They’d have no choice; by admitting that citizens of the USA are citizens of Britain (by allowing that they’re subject to British laws and service in the British military) the USA would have declared themselves an enemy!
Only British citizens were subject to impressment. Some of them were also US citizens, but, as said above, conscripting dual nationals hasn’t led to a collapse in the concept of sovereignty. Literally no-one was claiming that American citizens in general were liable to being conscripted by the British.
Third, the USA tried to play nice. Deserters and criminals were turned over to Britain. If either nation had a desire to gracefully bow out of this competition before bullets started flying, they had ample opportunity. The USA went as far is she could without losing face with the international community, and the British didn’t stop.
The US could always have stopped employing foreign citizens on its merchant ships.
Remember, we’re talking about a war in which the British sacked and burned our capital; this was not a minor ado in the hinterlands, but turned into almost an existential war for the USA.
“We bungled this war so badly that what was meant to be ‘A mere matter of marching’ turned into an existential threat” is not an argument for why going to war was justified.
Absolutely — the half-remembered U.S. nationalist depiction of this war as an unimpeachably righteous struggle of self-defense starts to fall apart the moment you start to poke it with so much as a feather, let alone after it’s been trampled flat by the massive elephant in the room known as “The Attempted U.S. Invasion and Conquest of Canada.”
“dual nationals”
But the USA didn’t view their citizens as dual nationals–and, more significantly, neither did other nations involved in the wars. To accept that American citizens were also British citizens would have meant accepting that the Revolution failed, pure and simple. The was the whole point of the Revolution. No amount of rules-lawyering can change that.
To be clear here, you are not merely misrepresenting how the international community would have reacted, you are directly contradicting US history and foreign policy at the time. The name you’re looking for is Thomas Nash.
“Only British citizens were subject to impressment.”
Your naivety is amusing. That’s the way the law read, but there are ample historic examples of American sailors being pressed into British service (see the Chesapeake-Leopard Affair) that the idea that the law was always followed is historically illiterate.
“The US could always have stopped employing foreign citizens on its merchant ships.”
Even if this were true–and this reveals a significant ignorance of the realities of sailing in the 1800s–the British would have had to agree to stop impressing American sailors as well. They did not.
Quite frankly, I do not believe you have a serious opinion on this matter. And to be clear, I’m hardly saying the USA was saints–obviously they had their own aims here, and weren’t exactly trying their hardest to avoid a confrontation. But the ideas you present are simply false, contract well-documented historical facts, and present a grossly false view of the world at the time.
“The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.”
Do you believe Israel actually wants to reduce civilian casualties in Gaza?
Netanyahu made a speech comparing Palestine to Amalek, and the bible claims that God commanded the utter extermination of Amalek. Israeli policy makes more sense if you assume they want Palestine empty than if you assume they hope to minimize collateral damage.
We even have people talking about the potential value of Palestinian real estate, and not just in Israel. Jared Kushner is openly saying that “Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable” and that Israel should “clean it up”. If Trump wins the next election, and America gives its backing to that level of violence, I don’t think Israel will hesitate for one minute to carry it out.
You can ask about what Netanyahu wants but I don’t think “Israel” is a coherent enough entity to be said to “want” anything specific. (This is true of countries in general, to be clear.)
From the Washington Post yesterday:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/21/israel-netanyahu-schumer-biden-gaza/
Tamar Hermann, a political scientist at the Israel Democracy Institute, said two recent polls done by her group found that about 80 percent of Jewish Israelis believe “Israel should not take into consideration the suffering of the Palestinians as long as hostages are held in Gaza.”
The people of Israel are overwhelmingly supportive of Netanyahu’s heavy handed approach to Gaza. He is unpopular because of his corruption but not for the suffering in Gaza. It appears that many Americans have highly inaccurate notions about what the Israeli voting public actually wants and our foreign policy is suffering as a result.
Looks like I forgot to close the blockquote… well, the part with the two lines on the left is my comment.
I’m a little surprised and disappointed by the fact that the Barbary Wars didn’t even get a mention here, because they bolster the thesis that isolationism just simply isn’t viable–in order to make overseas trade commercially viable in the Mediterranean, the United States ended up having to deploy its navy to force multiple piratical states to tell their corsairs that American ships were off-limits.
(It’s also arguable that said wars partially stemmed from the European conflict going on at the time–had the Great Powers not been busy killing each other, it’s doubtful that the Barbary states would have done as they did.)
And while we’re on the darkness of war and loss, this study by Larry Lewis of the Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence at Center for Naval Analyses on the practical results of the Israeli Defense Forces’ ‘Civilian Harm Reduction’ efforts does with much more rigor what I attempted more briefly a few firesides ago: assessing the IDF’s tactics to determine if they are, in fact, as careful at avoiding excess civilian casualties as they claim. He comes to a similar conclusion: Israel is, in fact, distressingly tolerant of high civilian casualties in Gaza and while the operation to destroy Hamas was justified by Hamas’ attacks, the methods Israel is using are resulting in more civilian death than is necessary.
It’s worth pointing out that, contrary to what the linked article says, the casualty figures coming out of Gaza are almost certainly fake:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-health-ministry-fakes-casualty-numbers
Of course the numbers aren’t real. Hamas is exaggerating civilian deaths, while Israel is downplaying them. If Hamas is simply manipulating numbers, it’s pretty crude–it’d be much easier to simply shift categories (remember, we’re dealing with a terrorist organization; the difference between “civilian” and “combatant” is extremely vague). But such numbers can still be useful. For example, we can assume, as I said, that Israel will downplay civilian casualties, which means their numbers will serve as a lower probable limit. And if Israel is comfortable with a lower limit that’s atrocious, that tells us pretty clearly that they don’t care about civilian casualties. Hamas’ numbers will probably serve as an upper boundary for what they think the world will believe. If their numbers fail to show an atrocious rate of civilian deaths, we can fairly safely assume that such atrocities are rare.
In other words, think about these numbers less as statements about reality, and more as statements about the mentality of the people presenting them, and of what those people think OUR mentality is. Even a lie can be useful data, you just have to handle it really carefully. (I deal with toxic waste for a living, and I’d say you need to deal with it MUCH more cautiously than most people do with toxic waste.)
“Hamas’ numbers will probably serve as an upper boundary for what they think the world will believe.”
That is not a safe assumption. Belligerent parties in conflicts very frequently underestimate civilian casualties on their own side during ongoing conflicts. They rely on institutional data and institutional data will be missing large numbers of people. The “Hamas” numbers in past conflicts have been based on institutional data and outside experts have assessed that pattern as continuing in this conflict.
People’s prejudices seem to be very much in play when it comes to Gaza Health Ministry numbers. They are treated as illegitimate without proof despite them having a historical track record we can assess.
To be fair, even if they have been accurate until now, it’s not certain they would remain so in the face of the extensive disruption caused by the israeli attacks, f.ex.
That said, if the US state department of all people the Gazan numbers to be at least reasonably credible *that probably says something*.
People’s prejudices seem to be very much in play when it comes to Gaza Health Ministry numbers. They are treated as illegitimate without proof despite them having a historical track record we can assess.
Did you even read the article I linked to? It gives several reasons why the numbers are implausible.
All of which are mathematically bunk. I enumerated on the simplest reason on a post that got mega glitched, but the other supposed explanations are tenuous at best. Uncorrelated women and children deaths are consistent with children dying more often to events which adults survive. Women and men deaths can also easily be conflated, particularly across short time frames, without any intent to defraud. It’s evidence of decoupling from reality but that decoupling doesn’t indicate the death toll is wrong.
In essence the professor is lying. Badly. Intentionally. To justify ignoring genocide.
