Trita Parsi

on the Middle East, if they even would bother to define what the US interest in the region is, and oftentimes they don't even do that.

But if they do, it would be a long list of things.

And at the end, it would be stand with our allies as if that is a core vital interest.

What does that mean?

That's a catch all variable that means whatever interest they have is now suddenly our interest because we have to stand by them.

This is part of the reason why we're at war all the time, because the bar for us to use military force, the bar for what is a vital interest, has just essentially been pushed down to the very ground.

Whatever some foreign politician wants.

Exactly.

And we're also gonna have to reckon with our role in this.

Yeah, we made it possible.

And it started under Biden, of course, and Biden explicitly, well, I don't know if he used the term, but they said that the strategy they had was to bear hug Israel, give it everything it wants,

and as a result of that, have leverage to be able to constrain the Israelis.

It's a completely nonsensical and idiotic approach.

First of all, it presumes that the US doesn't have leverage with Israel unless it first gives Israel everything it wants.

The United States has tremendous amount of leverage with Israel.

It's just that we don't have politicians with the backbone to use that leverage.

But the idea that once you've given them everything, suddenly they would not go and act as recklessly as they did is of course also nonsensical.

It was obvious that if we never imposed any cost in which the Biden administration even lied to Congress, Tony Blinken lied to Congress about the fact that the State Department itself had concluded in their reports that the Israelis were violating international law in a manner that would, according to US law, not make them eligible for military support any longer.

but lied to Congress and said that that was not the case, that they have not come to any such finding.

Whereas in reality they had, but they suppressed those reports.