Bibi’s Plan for Peace through Wider War
Plus: New reader chat feature, new plastics peril, old Blinken blindspots, killer AI robot dogs, America’s solar snafu, and more!
President Biden has been urging Israel to keep its impending retaliatory strike against Iran modest in scale, according to Politico, because he hopes to prevent the conflict from “spiraling into full-scale war.”
Hope is a good thing. But keeping it alive is harder after reading this week’s essay in Foreign Affairs by political scientist Dalia Dassa Kaye. She says that Israel, in its conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah and now Iran, “is not seeking a diplomatic off-ramp; it is looking for total victory.” The Netanyahu government, she writes, “is aiming for nothing less than the creation of a new reality on all of Israel’s borders.” It wants to render all its adversaries enduringly intimidated and substantially weakened.
This portends not just sustained violence in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, but a continuation of the “increasing militarization of the West Bank,” Kaye writes. Only last night, an air strike in the West Bank—where strikes by fighter jets were once unheard of—killed 18 Palestinians.
This quest for security through wider war, according to Kaye, is in part a legacy of the attack launched by Hamas a year ago. “A key lesson” for many Israelis “was that Israel could no longer afford merely to manage and contain the threats on its borders.” To restore the deterrence that seemed to dissolve on October 7, Israel “would need decisive military wins—regardless of the costs.” And now, Israeli leaders believe, their adversaries are weakened and thus vulnerable to sweeping attacks.
And, strategic calculation aside, post-October 7 political dynamics in Israel have linked “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political survival to continued wars that seem only to boost his popularity and the stability of his governing coalition.”
As if this political and geopolitical motivation for expanded conflict weren’t strong enough, additional impetus has been coming from within the White House, we learned this week. Politico reported that, even as the Biden administration publicly urged Israel to exercise restraint, some officials—including Brett McGurk, White House coordinator for the Middle East—were privately encouraging Israel to invade Lebanon, which it has now done. Over the past two weeks, according to Lebanese health officials, the Israeli military has killed more than 2,000 Lebanese people (some 400 of them women and children)—a much bigger toll than in the month-long Lebanon War of 2006, the last major conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.
Kaye says Netanyahu’s strategy could lead to an “Israeli reoccupation of Gaza and potentially even of southern Lebanon, as well as reinforced control over, if not annexation of, the West Bank.” Such an outcome would be “a recipe not for victory but for perpetual war,” Kaye writes, citing as a cautionary tale America’s own quixotic quest to “reshape” the Middle East through military force. Israel could wind up “locked in a cycle of war and global isolation, dragging the United States with it.”
And what if “dragging the United States with it” means direct American military involvement? Political scientist Stephen Walt, in his Foreign Policy column, writes that US politicians would then be forced to explain why they were “putting Americans in harm’s way on behalf of a perpetually ungrateful client state that takes money and arms from the United States and then does whatever it damn well pleases.” And if such involvement came before the US election, this “October surprise” could undermine Kamala Harris’s presidential bid, leading US politicians to “begin to question whether reflexive support for Israel is still the smart political stance,” Walt argues.
If you’re looking for a less bleak view of events in the Middle East, you might try this blog post by Paul Salem, a vice president of the Middle East Institute. Despite the latest rounds of escalation, Salem argues that “an important diplomatic opportunity still exists.” The international community, he says, should use this crisis to offer Iran a grand bargain: If Tehran agrees to remain verifiably nuke-free and to let go of its armed proxies in the Arab world, then it can get a “secure and prosperous place” in the international order. “It’s a long shot, but much of the Iranian public would respond positively to such a shift if there were a leader in Tehran bold enough to make it,” Salem writes.
Crucially, Salem suggests demanding comparably dramatic change from Israel. In his view, Israel faces a stark choice between the continued occupation of Palestinian territory—“with all the resistance, revenge and recurring war that that will engender”—and a two-state solution that could lead to the full normalization of relations with nearby Arab states. “Only the latter option can ensure a secure and prosperous future both for Israelis and Palestinians—and for the region more broadly.”
This vision may sound pollyannaish, and it is certainly at the sunny end of the spectrum of long-term possibilities. But dramatic crises and large-scale traumas can produce big change. The Cuban Missile Crisis led the US and the Soviet Union to get serious about nuclear arms control. And it took World Wars I and II to create, respectively, the League of Nations and the United Nations—institutions that, whatever their shortcomings and failures, were major and unprecedented innovations, and evidence that bold thinking can take material form.
Besides, it’s useful to be reminded every once in a while what kinds of things political leaders would be building toward if they weren’t so busy screwing up the world.
This week, the NonZero Newsletter is proud to announce a new feature that will harness the emerging power of natural intelligence (NI). We call it Chat-NZN. (Other, less visionary Substack newsletters just call it chat.) All of our subscribers—yes, that includes you!—will now have access to a Substack forum reserved exclusively for NZN readers.
Our goals are twofold. The first is to have a place for readers to discuss NonZero-esque subjects, including:
foreign policy
non-natural intelligence (AI)
the cognitive biases that help keep the planet mired in pointless conflict
the many issues that nations would be doing a better job of collectively addressing were it not for all that conflict
We hope all this discourse will broaden your perspective and also broaden ours by giving us an opportunity to get to know you better and to see what topics you’re passionate about.
The second goal is (even) more high-minded. Regular NZN readers know that we’re not big fans of social media as it exists today. We’ve criticized Twitter and similar platforms for incentivizing outrage and creating a reality distortion field that makes it harder to sympathize with—or even understand—people outside of your political or cultural tribe. So we hope you’ll help us make NonZero chat a better form of social media—a place where conversation is civil, diverse views are welcome, and virality is beside the point.
Now for the logistics: NZN members (who more crassly commercial newsletters might call “paid subscribers”) are the only ones who will be able to start new threads, but all subscribers are free to view the conversation and post comments within threads. The NZN team is kicking things off today with a thread to discuss this very edition of the Earthling. Click here to join the chat.
Get ready for AI-powered robot dogs whose bite is worse than their bark. Way worse. In Saudi Arabia, the US Army is testing a four-legged automaton equipped with an AI-governed gun turret, Military.com reports.
US forces already use robot dogs to neutralize explosive devices and perform surveillance. But this would be America’s first killer robo-dog.
If you’re American and you think that someday you’ll be able to sleep easier knowing that these creatures are keeping enemies at bay, maybe you should think again! In May, China unveiled its own machine-gun-wielding robo-dog in a video that showed the quadruped operating alongside soldiers during a military exercise. And there’s no way of knowing, based on the available evidence, which side would prevail in a dogfight.
Twelve years ago, when the US levied tariffs on China's solar energy industry, the policy seemed to have a downside and an upside: True, it might hurt the fight against climate change by raising the price of some green energy tech—but it would protect America’s solar industry and so keep the US competitive in that realm. Turns out the policy was all downside, argues David Fickling of Bloomberg Opinion.