If Hamas is simply manipulating numbers, it’s pretty crude–it’d be much easier to simply shift categories (remember, we’re dealing with a terrorist organization; the difference between “civilian” and “combatant” is extremely vague).
Unless the article I linked to is misrepresenting the data, the reported casualty totals are going up much more regularly than we’d expect, indicating that the totals are indeed being made up, rather than categories simply being shifted around.
My understanding of the conflict does not use sources unless they’re verified by someone other than Hamas.
You’re still completely ignoring that an actively occuring genocide isn’t concluded. Ten percent casualties across a population is more than sufficient to say that the population is the target.
Then they’d be letting aid enter Gaza. They aren’t and are, in fact, firing into crowds seeking aid.
Holy glitch batman. How did that happen?
Ohhh boy.
Okay, so I’ll get this out of the way first; you’re wrong. Very wrong. But the way your wrong is understandable.
The first thing to understand is that we can prevent this, in the future, by being openly skeptical of ethnographic sources from obscure locations when possible. Tablet, from even a cursory glance, has an observable bias.
More pertinently, they’re just outright lying. Full stop. Or really stupid.
Cumulative graphs impose linearity. This occurs in basically all cumulative graphs. Unless a phenomenon is geometric, either accelerating or decelerating in growth, it will appear linear. And the larger timeframe you use the more linear it will become. Even if it is geometric, it will typically just appear linear with a heavy slope until the peak.
For a really simple proof, go look up some historical cumulative death graphs for COVID. Until the vaccine was distributed the data was highly linear. And infection is a geometric growth graph. The only real time cumulative graphs fail to be linear is when the phenomenon has ended or the data has notable outliers.
For a more complex proof, break that frauds data out and view it on a non cumulative graphs. The points will scatter all over the place.
The article used a mathematical transformation that makes all ongoing events look linear then said the linearity means the numbers are lies. They’re super wrong.
Based on the broad collaboration of the death rolls it appears they, in fact, aren’t lying. The reason is that truth is more useful than fiction, here.
It seems as if the pro-Israel position is that Hamas’ overriding incentive is to exaggerate the Gazan civilian death toll as much as possible, in order to maximize the delegitimizing effects of Israel’s actions among international observers… but isn’t the pro-Israel position also that Israel’s assault on Gaza is justified (at least in part) by the imperative to liberate Gazans from the illegitimate and undemocratic rule of Hamas, which is totally and completely responsible for every last bit of the death and destruction currently being inflicted on Gaza by the IDF? Assuming all of the latter were actually true, wouldn’t this provide Hamas with a significant counterincentive to downplay the Gazan civilian death toll as much as possible, in order to minimize the delegitimizing effect of its own actions among ordinary Gazans?
(Of course, it’s also easy to find Israelis in high places arguing that Hamas’ actions do legitimately represent the will of the people of Gaza, when they’re openly trying to justify a policy of mass atrocities and ethnic cleansing… but let’s take the incoherence of the pro-Israel position one contradiction at a time, shall we?)
but isn’t the pro-Israel position also that Israel’s assault on Gaza is justified (at least in part) by the imperative to liberate Gazans from the illegitimate and undemocratic rule of Hamas, which is totally and completely responsible for every last bit of the death and destruction currently being inflicted on Gaza by the IDF?
Maybe some people take that position, but all the pro-Israel arguments I’ve come across centre on stopping Hamas from staging a repeat of October 7.
Assuming all of the latter were actually true, wouldn’t this provide Hamas with a significant counterincentive to downplay the Gazan civilian death toll as much as possible, in order to minimize the delegitimizing effect of its own actions among ordinary Gazans?
Is there any reason to think that the Gazan civilian death toll is actually delegitimising Hamas in the eyes of ordinary Gazans?
I’m not sure how it’d be realistic to expect anyone to have their finger on the pulse of Gazan public opinion under current conditions, but it doesn’t seem like a per se implausible idea — even if we can safely assume that Gazans reject the Israeli attribution of ultimate moral culpability for the current situation (i.e. 100% to Hamas and 0% to Israel) it still seems plausible to imagine “why did you have to go and provoke the army of violently unhinged fascistic sociopaths into murdering us?” as a question one might legitimately ask, especially if one’s entire family had just been murdered by an army of violently unhinged fascistic sociopaths. Not to mention, it’s also well-established by now that Hamas significantly miscalculated in underestimating the Israeli military’s lack of preparedness for the October 7 attack, and had been expecting the attack to do far less damage (especially in civilian areas) than ended up occurring, which presumably would’ve provoked a less brutal Israeli assault in response.
Again, the notion that Hamas is downplaying the Gazan civilian death toll as a play for internal legitimacy is pure speculation, but so is the notion that Hamas is fabricating large numbers of Gazan civilian deaths out of thin air as a play for international sympathy, the latter of which seems far less plausible (given that the Israelis are widely known to rely on these same death toll estimates themselves in their own internal deliberations) and far more morally grotesque.
The brutality of the response and the fact that there are entire established bodies of literature about how brutality doesn’t work give clear lie to the idea that Israel wants to prevent further terrorist attacks, or at least means that they’re too irrational to actually achieve goals, which is arguably worse.
Likewise, if Israel was legitimately trying to avoid casualties and Hamas was forcing civilian deaths anyway then support would naturally move towards alternatives, like the PLO. Israel needs a generation with limited deaths and stable borders to actually stabilize security-at the least-but they can influence who the Palestinian population supports domestically. Because Israels strategy is to keep the PLO from having unified support at all costs, which helps Hamas, Likud, and no one else, that’s not happening. The fact that this strategy is antithetical to peace accurately describes the last two decades there.
violently unhinged fascistic sociopaths
The use of this phrase tells me that you aren’t arguing in good faith here.
The Israeli finance minister is on record arguing for claiming greater Israel, the settler movement Bibi is affiliated with has already started plan to resettle Gaza and is helmed by a woman who directly denied that killing gazan children is wrong, and no, that’s not an exaggeration.
The right wing in Israel are *lunatics*. And they control the government.
It’s one thing for you to disagree with that characterization of the Israeli ideological mainstream, but would you honestly look a Palestinian from Gaza in the eye and somehow try to blame them for making that characterization themselves, given the combined weight of everything Israel has done to them both before and after October 7?
If you’re genuinely unable to engage with the idea that a Palestinian from Gaza might sincerely view Israel’s behavior in such terms (in this example, by way of blaming Hamas for failing to anticipate that its October 7 attack might provoke such an unapologetically disproportionate mass-murderous Israeli response) then between you and me, I don’t think I’m the one who needs to examine their own capacity for good faith here.
If you’re genuinely unable to engage with the idea that a Palestinian from Gaza might sincerely view Israel’s behavior in such terms (in this example, by way of blaming Hamas for failing to anticipate that its October 7 attack might provoke such an unapologetically disproportionate mass-murderous Israeli response) then between you and me, I don’t think I’m the one who needs to examine their own capacity for good faith here.
Well, let’s start by looking at Hamas’ expressed positions on the whole Israeli situation:
“Article 6: The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned.”
“Article 7: Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”
“Article 8: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.”
“Article 11: The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgement Day. This being so, who could claim to have the right to represent Moslem generations till Judgement Day?
This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement.”
“Article 12: Nationalism, from the point of view of the Islamic Resistance Movement, is part of the religious creed. Nothing in nationalism is more significant or deeper than in the case when an enemy should tread Moslem land. Resisting and quelling the enemy become the individual duty of every Moslem, male or female. A woman can go out to fight the enemy without her husband’s permission, and so does the slave: without his master’s permission.”
“Article 13: Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement… There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”
“Article 15: The day that enemies usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.”
Source: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
And let’s not forget that Hamas is in power because it was democratically elected in 2006.
