Three Faces of Stubborn Bully Failure

 

Three Faces of Stubborn Bully Failure

Outside of their closely aligned nations, the three autocrats above share these common traits: as a result of their bully autocratic international actions each has drawn international opprobrium and resentment, each has or is in the process of neutralizing and politicizing their national judicial systems to serve their personal ambitions, each has imposed their vision of economics on their nation with disastrous consequences, each believes that international policies are primarily a function their personal relationship with other world leaders and each actively spins “facts” to justify their positions while censoring or falsifying statistical or factual information that contradicts their distorted and self-centered statements. One of the other common traits is stubbornness: they actually believe that by repeating clearly the same failed policies (“doubling down”), they will achieve a different result. Insanity? You be the judge.

Let’s start with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and his “Security Cabinet.” After publicly stating that there is “no starvation in Gaza,” Netanyahu stands charged by the International Criminal Court of “war crimes,” and the notion that he has been the principal architect of “genocide” is the majority opinion across the globe. The “war against Hamas” has formed his main way to deflect his criminal bribery prosecution, as he continues to press for the right of his unicameral Knesset to have the right to overrule his own Supreme Court. After he recently fired the nation’s attorney general, she was immediately reinstated by the courts. Increasingly, our Western “allies” are recognizing an independent Palestinian state, to Donald Trump’s dismay.

Facing protests in Israel itself as well as reports from Netanyahu’s most senior leaders that the Israeli Defense Force is wearing out, some nations (like Germany) are suspending military sales to Israel. That the United States has continued to supply military weapons and munitions to Israel has irrevocably linked the United States as Israel’s great enabler and coconspirator in the death and destruction in Gaza. Many Israelis also fear that Netanyahu’s August 9th decision to mount a total takeover of Gaza City (a reduction from his goal to take all of Gaza, consistent with Donald’s Trump’s vision of Gaza as a major beach resort free of Palestinians) will result in the execution of the remaining hostages are serve as a recruiting incentive for Hamas. Devasting more Gazans.

Writing for the August 9th New York Times, Pat Kingsley summarizes this recent policy repetition: “Throughout the war in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has repeatedly said that he just needs one more military maneuver to finally defeat Hamas… In April last year, Mr. Netanyahu said that Israel was merely ‘a step from victory’ — as long as it captured Rafah, a city in southern Gaza. This March, with Rafah long decimated and Hamas still refusing to surrender, Mr. Netanyahu started a campaign that he promised would finally give Israel victory. When it did not, he launched an even broader operation in May that, three months later, has failed to dislodge Hamas’s battered remnants, while leaving many Palestinian civilians on the brink of starvation.

“Now, Mr. Netanyahu is planning another major push after his cabinet voted on Friday to prepare to capture Gaza City, the main city in the enclave. That followed his announcement on Thursday that Israel would finally defeat Hamas by occupying all of Gaza and then handing it to ‘Arab forces that will govern it properly without threatening us.’

“This latest endeavor, which may take weeks to begin, risks ending the same way as all his previous efforts: in a strategic dead-end, with Hamas still holding on by its fingertips, Israeli hostages still in Hamas’s grip, and Palestinian civilians trapped in a dystopian nightmare. Israel captured much of Gaza City in the first months of war, seizing some areas more than once, before relinquishing it all on the false assumption that Hamas had been defeated.” There are no credible “Arab forces” able to take that control, as all regional nations decry Netanyahu’s double down. The world blames Israel’s overkill against Gaza; Trump and Netanyahu blame a weakened Hamas. Israel has become one of the most hated nations on earth. In a parallel reality, the United States is rising rapidly in that global negative perception.

Meanwhile, Trump struggles with the notion that in the eyes of the world, Putin has played him like a fiddle. Putin has not altered his original goal of either taking control of all of Ukraine or at worst relegating Kyiv to a vassal state mirroring Putin’s indirect control of neighboring Belarus. Putin believes meetings and conversations with Trump help him implement a delay, which in Putin’s mind, will produce his desired results. More importantly, Putin believes Trump is intellectually weak, desperate to “look successful” even in failure, and willing to throw anyone under the bus to “appear to be a winner,” even as he is losing big time.

Writing for the August 8th Newsweek, in anticipation of the upcoming Trump-Putin meeting, Andrew Stanton and Barney Henderson explain what Trump’s caving to Putin’s expectations might look like: “The United States and Russia are aiming to secure a peace deal that would lock in Russia's gains in Ukraine following its invasion three and a half years ago, according to a report by Bloomberg.

“The deal would mean Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky giving up the entire eastern Donbas, Crimea and parts of Luhansk and Donetsk, where fighting is still raging, unnamed sources told Bloomberg… Newsweek reached out to the U.S. State Department, as well as the Russian and Ukrainian foreign affairs ministries for comment via email on Friday [8/9]… If confirmed, such a deal would represent a huge win for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who launched the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 with the stated goal of ‘liberating’ the Donbas, despite concerns and condemnation from global leaders who viewed the war as unprovoked and unjustified.”

August 9th was Trump’s deadline for a Russian acceptance of a ceasefire, after which major new economic sanctions would kick in. Go to any store in Moscow and buy a world map. Even as combat in those territories continues, the maps all clearly show Russia as including all captured or targeted capture Ukraine territories. Putin is inured against sanctions. There are still enough buyers for Russian fossil fuels, and even massive threats against its biggest buyers (100% tariffs against India, for example) don’t seem to move the needle. Absent a massive new infusion of US offensive weapons to Ukraine, with reduced restrictions on usage, that needle is unlikely to move at all. Putin will use the meeting to magnify his effective delay towards “victory.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is sad to watch this massive litany of foreign policy failure and global opprobrium against us, realities which will strongly impale the United States and its economy on a downward spike of higher costs, travel restrictions on Americans and profoundly reduced US global influence.