most americans are not at all interested in the distant, foreign conflict in israel that has nothing to do with them in any way. the counter-examples are jews and right-wing christians, neither of which are swing demographics. biden appears to be trying to appeal to reagan democrats, which are all dead.
nor is israel a strategic asset in a post-petroleum world, which we are on the brink of. when you take the oil off the table, israel becomes a troublesome annoyance that should be abandoned.
biden should spend less time concerning himself with what is happening in israel and more time talking about the economy.
7:31
america is the empire. in the middle east, the empire has always ruled via divide et impera; divide and conquer. it is ancient imperial strategy in the region to set the barbarians off against each other, to minimize the threat they pose to the empire's control.
we needed some way to keep the dirty arab barbarians holed up in the desert and building a military base in israel was an effective tactic to bottle them in. then, we tricked them into sending us all their money, and they fell for it because they're dirty barbarians. so long as the arabs were busy fighting the jews and willing to spend all their oil money in the west, they posed the empire much less of a threat. this tactic to neutralize inherent arab barbarism is a fundamental part of the post-war order.
now, this has frayed over the years, certainly, but the basic dynamic of divide et impera remains in place. however, it is a tactic that needs to be revisited with the end of the petroleum era.
first, the substantive threat that arabs have long posed to the west will cease to be of concern for the foreseeable future with the end of the petroleum era, as they return to religious ignorance and cultural backwardsness. we can hope for a french revolution style uprising in the middle east, but it doesn't appear to be imminent. historically, the region has been a backwater and all logic implies that it will once again devolve back to one when the oil goes away, as the region has repeatedly gone through phases of de-evolution over the centuries that have resulted in massive depopulation and widespread deurbanization. climate change will also make much of the region uninhabitable, which is a type of retributive justice. second, controlling the middle east itself becomes less important when the oil is removed as an energy source, which undoes the value of israel as a strategic western bulwark against arab expansion.
this doesn't end the game so much as it changes it; there are new resources that will need to be controlled and new regions that will need to be dominated. another reflection of biden's strategic ineptness is the fact that the most strategic region in the future will actually be the resource-rich region of afghanistan.
the days of israel's strategic importance to imperial hegemony and dominance are severely numbered. america needs leadership that is looking forwards, not leadership that is stuck in the past.
7:46