So, some questions:
(1) Why is it Israel that gets described as “unapologetically disproportionate mass-murderous”, and not the side which rejects the possibility of a compromise or peaceful settlement and openly calls for genocide?
(2) What, in your view, would be a “proportionate” response to an opponent who openly wants to commit genocide against you?
(3) Why is all the blame being laid on Israel here, and not on the people who elected a pro-genocide government?
(4) Why would people elect a pro-genocide, anti-peace party if they really just wanted to be left in prace?
(5) Do you have literally any evidence that Palestinians in general blame Hamas or are discontented with its actions, or is this just “Well of course, with Saddam gone, the Iraqi people will joyfully embrace secular liberal democracy! Everybody wants their country to be just like America” all over again?
1) the Israeli right is just as bad, and elections are held more often than “before the average Israeli was born or could vote”.
2) destroying that opponent. But, in the same way that victory against Japan didn’t require destroying the Japanese people, defeating a terrorist group does not involve collective reprisal.
Also, who cares about proportional responses? That’s for rational actors and geopolitics. Not morality or warfare.
3) because Israel also elected a pro genocide government, and controls the security situation.
4) because Israel had indicated it’d never respect the pro peace anti genocide party and funded the opposition.
5) Israel is shooting all the journalists that could provide that evidence. It’s also not relevant to the thesis.
This isn’t a conflict with only two sides. But because the Zionist settler movement/party meaningfully created both of the genocidal parties or helped put them in power, and notably *is the powerful one with us backing*, I first blame them.
Hey Bret, have you played Terra Invicta? It’s not exactly history but based on other games you’ve talked about it certainly seems up your alley, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, either here or on Twitter or elsewhere.
I suppose one could also add that one of the reasons for the failure of the League of Nations, and eventually the rise of revanchist states, was isolationists in Congress opposing Wilson’s internationalism
Adam Tooze in the deluge holds Wilson as the primary party responsible for the failure of the post WWI liberal world order. Wilson’s internationalism was not the open handed internationalism of the US post WWII. He denounced the militarism of Europe but didn’t abandon the notion of the US continuing to play it’s hand to the hilt. In particular this created a monetary crisis that was devastating to the young democracies created in the aftermath of the war.
The opening decades of the 20th century were a somewhat reactionary period in the US, in particular on racial matters. This makes it easy for us to overlook the fact that in the world outside the US there was a liberal groundswell. It’s not just that new governments were created in Europe after WWI, it’s that politics in general moved much towards the notions of democratic legitimacy both inside and outside Europe. Even in colonial empires where there was no democracy there was the emergence of educated middle classes among the colonized people who were advocating and laying the groundwork for the same rights among their own people.
The new governments in Europe were not particularly liberal, though, even before fascism grew in popularity. Poland had Sanacja, for example, detaining people without trial in one of the first concentration camps in Europe. The first president of Lithuania eventually led a coup d’etat that turned him into a dictator. In Latvia, it was the prime minister that did the same thing 8 years later, and in Estonia it was also the president. Hungary went authoritarian almost from the get-go. And so on.
Sanacja was not perfect but then the anti-Dreyfusards were hardly perfect either. The question I say is where the battlegrounds were. In the 1890s France was the battleground between liberalism and anti-liberalism while Polish liberalism was a distant dream that would first require the weakening of German and Russian imperialism. In the 1920s liberalism was firmly established in France while Poland was the battleground between liberalism and anti-liberalism. If counter productive trade policies had not killed the young shoots of of democracy then perhaps in another couple of decades Poland could have firmly moved into the liberal camp like France and the frontier could have moved to other places.
Finland remained democratic during 1930’s and WWII, so I am writing from a privileged perspective, but in general, I’d say that independence was problematic from liberal point of view. The people who brought it about were definitely not very liberal: they were nationalists and well versed in conspiratorial movements. People who had learned to disregard law for the sake of greater good. This is not conducive to actual democracy.
Even in Finland, where we had had parliamentary politics for 50 years before independence, getting the freedom fighters who had been the vanguard of independence side-lined and the state controlled by the reasonable liberals and social democrats who were accustomed to battling it out in the parliament, in the courts and at the polls.
In Finland, we had a right-wing coup attempt in 1932. The then president, an old nationalist freedom fighter, saved the republic by proclaiming in the radio: “I have fought my whole life for legality, and shall not see it destroyed”, then deploying the army against the attempt. The coup dried up without actual fighting. The respect for the law prevailed, and we continued to have free elections afterwards.
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand (a spectacular figure we must discuss sometime)
Please! If for no other reason than that I’ve long wanted to do a Star Wars expy inspired by the French Revolution, with Napoleon as Darth Vader and Talleyrand as Palpatine. Napoleonic Wars technology, so no starships, but not set in RW France, either. It…has promise, I think; Talleyrand as a With Lord may do the real person a disservice, but it’s damned evocative considering how he kept insinuating himself into events even at the Congress of Vienna.
All my homies hate Talleyrand.
There is the problem that SW universe lacks nations. The key to Talleyrand is that he was a Frenchman, loyal to his nation as a concept. He managed to get France undissolved at the Congress of Vienna mainly because the other great powers did recognise the legitimacy of France as a concept. The idea of making it into an Italy or a Germany with a hundred small duchies was not really something anyone considered, so everyone was ready to deal with Talleyrand. You needed not to treat France too badly, because you’d need to deal with it later. (To be honest, the Congress of Vienna was really successful: they created a European system that lasted until 1870’s.)
In Star Wars universe, you don’t have anything akin to France. You have individual planets, but they are more like US cities or states. There is no large, militaristic subarea of the old Republic thst would be joined by a common language, culture and history, let alone something that would be recognised as legitimate.
I don’t know. I’d say that the Naboo, the Gungans, and the Mandalorians seem to be, if not nations then at least something very similar to nations.
In Star Wars universe, you don’t have anything akin to France. You have individual planets, but they are more like US cities or states.
I’d say the planets are more like nations, with the Republic as a kind of UN analogue.
Looks like the main reason Isolationism failed for the US was the importance of trade. So if the US economy changed in a direction that made trade less and less important, Isolationism might work. Unlikely, but not impossible.
Or, if another country became more powerful than the United States and took on the role of guaranteeing undisturbed global trade.
Which makes me wonder: should we refer to Switzerland as successfully Isolationist? It even is a small nation. Other countries, in particular those surrounding it, do the heavy lifting of keeping it safe by keeping themselves safe.
I’d say its lucky.
“Neutral”, or perhaps “long-term neutral” seems like a better term than “isolationist?” Switzerland certainly interacts with its neighbors in plenty of other ways. But, yes, Switzerland was successfully neutral for long periods of history- during the Cold War several other countries in Europe were also successfully neutral, including Finland, Austria and Yugoslavia, so it shows that neutrality can certainly be done.
Albania after 1961 was maybe a better example of *isolationist*, since they were hostile to both superpowers, and allied to China instead (they withdrew formally from the Warsaw Pact after 1968). They didn’t get invaded or anything, but they did pay a heavy economic price for it (especially after they broke with China as well in 1978).
The neutrality in cases of Yugoslavia or Finland was more about maintaining independence than specifically about avoiding international entanglements.
Finland, for example, avoided getting occupied and becoming communist by pursuing a very careful policy of balancing. This was mainly possible because Sweden, on her Western border, maintained neutrality and balancing, too: it was clear that a clear infringement of Finnish independence or the loss of her democratic system of government would have led Sweden to join NATO. For Yugoslavia, the stakes were a bit different, but still, it was mainly about the European balance of power, and the fact that Yugoslavs didn’t want to get their policies dictated by Moscow.
Oh, I agree, I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. That’s part of why I wanted to distinguish “neutrality” from “isolationism”.
