the Houthi rebels have stated they plan to target more Israeli ships in the southern Red Sea.
I hope that the neocolony is happy about this. It must be running a test to see how much a government can be hated before everybody gets sick of its shit and overthrows it.
The ship was sailing from Turkey to India under a British flag and the ship is ultimately owned by a Japanese company. The Israeli company/billionaire is just a major stockholder in the Japanese company. Israel could care less about this ship.
The reason Israel and US will care is because this creates a risk of doing trade with Israel that passes through Suez Canal. This raises the cost of doing business with Israel, and puts US in a difficult position.
Hopefully, but knowing the US they would just redirect anti-piracy units operating in the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea. Or they would begin to arm merchant ships which itself is a big problem, but I doubt the US and Israel care much for international law.
Even this risks deeper escalation though as Yemen will protect its own interests.
Yemen is in no position to pose any sort of material threat to the United States. But also, why would they? The internationally recognized Republic of Yemen is a close US and Saudi ally, and essentially a puppet state. Further the Houthi movement has no standing navy, even auxiliary craft. What would they even do?
Suez is also the most vulnerable of the waterways in the world and the most important, historically every danger to imperialist control over it was met with swift and heavy handed answer.
Indeed, so it’s hard for US not to respond to this.
Never say “it’s about geopolitical interests” the US was willing to throw all that into the water to do a genocide. The genocide is the goal.
The genocide, and moreso the ethnic displacement have always been the main side-quest in the Israel project. Displaced Palestinian people strain the social systems at the neighboring, non-friendly Middle Eastern countries. And eventually this leads to the rise of militant, often fundamentalist extremism. On October 7 the US seized the chance to do this at an incredibly accelerated pace. And create a pathway to spike a full-on war in the region to get those sweet fresh war dollars babyy.
I think the genocide is the goal of Israel, but US simply finds itself trapped because of their decades long position of supporting Israel unconditionally and significant political influence that Israel exercises in US. This situation is an absolute disaster for US right now because it’s turning the whole world against them, but they have no political path domestically to stop the genocide train.
I’m not going to spend a single joule feeling bad for the country when they’ve let it get to this point and show no remorse or even willingness to change. This isn’t a case of a troubled person who just needs help, this is a country that was literally built on genocide to export fascism.
I completely agree.
I guess it’s good to be empathetic by default, there are plenty of situations where the villain really is a victim of circumstance and just wants an out.
I generally tend to view US regime as simply having no regard for human life. It’s not that they commit atrocities for the sake of committing atrocities, but rather they see atrocities as means through which they advance their geopolitical goals. And in case of Israel, the genocide isn’t really helping US geopolitically.
Which is the main reason I see the atrocities as being the goal. The fact they’re willing to “spend” their geopolitical power on genocide really tells you what their end game really is. I struggle to think of any other framework where it would make sense to do such a thing.
Thing is that the genocide is now united all the Arab nations against both US and Israel. If all the countries in the region put up a united front, then US will end up being kicked out of the Middle East in the long term, and project Israel will likely collapse as well.
Major issue for the US is the Arab world reconciling with Iran. This situation undoes the past nearly 50 years of containment. Iran and it’s proxies are now effectively free to do as they please and Saudia Arabia will turn a blind eye.
I think that’s the biggest recent geopolitical development in the region as well. China managed to pull off a masterful geopolitical achievement brokering normalization of relations between the Saudis and Iran.
Blinken is shaking his head. Gonna go down as another McNamara. All his work undone because US foriegn policy is guided by Weltpolitik as opposed to Realpolitik.
He looks demoralized and depressed in every recent vid I’ve seen of him. Project Ukraine is unravelling, Middle East is an absolute disaster, any plans for containing China they might’ve had are fizzling fast. I think he’s starting to realize none of this ends will for this admin or him personally.
I’d say the US is a far more eager participant than you assume. As Biden himself has said in the past- “if Israel didn’t exist, the US would have to invent one to protect US interests.”
Israel is the physical embodiment of US influence in the MENA region, a key to destabilizing and controlling much of the world’s oil and the trade between Europe, Asia, and east Africa. Many Israelis with dual citizenship are part of the highest levels of US administration- Yellen and Blinken being the most high-profile names that come to mind. And even now as we speak, Hochstein, Biden’s energy security advisor, is in Israel talking about stealing (“developing”) the offshore gas recently discovered.
I would say that it is anything but a “unfortunate coincidence” that the US is backing this genocide. It’s not a one-off event, the US has backed every settler-colonial state and fascist dictatorship since WW2, and has an extensive history of instigating or otherwise supporting their acts of genocide, as well.
The situation is a disaster for the US, but as you said- they have no political path domestically to stop the genocide train, because said paths are wholly unfeasible and counterproductive to their end goals- the permanent destabilization and fragmentation of the Arab world (and the world outside the US and its western puppets, at large). Genocide is an inevitable part of the process of American hegemony to further this means, to maintain its ever-growing proxies’ foothold (whether it be the encroachment of NATO, the expansion of Israel, the spread of US foreign bases, the militarization of Taiwan, it’s all just part of that same pattern of never-ending expansion and aggression), and to find new reasons to terrorize the world on Wall Street’s behalf again and again.
Do average Americans hate what’s going on? Sure (at least, many do). And there’s increasing dissent among the pencil-pushers in government as well. But none of that matters to the US, at the end of the day, because the real powers-that-be behind the US- its wealthy elites- love Israel, and they stand with white, western supremacy, and I would even go so far as to say that they love genocide, just as they love war and destruction, because it is how they came to power and how they maintain their power.
Oh I completely agree that Israel is central to US strategy in the region, and I think this is precisely why it’s such a disaster for US. Israel doing an open genocide against the Palestinians is uniting countries in the region against Israel and by extension against US itself. US tried to play a peace broker in the region, and now this position has been completely discredited. The end result of all this could end up being all the Arab countries finally creating a united front and pushing US out with China coming in to replace it.