Victor Davis Hanson
Israel is certainly in dire straits. The U.S. for the first time since the Carter administration is now unapologetically anti-Israel. It leverages military aid to Israel to coerce concessions to Hamas and destabilize the Netanyahu government. Washington itself is rudderless, with a debilitated and evaporating president, a puerile and now mute vice president, and a Democratic ticket that is mostly guided by 200,000 pro-Hamas voters in Michigan.
Israel’s own Left is increasingly pro-Biden and supports its interference in Israeli politics and against its own elected government.
Over 100,000 northern Israelis are displaced. Iran is on the verge of attacking the Israeli homelands with supposedly greater force than its prior barrage. And Europe, the U.S., and the new China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and Turkey axis all seem oddly aligned in their condemnation of Israel—this after Hamas pulled a medieval slaughter of some 1,200 Israelis in a time of peace.
Yet all that said, Israel is still in an ascending position.
It has all but destroyed Hamas—its command-and-control leadership, subterranean headquarters, munitions storage and production, and its underground transit system. Almost all the planners of October 7 are dead. Those in hiding likely will be in a few months.
Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis are ready to strike in unison but oddly remain in an unforeseen if temporary pause phase—and perhaps for a variety of reasons.
One, the Iran gang is now conducting a full cost-to-benefit analysis. Tehran especially is trying to figure out how much damage its consortia will incur if their actions soon match their loud, existential threats.
The rubble of Hamas in Gaza seems a warning of what Shiite Beirut and its rocket depositaries could soon look like—far worse than the flotsam and jetsam of 2006. Or if the logic of absolute war were to follow, Gaza City is an apocalyptic vision of what the key infrastructure of Iran itself might soon resemble.
The loud and blowhard Houthis in a nanosecond lost their port facilities. That represented a hundred-million-dollar infrastructure loss. And their international Western and Chinese patrons may not wish to replace the bombed-out cranes and docks—given the Houthis’ terrorism in the Red Sea’s international maritime lanes.
Iran knows that during its last exchange, a handful of Israeli rockets did more damage than over 320 Iranian counterpart missiles launched at Israel. But more importantly, Israel has now taken out Hamas and radical Islamic terrorist leaders in three major Islamic cities—Beirut, Damascus, and Tehran. Iran and its surrogates know that even the Mossad and the IDF could not have pulled those hits off without inside helpers, who apparently hate their own terrorist leaders more than the Zionist entity. How many more are there and where and who are they: the theocracy wonders?
The danger now, however, is that Israel’s enemies know that the waning Biden presidency, and the 50/50 chance of an even more sympathetic Harris presidency both suggest that there is a window of opportunity for attack between August 2024 and late January 2025—and possibly beyond—when Israel’s traditional patron simply will not be a reliable counter to Iran.
Moreover, Iran also fears the possibility of a Trump presidency in January 2025. That scenario would likely allow Israel the wherewithal to do whatever it deemed necessary to reestablish theater-wide deterrence—while Washington would warn Tehran to stay out of any Hezbollah-Israeli border war.
Add it all up, and we are entering a dangerous six-month window of war where Israel’s enemies may do something stupid on the rationale that such an opportunity of U.S. disengagement from Israel may not recur.
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