Finland and Yugoslavia were, as you say, both making smart strategic decisions in staying neutral (and in Yugoslavia’s case I think they briefly considered joining a mutual defence pact with capitalist Greece and Turkey, until Stalin’s death made that unnecessary). In Albania’s case I think ideology played a bigger role, and they did pay a price for their ideological isolationism.
Switzerland was overrun by Napolean during the Napoleanic wars.
By the time of WWI and WWII, Switzerland was a much wealthier country that spent a fair amount of that wealth fortifying their mountains, making itself a tough problem for any invader.
Also while the British Navy might have controlled the seas in the 19th century, the Swiss generally had multiple countries to trade with, with the exception of the period in WWII when it was surrounded by Axis controlled countries.
Switzerland is not at all isolationist in the interwar American sense. The interwar American sense is “we don’t do international organizations.” It’s a kind of vulgar souverainism. The Swiss sense is “we invite other countries to convene on our territory to negotiate human rights treaties and mitigate the horrors of war”; the Geneva Conventions were passed at the behest of Switzerland. Sweden has a similar history of neutrality leading to taking a role in promoting human rights; during WW2, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg pressured minor Axis nations not to participate in the Holocaust, with a fair amount of success.
This mentality has persisted to this day, and in the 2010s, Sweden and Switzerland were the top two developed countries in how many asylum seekers they were taking in per capita (both viewing it as a matter of international human rights); notable, Switzerland was doing this even while having an extremely negative domestic discourse about migrants, much more so than (say) Germany, so it’s not reducible to some kind of domestic anti-racism or to a neoliberal belief that immigrants are good for growth.
Same goes for Yugoslavia during the Cold War- their neutrality was the active kind where they still took an active role in international affairs, specifically in the Non-Aligned Movement and cooperation with developing countries.
That is really surprising to me about Switzerland and the refugees though, for the reasons you mention. I’m aware that Swiss public opinion is deeply unhappy about immigration in general, at least by the standards of Western European countries, so it’s interesting they still took a lot of refugees in spite of that.
I’m more familiar with the discourse on this in Sweden, but Switzerland appears similar. The way it works is, human rights activists in Sweden care about things in direct proportion to their physical distance from Sweden.
This is an artifact of the Cold War, in which Sweden was not supposed to take sides but it was clear that within Europe (especially Northern Europe), all the atrocities were committed by one side. In the same era, Sweden’s history in WW2 and the early Cold War also gave it some gravitas within the UN (cf. Dag Hammarskjöld), but for reasons of foreign policy realism it only gave it actual power in remote conflicts involving geopolitically unimportant belligerents.
The upshot is that refugee admission in Sweden and Switzerland is viewed as a human rights obligation in foreign affairs, alongside giving large amounts of foreign aid (Sweden is one of the top donors relative to GDP; Switzerland is fairly high as well, though not as starkly). The predominant attitude is “those people are destroying our perfect society but it’s our duty to bear the burden.” In contrast, there’s not much domestic anti-racist activism.
I wouldn’t say that Hellenistic armies failed, so much as were defeated by a superior system, the Roman Legion. There’s a distinction there.
Also, I’m not sure if I would characterize the Cold War as the “Long Peace”, not when there was constant tension, proxy wars, and the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over those times like a dark cloud on the horizon. That said, it was a long sabbatical from all-out conflagration, and there’s something to be said for that, although credit for that goes mainly to nuclear deterrence/MAD.
“The Long Peace” is somewhat of a misnomer, but it’s pretty clearly established that the latter half of the 20th century was relatively peaceful, even in pretty war-torn areas. It’s not that war disappeared, it’s just that there was *less* of it than in say, the 19th century. Much less earlier time-periods. We’re not only lacking the major conflagrations, there’s also a lot less brushfires (though they’re not absent!)
For Europe it’s exceptional, but even for Africa say, there’s a lot less warfare going on than either during or before colonialism.
Try explaining in a discussion about the American Civil War that the United States is NOT an autarky, and never has been. (If nothing else in the 1860’s Coffee had to be imported)
Especially if the subject of European Intervention comes up. (If Britain simply cut off the supply of Indian Saltpetre the Union would be an inclined plane wrapped helically around an axis)
Not to mention that the Confederacy policy about the naval superiority of the Union was to trust “King Cotton”, that is, the reliance of the European nations on the slave-produced US cotton that would force them to get involved to avoid economic harm from the falling supply. As it turned out, hoping the British Royal Navy would break up the Union blockade was a mistake, because the Brits just forced Egypt to plant cotton, instead of getting involved.
Not that the failure of King Cotton stops people suggesting that “King Corn” will save the Union if other countries do decide to get involved.
You do realise the American Civil War was before Egypt was colonised by Britain?
So, it would be more accurate to claim that the Egyptians had used the price increases caused by the American Civil War to get rich by selling cotton.
However, I had read* that in response to the ‘cotton supply shock’ caused by the ACW, British merchants had encouraged subsistence farmers in Brazil to grow cotton; though I do not know the details of what went on in India at the time.
* Here: https://web.archive.org/web/20161118054539/https://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/11/10/slavery_and_industrialism/
I have several episodes on this topic here: https://uscivilwar.substack.com/
Episode 61 in particular relates to the issue.
Aside from the obvious importance of agricultural export markets to the economic viability of the antebellum South, the Northeast was also a thoroughly dependent on global trade — for instance, much of the seed capital for early New England industrialization also came from opium smuggling into China. (A neat little microcosm of the connections here is the supercargo of the first U.S. merchant ship to successfully complete a trade run to China, a Revolutionary War commander named Samuel Shaw, whose family subsequently made a fortune in the Chinese opium trade via his nephew Robert Gould Shaw, grandfather to the namesake portrayed by Matthew Broderick.)
While not a major European war I think you could say that the same kind of economic impacts of trade are what got the US into the Barbary Wars – if we’d had a n isolated economy we could have just banned US ships from those waters and ignored what happened to any who violated our ban. But again weren’t willing to cripple parts of the economy by actually isolating – and so went to war.
“Those waters” were actually pretty large. The Atlantic has no natural boundaries in the middle, and the Barbary pirates had ocean-capable ships. They prowled on the Atlantic widely, from the Caribbean to Iceland and Ireland, so you could meet a corsair ship anywhere after losing the sight of Long Island. (You should remember that “ocean-capable ship” need not be large. You can take a merchant ship with a fishing boat.)
The point is that the Barbary nations had an understanding that they were in war with everyone with whom they didn’t have a truce. (This is pretty routine view of classic Islamic jurisprudence.) So, you could keep your ships safe by paying them. For example, Sweden paid regularly rather large sums to the Barbary states to keep her merchantmen intact, even if the Swedish shipping was mostly confined to the North Sea.
Hoping no one takes offence, I am going to contrast this to the extremely-legalistic view above regarding the War of 1812. From their own cultural and legal perspective, the Corsairs had the “right” to attack any ship and enslave any person barring said treaties. However, the U.S. was under absolutely no particular moral or legal rule to respect that tradition.
It’s basically the same story as the War of 1812. Whether it’s abstractly right or abstractly wrong, the United States decided not to allow another party to claim power of its citizens abroad. And, the United States sincerely believed the claimed power in both cases to be illegitimately-applied.
I actually agree with you here. The fact that the barbary piracy had a justification and rationale in Islamic law is not really a defence: if your ideology means that you are in a constant war with anyone who doesn’t pay you tribute, then you run a risk of being justifiably attacked, too. War is a two-way street, and the US attacks on the Barbary states were eminently justified.
The difference to the War of 1812 was that USA actually shared large parts of maritime law with the British, and they did and do consider it justified to inspect foreign merchantmen when there is sufficient reason for that.
