Source; Anonymous
neo-liberals are ideological and emotional in their approach, rather than being realistic and assessing forces and recognizing that making the perfect the enemy of the good or trying to have everything that they want all at once is going to be counterproductive.
Up to this point, Israel has received a great deal of U.S. aid; it’s going to continue to receive a great deal more. If the antiwar position or the non-interventionist position is we can’t do anything until we cut Israel loose and remove any kind of support from Israel, then we basically have a politically impossible position, because the amount of support the American people have for Israel as a whole is much greater than the amount of support the American people have for our joining Israel’s air force in bombing Iran or certainly having American boots go on the ground to undertake regime change and an occupation of Iran. And do you think Americans are less supportive of Israel in the midst of a war than they were of Ukraine?
The U.S. has not yet directly intervened in an offensive capacity against Iran. But Trump seems on the verge of doing so. As such, Trump has gotten a lot of pushback for letting a major Mideast war begin on his watch. Some even accuse him of betraying the America 1st movement and joining forces to fight a war on Israel’s behalf. Some say Israel’s attack on Iran is all Trump’s fault, that this attack could not possibly have happened without Trump giving his assent to it, and therefore, this war is our war. As I stated above, those people ideologically want to have their predictions fulfilled. That’s taking on a nightmare scenario, and it’s actually abandoning the responsibility we have to look at each step of this situation. America has a choice every step of the way and can back down or choose not to be involved at any point.
The basic fact of the Israel–Iran war is that Israel is much stronger than its opponent. And that the U.S. is already deeply involved in the conflict. Israel is attacking Iran using U.S.-supplied munitions. America repositioned forces in the region to thwart Iran’s retaliatory strikes. Without our significant and ongoing military support, Israel wouldn't be in a position to win this war. Does that mean that we should get more involved because the war is made possible by what we’ve already done? Does it mean that we should not make efforts at staying out, and calling at least for peace? Should we abandon all hope of having an end to the war, of calling for an end to the war, of staying out of adding more force to it because of what we’ve already done?
No! Non-interventionists should fight the battles they can win, and be skeptical of despairing over battles that frankly have already been lost.
There’s already a big push to get Trump to bomb Fordow nuclear enrichment facility, because Israel is unable to take them out, meaning it needs our bunker busters and B-2 bombers. And there’s the risk that U.S. forces and assets will be targeted or maybe incidentally hit by Iranian strikes, which would likely trigger our escalated involvement. And there's also the simple matter that Israel is a small country, and if ballistic missiles are raining down on it, we might want to enter the war directly to prevent Israel from resorting to nuclear weapons.
But history shows how very, very wrong predictions have been, even by the experts.There were an awful lot of neo-liberals who said, after Trump assassinated Iranian military officer qasem soleimani that this was going to lead basically to World War III, that this was going to lead to all sorts of unrest in the Middle East, that Iran was going to retaliate against us—none of which actually happened, or at least, not to the degree that it had been predicted. And even before that, neo-libs were saying the same thing about moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in Israel and in terms of threat inflation. Those outlooks were based on emotional, ideological preferences.
The war itself is sort of verifying the logic of both of the belligerents. There are ballistic missiles coming from Iran, and blowing up apartment buildings throughout Israel. And the Israelis are saying if one of those ballistic missiles had a nuclear warhead, we would be screwed. Israel is such a small country and a compact country that, even if it has a 2nd strike capability the amount of damage that Israel as a compact country could receive from a handful of Iranian nuclear weapons in the event of an apocalyptic showdown greatly exceeds the amount of damage that Israeli 2nd-strike capabilities could conceivably inflict on a vastly larger Iranian land mass with a population of 85 million. So, all those calculations make the Israelis very, very keen to defang an Iran, who daily does all it can to annihilate Israel, and to remove any possibility of an Iranian nuclear program. As for the Iranians, it's absolutely clear that Iran wants to have a nuclear weapon. That's a realist outlook that says both of these belligerents are going to keep at it because they both have rational grounds for what they’re doing. Obviously, the amount of pain that they’re both inflicting on one another is also a calculation that has to be factored in.
And there’s also the question of the danger for both of these states that something is going to change with respect to outside powers. The Iranians are certainly worried that America will get in. As for the Israelis, the reason they are free to have a war with Iran is because they're not in grave danger of having a war with their Arab neighbors. But that could change if the Arabs become more sympathetic to Iran and less sympathetic to Israel, that would open the possibility for Israel of facing a multi-front war, which would be an extremely dangerous position for them.
So, that actually gives both Iran and Israel an incentive, both in terms of the pain they’re experiencing right now from the mutual blows and also from the possibility that the international situation is going to change, to start talking to one another and to try to resolve this very difficult logical problem. It’s not as if they both want to continue this tit-for-tat indefinitely, or that they can do so.
Supplemental Info:
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-special-report-june-17-2025-evening-edition
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/heres-how-much-damage-israel-has-done-to-irans-nuclear-program-5874235?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2025-06-17&src_cmp=gv-2025-06-17&utm_medium=email&est=xe3HhYO%2BBgNWE%2BGynMKnuRKjSD0y8Z3YsEQJJHDTvFwvE0c8Gl3MAFQuXnru
What a US Strike on Iran's Fordow Enrichment Facility Would Mean for Tehran's Nuclear Program
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