This is a case where I’m not sure your examples are proving what you think they’re proving. Yes, in each case the US was *eventually* pulled into the general war. But to mangle a Keynes quote, eventually we’re all dead. Buying time and slowing things down has a value. By entering these conflicts late, the US paid less of a price and took less damage once they were eventually resolved. I sure don’t wish the US had gotten into WWI two years earlier.
If the US had entered earlier, it might also have ended earlier.
By formally and totally entering those conflicts, you mean. American merchants and merchant-sailors were under attack in WW1 and WW2 from an early point, years before the nation officially entered the conflicts.
Yes, that is exactly what I mean.
But I think that’s Dr. Deveraux’s point. America was involved in these conflicts from day one, and pretending that there was a point where we weren’t impacted, that there was a time where Americans operating for America weren’t under fire, is just wrong.
The fun thing is that the British also wanted to stifle American manufacture, by dumping if necessary, but their own naval actions spurred its development. And once it was developing, various Americans who had thought it would be better for Americans to farm instead found that manufacturing did not have the detrimental effects on society that it had in Europe, where people were abjectly dependent on it, and so stopped opposing it. (Like Jefferson.)
I’m not totally convinced by the historical case against isolationism. The USA’s geographical extent at the time of the first two examples was quite different from that being currently used to justify isolationism. Furthermore, the War of 1812 was not an example of the USA being dragged into a general European war. It was a war of choice launched because a sufficiency of politicians – who had a variety of motives ranging from the preservation of American honour to imperial expansion – were willing to vote for it, in part because they thought it was a propitious time to attack the UK: Napoleon was at the height of his power and about to overwhelm Russia and naïve individuals like Jefferson had convinced themselves that taking Canada was “a mere matter of marching”. A year later circumstances had changed (for example the retreat from Moscow and Castlereagh’s June 16th announcement) and the vote might have gone another way.
As for World War 2, I do not believe that Hitler would have declared war on the USA but for Pearl Harbor, and this Japanese attack was a (desperate and foolish) response to Roosevelt’s very much non isolationist policy. Would the Pacific War have happened if there had been no embargo and Japan had been allowed a free hand in China? I am not arguing in favour of isolationism, just that isolationism could have kept the USA out of the war as long as the country was prepared to turn a blind eye to evil behaviour in foreign lands. And this isolationism need only have applied to Japan; support for the UK in Europe could still have continued.
Hitler (rightly) saw Lend-Lease as a de facto declaration of war. It put the US’ huge financial resources behind Britain, removing a major constraint. Throw in the Hemispheric Exclusion Zones, US warnings to pro-Axis neutrals such as Spain about the consequences of entering the war, the pace and extent of US re-arming and the depth of staff talks between the US and Britain and it was clear that war was only a matter of a short time. Moreover, US public opinion had shifted significantly away from isolation. There were large majorities in favour of support for Britain (and later the USSR) and for delivering this support even if it meant fighting.
‘…Driven by the perceived failures of the post-WWI peace, Americans went into the 1930s quite adamant that they would avoid the next major European War. But even before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war on the United States just a few days later, the tensions pulling the United States into the conflict were significant and once again based on the United States’ strong economic connection to Europe. The United States Navy had, in fact, been conducting ‘neutrality patrols‘ to protect American shipping beginning in 1939 and that effort escalated as German U-Boat attacks mounted. The alternative would have been burning down the Anglo-American trade relationship and in the process self-destructing a decent portion of the American economy, an obvious non-starter…’
Nevertheless, it was Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany who declared war on the USA, forcing it to take a side. On USA neutrality patrols, that seems to me the equivalent of the owner of a gun store putting a security guard on the front door, to try and send a deterrent message that people in the neighbourhood should not take liberties. (Although Imperial Japan maybe read the state of isolationism as weakness of willpower and the neutrality patrols as an ‘act tough’ bluff.)
On the subject of historical duplication, I sometimes wonder if in a thousand years anyone will believe that there was a World War 1 and a World War 2. And if so, will they believe that in both cases an autocratic German states made the same blunder by opening un-necessary hostilities against the United States? Or will they conclude that historians copied events from one war onto the next, and then “punched up” to story?
Adrian Goldsworthy points out in one of books that, if we had the same amount of archeological evidence for the twentieth century as we do for the third, neither the world wars nor the Great Depression would show up. The century would look like one of continually-increasing prosperity, and contemporary reports of huge wars and economic crises would be dismissed as exaggeration.
Ehh…. That surely depends doesen’t it? There’d be a whole lot of shells scattered all across northern France, f.ex.
“If we had the same amount of archaeological evidence for the twentieth century as we do for the third” implies, inter alia, that most such relicts have long since rusted away or been otherwise lost.
Somebody once wrote a very good essay that the WWII would be implausible for the dramatis personae: having the “Iron-wringer” and “Steel man” together with the traditionalist “Church hill” fight against a smallish, demagogic politician whose name means roughly “underground river” with the subject-ending -er is too on the point. Hirohito being another small guy is a clear duplication, and him being triumphed over by a toweringly tall MacArthur, i.e. son of Arthur, the legendary British king, is a clear legend. Then, the invention and first use of the atomic bomb as the end of the war is a clear origin myth.
Oh yeah, the Iron-Wringer and Steel-Man fought a war against a common enemy, helped by a Church-Hill and King Arthur. Iron-Wringer developed the atomic bomb, used it, and the war was over. Then, the Iron-Wringer and the Steel-Man started to quarrel, and the Steel-Man stole the secret of the Atom bomb and made them for himself, too, while the Church-hill slowly lost significance. This would be best studied via psychoanalytic interpretation, don’t you think?
That’s hilarious- do you remember the original article so I can look it up?
This is one copy of the original “WWII as History Channel show” https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/world-war-ii-most-implausible-plot-ever/
There was more elaboration in the comments of the original Livejournal post, but it’s been locked or deleted, so you’d have to try raiding archive dot org for old copies.
Or, heck, here you go. Extra final paragraph, plus comments. https://web.archive.org/web/20100715073009/http://squid314.livejournal.com/275614.html
Thanks a lot! I had searched for it, but couldn’t find it.
Who is the “iron wringer”? I assumed from context that you were referring to Roosevelt, but looking up his name the etymology appears to be something like “by the rose field”.
I think it is Eisenhower.
That’s also my guess. But it was my understanding that Eisenhower means Iron Miner, or, more literally, Iron Cutter.
> “Then, the invention and first use of the atomic bomb as the end of the war is a clear origin myth.”
The “invention” of the atomic bomb *is* a myth though. The Manhattan project was 5% invention and 95% construction and engineering work for an industrial crash program. The scientific community had been working on the general science for decades, they just suddenly had the budget and the motivation to make it happen quickly. This is why when other nations wanted to duplicate the American success they could do so at a fraction of the cost by just taking a little longer.
The WWII that gets recounted in the pop history is not the WWII of actual fact. It gets distorted for entertainment, ideology and just plain laziness. Even with ample historical records it takes effort and caution to separate the wheat from the chaff.
“general science for decades” — what.
The atomic bomb depends on nuclear fission. No fission, no bomb. Fission was discovered in Dec 1938. It was explained (by Lise Meitner and her nephew) in Jan 1939. The first chain reaction was Fermi’s Chicago Pile, Dec 1942. The first bomb, Trinity, July 1945. That’s 6.5 years from “huh, that’s funny” to a bomb. Not decades.
Radioactivity had been known since 1898. Stellar fusion had been modeled in the 1920s, and lab fusion done in 1932. But those don’t give you Hiroshima.
Leo Szilard did speculate about nuclear chain reactions in 1934, but it was completely speculative. In November 1938 there was no budget or motivation that could have been conceived of as leading to an atomic bomb; the key element (heh) simply was not there.
To elaborate nuclear decay had been known forever, and alpha, beta, etc. emissions known for a while. It was also speculated that fusion could sustain a chain reaction because the extra heat and reaction products generated by fusing particles could then induce fusion of other particles. This was known to happen in nature and speculation as to how to do it in a lab were abundant.
*Fission* was new. Fission refers to the property if atoms to split in two, not just decay and shoot off particles. The second it was shown that radium could undergo fission and produce neutrons everyone instantly thought of a runaway reaction…which happened in 1939.
We legitimately went from “hey, maybe….” To not only splitting it in a chain reaction, but production of enough enriched material to make a bomb, in a decade. Then teller designed a device to cause a fusion chain reaction off a fission fireball.
This bears repeating. It took six years to go from fission being discovered to a bomb, and twelve years to revisit fusion and successfully design a H bomb.
The Manhattan project was a scientific masterpiece rivaled solely by the moon landings in the history of the world. The skepticism above is baffling. The reason it was cheaper to immigrate is that nuclear seed material is a huge help, and science is about discovering replicable phenomenon. Also the Soviets stole all the research.
Just want to clarify that my reply got hammered with phone typos. Notably, radium doesn’t undergo fission, neutron radiation induced fission in heavy atoms, primarily uranium isotopes. And I meant immitate, not immigrate, in regards to why the Soviets and friends made bombs on the cheap.
Honestly you don’t need decades of scientific work to go off of, the scientific work can be greatly accelerated by funding and pressure to produce results with “asap” deadlines. Both academia and industry research is plagued with lack of direction and funding for topics that aren’t hot shit right now, which isn’t really a systemic problem as much as a fact of human nature that when we pool resources together, nobody wants to see them pooled together to be thrown into any hobby projects, but we want to benefit from that soon and in ways that are already clear. War effort and the fact it was actually possible (a fruitless endeavour could’ve taken forever) made it happen in a few years.
This is a feat unlikely to be replicated today, as despite the host’s “murica fuck yeah” views, the country’s far too divided to make a consistent war effort. (This is also demonstrated by his Twitter discourse with other Americans.) Not that it couldn’t be accomplished, but it’d take way longer. One national will can do a hell of a lot.
For a more recent high-effort ‘feat’, don’t forget the SARS2/COVID-19 vaccines. We went from “huh, new virus” to putting shots in arms in less than a year. And not just one vaccine, multiple ones with different technologies.
Part of that was luck; people had been working on mRNA and viral vector vaccines for years, in hope of getting a “plug and play” vaccine system, and both techs had just recently reached key parts of maturity (like nanolipids so RNA lasts long enough to get into cells.) But China’s conventional killed-virus vaccines were developed about as quickly too. There’s also the (mixed) luck of the virus being somewhat vaccinatable against.
But still, focused effort, and the will to gamble on success (e.g. building up production lines even before approval) accomplished a lot. Kind of amazing when you’re used to it taking years to build a train, or to fail to build a bike lane.
“The atomic bomb depends on nuclear fission. No fission, no bomb. Fission was discovered in Dec 1938”
December 1938 is before the start of the Manhattan project. The discovery of fission and it’s subsequent demonstration with the Chicago Pile were the result of decades of work. The scientific work between Rutherford’s experimentation and the Chicago Pile was considerably greater then the scientific work between the Chicago Pile and the Trinity test. The enormous amount of work leading up to the Trinity test was not scientific work, it was industrial R&D.
TV shows can be quite hit or miss about their scientific accuracy but the show Stargate:Atlantis had a nice pithy quote that is right on the money:
“Major, most of my high school chess team could design an A bomb. The actual hard part is having sufficient fissile materials of an appropriate grade.”
Once again, the myth of the A-bomb is that it was some breakthrough of scientific invention. The work of invention was almost incidental. The main work was an industrial crash program. And that is something that is far less exotic, we are familiar with the notion that a new industry might be built up in a few years.
“For a more recent high-effort ‘feat’, don’t forget the SARS2/COVID-19 vaccines. We went from “huh, new virus” to putting shots in arms in less than a year. And not just one vaccine, multiple ones with different technologies.”
Which again, is the realization of decades of work. The covid vaccines were them applying cutting edge techniques in microbiology, they weren’t inventing those techniques for the covid vaccines. If they were inventing the techniques, it would have taken a lot longer! Absent covid, those techniques still would have been used with less schedule urgency. If we were talking about the covid vaccines the way we talk about the manhattan project, people would just say that they invented a new kind of vaccine because of covid.
The Neutrality Patrols were a bit more than just putting a security guard on the front door. The US lost two destroyers while escorting convoys in October of 1941.
Furthermore, Wikipedia tells me that, while they would perfunctorily report British ships in the Gulf of Mexico, most of what the Neutrality Patrols did was shadow German shipping and report it to the British Royal Navy. That’s not far different in kind from NATO flying AWACS aircraft just over the border from Ukraine and relaying the data to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
As far as the security guard metaphor goes the neutrality patrols were more like putting a bunch of guards in place several streets over where some dudes were brawling and telling the guards to do all they could to get between them and intimidate one of the brawling parties while protecting the other.
In general, everyone in here arguing about Israel/Palestine makes elementary errors that would take far too much time to go over one at a time, to the point that most Israelis would find these comments to be hilariously ignorant even by people who agreed with them on the general positioning. In no particular order, this covers people here arguing over Palestinian casualties, the role of Likud in Israel, Israelis’ opinions of the war, Israeli military history, and human rights issues on both sides. Might as well start trying to explain Finnish politics to A Finnish Reader while not knowing any Finnish, reading any Finnish news, or reading any Finnish history.
There’s generally some pretty cool military history that can be learned from modern Israel, including in particular Bret’s general interest in how armies recreate the values of the society they come from (and we’re seeing that on both sides, even at the level of the specifics of the ongoing hostage negotiations). The stuff people argue about is not at all interesting, because it’s completely boring unless you have a special interest in urban warfare and combat engineering.
I have seen Russians make precisely the same arguments you are making here. Oh Russia isn’t an aggressor, you Americans/Asians/Europeans/Poles/Finns are hilariously misinformed about the situation. It’s an extremely effective bit of motivated reasoning for people who do not wish to consider uncomfortable criticism from outside sources.
You’re assuming I’m saying this in defense of Israel. I’m not. As I said, Israelis would find all the arguments made here, including by people with the same general positioning, to be uninformed. For example, in a long thread here a bunch of people who have strong opinions about the Gaza Ministry of Health numbers seem unaware that the IDF finds these numbers broadly reliable, enough to use them to base its own estimates of combatant and noncombatant deaths. I can go over other whoppers made by both sides here if you care.
In the case of the Ukraine war, usually the informed Ukraine watchers read both Russian and Ukrainian sources – not official Russian media because it is trash (which Israeli media is not), but milbloggers who are more forthright about the problems of the Russian Armed Forces than official sources are. At the end of last year, it was noted that the reader fed on a diet of Russian milbloggers would have understood military events in 2023 much better than one fed on a diet of NAFO – and this was noted in pro-Ukraine spaces, analyzing the failure of the counteroffensive. It’s understood that the Kremlin is compulsively dishonest but also that it’s necessary to rely on Russian sources and read them critically to understand what’s going on in the war, even purely at the level of “there’s an offensive here.” In contrast, in the Gaza war, Arab media sources have made up multiple full ground assaults on Rafah, and then when the IDF announced the hostage rescue, it took hours for pro-Palestine posters to even believe that, because they somehow thought that Israeli media could make up hostages (some conspiracists still claim that).
I am not the one you replied to, but I would be interested in hearing your overall take on the mistakes made here.
It is worth noting that many independent commentators were giving valid info on the state of the counteroffensive. It’s been possible to avoid Russian sources and be informed.
I would also like to clarify that the IDFs casualty figures are all but explicitly based on assuming every male over 14 is a member of Hamas and that Rafah has been a target for weeks, meaning it’s not a huge sin to jump the gun when an invasion is likely. I still agree that the talking points are unrelated to even propaganda sources.
> “It is worth noting that many independent commentators were giving valid info on the state of the counteroffensive.”
Yeah, from where I was sitting the conversation was about whether or not the pivot to positional warfare was going to work out or not. And given the limited information we had due to operational security, it’s going to take time to assess that.
The independent commentators were using Russian sources in addition to Ukrainian and NATO sources. (It was similarly noted how during Prigozhin’s attempted coup, social media updates were basically translations of Russian Telegram channels.)
The IDF casualty figures don’t make any such assumption; of note, American estimates of how many of the 32,000 dead were combatants are not much lower than Israeli ones, and even the Hamas estimate is not that much lower (at one point Hamas admitted it was 6,000; add up Islamic Jihad and you get to not much lower than the American estimate).
And re Rafah, it’s notable that in February, Israeli leftists, based on our knowledge of internal Israeli politics, expressed skepticism that there would be a full ground attack; Bibi kept saying he’d launch it, but the IDF (as described in Israeli media) seemed skeptical, and the consensus was that Bibi doesn’t want to attack Rafah but to be able to say that he could have defeated Hamas for good but was prevented from doing so by Biden, leftists, the courts, or the IDF. A month and a half later, no invasion of Rafah. That’s what I mean when I say it’s important to be able to critically read Israeli sources (and Palestinian ones, but the people saying “Israelis are comparing Palestinians to Amalek” are not relying on Palestinian sources but on misreads of Israeli ones).
Alon the Israeli estimates of Hamas dead are computed directly from population statistics. About 35% of those killed are men and boys over 14. The last estimate of Hamas deaths from IDF was 10000. At the time total deaths was just under 30000.
IDF is estimating Hamas deaths by ripping the adult and teenage boy population out of the total. That’s just what’s happening, it’s crystal clear and completely incorrect. American officials may be parroting the same lies, but they are lies.
Re; Rafah okay, but let’s be clear that Bibi might very well order the IDF to invade Rafah now.
And re; milbliggers, those bloggers use a variety of sources including, because it’s 2024, chartered(?) satellite photos. No one trusts Russian sources, but they do read them.
The same people who called it right on Rafah are still saying Bibi doesn’t want to do it but rather wants to blame failure on other people.
Then there’s other areas where you and others don’t so much rely on Palestinian sources (e.g. polls of Palestinian public opinion, what Gazan dissidents say, analyzing Hamas statements, etc.) but on badly misreading Israeli ones. The Amalek quote is another example: Bibi said “remember what Amalek did to you,” which quote is literally etched on the walls of the ICJ, and does not refer to the Palestinians in Israeli discourse but to any force that is killing large numbers of Jews, e.g. Hamas after 7.10.
The 35% men figure is what the IDF and others don’t believe. The Gaza MoH figures are considered reliable for overall deaths and not for the combatant/noncombatant breakdown, which it doesn’t even try to produce. That’s the importance of the Hamas admission that it lost 6,000 fighters plus other indicators that it really is about 1:2 between combatants and noncombatants (for example, it’s consistent with previous Gaza wars).
Alon, I’m not sure what position you’re actually taking re; casualties, but to be clear the ratio of Hamas fighters to civilians can’t be 1:2 because that’s the ratio of *males* killed to all demographics, and Hamas fighters are definitionally going to be a fraction of total men. I mean, technically women can be combatants too, but unless Hamas manifested gender equality while I wasn’t looking it won’t make up the shortfall.
That 6000 figure is more reasonable and some hundreds to low thousands of extra fighters not counted is believable, but it’s not going to reach the 11000 figure claimed by Israel and which is needed to reach a 1:2 ratio of combatants to noncombatants. The ratio is somewhere between 1:3 and 1:5, likely 1:4.
On the topic of casualty ratios, it seems germane to note that we don’t have to do the same kind of guesswork about militants versus civilians when it comes to Israeli casualties on October 7: “The final death toll from the attack is now thought to be 695 Israeli civilians, including 36 children, as well as 373 security forces and 71 foreigners, giving a total of 1,139.”
In other words, the confirmed militant-to-civilian kill ratio in the October 7 attack was approximately 1 to 2.05, more or less indistinguishable from the implausibly-charitable estimate being touted by Israel’s defenders in order to make the IDF’s conduct in Gaza appear better.
> “The independent commentators were using Russian sources in addition to Ukrainian and NATO sources.”
From where I was sitting, the only use they were getting out of them was as comedic material.
I’m amused by you pointing out people’s bad assessments of the GHO statistics considering I’m the one in that comment chain who tried to remind people that those statistics are from institutional data and are most likely an underestimate.
> “At the end of last year, it was noted that the reader fed on a diet of Russian milbloggers would have understood military events in 2023 much better than one fed on a diet of NAFO”
Russian milbloggers predicted the counter offensive didn’t go very far in the same way a stopped clock is right twice a day but that does not mean they conveyed a remotely accurate picture. And “NAFO” sources started disseminating robust analysis as soon as the fog of war had cleared. The video essayist Perun had a very clear eyed analysis in November, five months after the start of the offensive, which lays out the successes and failure. He works entirely off of declassified, publicly available information and gives a far better and in depth picture then you’d get from the Russian mil blogger crowd. And of course if you put in the effort you could have gotten much of that information faster it just would have taken more time to sift through the details. Actually making good assessments takes time and we got those good assessments remarkably fast. Claiming the milbloggers is better seems like hyperbolic overreaction.
There’s the old bromide about how the only person you should trust to pick the ponies is the one who has never seen the racetrack. What Israel is doing is depressingly unoriginal in history and the blindness they are exhibiting is part of the all too familiar pattern. This isn’t explaining the nuance of Finnish politics to a Finn because this isn’t nuance; it’s just a story we’ve seen before, including the part where people claim “this time is different”.
Okay, a video essayist could explain the failure of the counteroffensive in November. People reading sources from both sides could explain it in July. That’s the difference.
Alon that’s a fundamental conflation of knowing, saying, and believing something.
Reading Russian sources on July conveyed very little useful information and certainly didn’t let you explain the offensive. Reading Ukrainian sources in July wouldn’t have let you do that. Complete tactical knowledge of everything in the world wouldn’t have let you do that. You’d need to know what American politicians, Ukrainian generals, and Russian generals would do *before they did* to actually know what would happen in July.
The best someone could possibly do it make an educated estimate. Those estimates were generally that Ukraine had an opening but it needed to be fast, well supported by the West, and lucky. That was prescient but caged. Russian commentary was that Ukraine would fail no matter what. That was not, but it was a stronger prediction.
Sometimes, strong predictions that end up right indicate less intelligence than weak predictions that are also valid.
I mean in all your examples, it’s only because America is a great power or being forcibly dragged by British when it’s small. America being middle power coincides with Pax Britannica and the two oceans certainly serves USA well there to halt disruption by European powers. By comparison, Mexico and Brazil both aren’t great powers and they also managed to not dragged into global conflicts because of both oceans.
It often seems like U.S. foreign policy thinkers of a centrist Blob-minded persuasion (i.e. neocons and/or liberal interventionists, po-tay-to po-tah-to) are fond of using the term “isolationism” to equivocate between two very different positions vis-a-vis “foreign entanglements”: a right-wing nationalist argument that foreign interventions are too costly and that we should stop them for our benefit, and a left-wing anti-imperialist argument that such interventions are for our benefit, at the expense of the rest of the world, and that we should stop them for the rest of the world’s benefit. This post is well tuned to addressing the former argument (in so many words: the American way of life isn’t self-reliant and never has been, from its very earliest origins this country has always been dependent on wealth and resources extracted from the rest of the world, so can we please get real and stop deluding ourselves that these “foreign entanglements” are selfless acts of charitable benevolence that cost us money instead of making it?) but it doesn’t really address the latter argument, if anything only reinforces it.
There are libraries’ worth of left-wing writings on these issues, but a particularly evocative articulation of the basic point can be found in an essay on the hypocrisy of Western colonialist anti-fascists (with a sardonic racial slur in its title) written by George Orwell on the eve of World War II:
But Orwell’s main argument, there and elsewhere, was wrong. In “The Road to Wigan Pier” he famously wrote:
Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation–an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes.
He didn’t live to see himself proved wrong, but wrong he unquestionably was. In the twenty years after his death, Britain did indeed throw the empire overboard, and entered an age of unprecedented wealth and welfare, partly as a result. In Orwell’s time, most of the British population already did work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. They’re not the “we” he’s talking to here. The “we” is People Like Us, people who went to university and subscribed to the New Statesman; the very small educated class. They still get to take taxis and eat strawberries and cream and so does pretty much everyone else. The idea of a working-class person taking a taxi to the airport to fly off for her honeymoon in Spain or the Caribbean would have been an insane delusion to Orwell. It’s reality now.
Orwell was a journalist, not an economist, by training and experience – just like Marx – and so while he was excellent at describing problems, he wasn’t good at explaining them or proposing solutions. He thought the Empire was a profit centre for Britain as a whole, just as many other anti-imperialists on the left and pro-imperialists on the right thought. He was wrong. It was a cost centre.
Let’s not compare Marx and Orwell here. One was a thinker of world-historical significance (whatever the flaws in his model, which were real and many, and whatever you think of his solutions and diagnoses). The other was….not, he was a moderately talented essayist with some decent insights, but he wasn’t a world-historical thinker.
British mismanagement of the Indian economy was massive and notorious, so I’m sure you’re right, but I think it’s possible in theory for a colony to be profitable, even if many of them weren’t.
It was a massive profit centre for two centuries. The changes in the world economy and the social structure of Britain brought about by the wars made the empire a net cost – and Britain promptly set about abandoning as much of it as they could. Note that some bits they kept were turned into tax havens, to the continuing benefit of Britain.
It was a massive profit centre for certain individuals. It’s much less clear that it was a profit centre for Britain as a whole.
The overall gdp growth of both is pretty strong evidence that Britain both looted India and profited as a whole, but it’s very hard to prove. Because produce itself wasn’t always transported all the way to Britain not all of the exported goods went there directly, but from my understanding exports of both raw textiles, cotton, spices, and drugs was hugely significant and Indian agricultural exports to other colonies kept other goods flowing to Britain by allowing more specialization.
On the other hand trade was already doing that and it’s entirely possible a more egalitarian economy would still have led to the exact same gdp growth in Britain without deconstructing India.
Attempts to show it was not rely, AFAIK, on rather contorted counter-factuals. The profits of the East India Company, the many country houses (themselves considerable profit-centres) built on Indian and West Indian fortunes, the proportion of the state budget paid for by the empire (eg the half the British army and whole of the Indian armies funded by India) all argue otherwise.
I claim no expertise on the profitability of British control over India, but the existence of country houses doesn’t refute “individual profit, not collective British profit”. Modern analogy: many tech fortunes have been made in companies that were never profitable, via concentrating revenue or venture capital in a few hands.
A second possibility is that India was profitable for a while, like when the EIC started out with high value extraction, but was not profitable as a large empire under the Raj. Cynically one might even wonder if the EIC allowed itself to be taken over precisely because it was becoming unprofitable.
A third possibility is that the Raj was profitable until you consider opportunity costs. I.e. that it had a positive rate of return, but a low one, and constituted a poor investment by Britain, like a billionaire putting all their wealth in a savings account. In which case we could still see a post-empire boom, as public funds went to better investments like health care.
“It is not in Hitler’s power, for instance, to make a penny an hour a normal industrial wage; it is perfectly normal in India, and we are at great pains to keep it so.”
This, of course, is also wrong. It certainly was in Hitler’s power to make a penny an hour an industrial wage. It was in his power to make zero an industrial wage, and he did it.
Well, Orwells beliefs were, in fact, more complicated, and he was right within that context. He was speaking on left wing political leaders to condemn their refusal to admit that the wealth extraction from the colonies was underwriting the economy. They were selling the utopian vision, not addressing the messiness of getting there.
As it turned out, his prediction came to pass…but was drowned out by the more easily blamed devastation caused by WW2 and the great depression.
Orwell actually fully believed in a utopian vision. He was a libertarian socialist and his view of the socialist end state was plenty rosy, in it’s own way. He just wanted honesty in the devastation necessary to get there.
The fact is that you’re also just objectively wrong about the empire. It absolutely extracted wealth and did so on mass. That wealth went up to the rich to a degree even socialists didn’t truly understand, but it existed and had a profound effect on the British economy.
It’s just that the neocolonialism method of extracting wealth is more efficient at extracting wealth for the effort expended, and an economy with even partial socialist reforms better at exploiting that wealth to create living standards. Combined with some foundational technologies and gdp increased once the messy transitional disaster was over. Not that neocolonialism is socialist, but you’re conflating a world without colonialism with our modern one.
Marx also was an economist. He didn’t have a degree in it, but if he did we’d never have heard of him; Prussia actively oppressed left leaning economics and the actual profession basically vetted your beliefs, so he’d either have disappeared, been discredited, or been converted if he had an economics education.
His economic theories aren’t *right*, because no theory is right, but they have been adapted as a foundation for modern study.
…which is still somewhat censored, by the by. The economists who get jobs in policy tell neoliberal or neoconservative policy makers what they want to hear. There’s a real talking head problem.
Finally, did Hitler *really* set wages to 0, or did he just hide the costs? Such a view arguably makes the same economic mistake he did, it assumes that you can loot an economy and just staple it into your own. It took tremendous effort to actually extract industrial wealth from the occupied territories. The educated population couldn’t be removed from the larger economy costlessly, guards had to be employed, supervisors employed, etc. The failings of the Nazi economic model were myriad and significant.
To be fair, we don’t know how Hitler’s economic model in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe might’ve performed absent its single most significant economic burden, the presence of an angry Red Army directly to its east.
Taking the Anglo-American conquest of the North American frontier as a model for the German conquest of the Eurasian frontier (as the Nazis themselves did, both practically and ideologically) implies that if Hitler could’ve snapped his fingers and reduced the scale of the Nazi-Soviet war from the single most colossal one-on-one peer conflict in human history to a smattering of isolated small-scale asymmetrical wars and counterinsurgency operations on par with the U.S. “Indian Wars,” the economic model of the entire Third Reich could’ve turned out quite differently.
Hence Orwell was ultimately quite correct that Hitler didn’t have the power to do it, because unlike the enemies of either the British Empire in India or the U.S. in North America, Hitler’s enemies had the power to stop him.
Well, the need to look industrial economies relied on attacking nations with industrial economies, which almost definitionally had the capability to fight back. If the Soviets could be reduced to an asymmetrical conflict then they wouldn’t be worth looting, not to the degree needed to fund the military spending Germany was doing.
Although Germany also wouldn’t need that military…but that also changes the domestic situation. Personally, and pardon my language but it’s appropriate, I’m sure Hitler would have found a way to fuck it up.
I also want to submit that the Chinese Pacific front might also qualify in human, if not economic, scale, but I’m just being contrary if I’m being honest.