Category: International relations

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Playing with numbers.

Reaction to US Secretary of Defense (he prefers to call it “of War”) Pete “Kegseth” Hegseth’s comments that NZ was “freeloading” on the US because it does not spend 3.5% of GDP on defense was predictable if shallow for the most part. Most reasonable commentators, including–surprisingly–Don Brash, found the figure to be ludicrous on the face of it, and as someone said, perhaps intended to be aspirational rather than realistic. That is a very polite way of phrasing things. Predictably, the government responded by pointing to its pledge to spend 2%GDP on defense in the next decade, although it was vague on the how and why’s of the increase other than repeating the recent mantra that NZ is located in an increased threat environment.

The impolite way of phrasing things is that the call for NZ to spend 3.5% of GDP on defense is a mastubatory pipe dream by a sweaty-palmed war fetishist white nationalist alcoholic “Alpha male” wanna-be by the name of Pete Hegseth. It has no basis in any discernible fact and it bears no relationship to any known strategic reality. Like most of what he says, Hegseth’s demand is a blustery babble of bullying rhetorical incontinence, much like his purported US war plan for its attack on Iran.

So let’s consider the facts.

The only countries that spend 3.5% of GDP on “defense” are authoritarian, war-mongering and/or garrison states (a garrison state is one that is besieged by hostile adversaries, like Ukraine, Iran and Taiwan). Most liberal democracies come nowhere close to that benchmark, and in fact until MAGA madness overtook US defense policy, the so-called “2 percent standard” where NATO members contributed that amount of their GDP to their collective defense was considered to be on the high end of the scale, especially for smaller states and particularly for those that did not have frontline borders with hostile actors like Russia. Two percent is already a stretch for most countries. 3.5% is untethered to the realities of most national security calculations.

A brief look at global GDP expenditures on defense tells the story: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS

Anyone with a modicum of understanding of democratic politics knows that (unlike the US) most democracies prioritize domestic policy areas that immediately affect voting constituencies. These include health, welfare, housing, education, retirement benefits and other public goods that maintain the material bases of public support for a given government, and more generally for democracy as a form of governance (as opposed to, say, various types of authoritarianism). Expenditures on defense and security (including on intelligence services) tend to be of lower priority and directly related to exposure to threats to national interests, including but not limited to the physical integrity and sovereignty of a given democratic state. Since threats can be indirect, distant or too large to be handled alone, many democracies forge security alliances and pacts with larger like-minded or strategically-aligned partners. NATO is an example of that, as is the Australian-New Zealand bilateral defense pact and various regional security agreements.

One of the advantages of such collective security agreements is that it reduces the need for individual countries to increase their defense spending to levels that draw resources away from non-security domestic spending. In military terms, collective security agreements are supposed to be a form of force multiplier in which smaller partners exchange the mantle of protection from larger partners by assuming roles in support of common objectives and interests that the larger partners cannot or prefer not to do by themselves (say humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping missions).

What the US is demanding, therefore, is contrary to the spirit as well as intent of democratic collective security. It threatens to withdraw its security “cover” from countries unless they spend more on defense than the US does itself (the US is at 3.4% of GDP spent on defense while actively involved in several conflicts of its choosing). Moreover, this one-size-fits-all spending baseline not only ignores the reality of domestic politics in most liberal democracies other than the US. It also ignores the geopolitical realities of different states. The US is a continental country surrounded by blue water and non-threatening land neighbours that has a neo-imperialist foreign policy and war-mongering constituencies that drive it to pursue continuous wars that it does not necessarily fight to win: instead, it must find foreign enemies to fight in order to justify its international behaviour and provide sustenance to its military-industrial complex (which is a motor force of the US economy). It fights not to win but because it can, and because it has domestic actors that materially benefit from perpetuating the suffering of others.

Liberal democracies like NZ are cut from a different cloth. Their threat environments are often different to that of the US and, for that matter, from each other in most instances. So the cookie-cutter approach to security and defense spending demanded by Kegseth and his minions, as well as parallel demands that defense policy of US partners dovetail and overlap in the interest of “interoperability” and strategic integration, falls short of recognizing the specific threat environments that other States may have to cope with, and therefore the strategic perspectives that they need to adopt in response. The international community, both in peace and in conflict, is not as US-centric as some might think. Force integration and joint operations is not a “ready to wear” clothes rack, either in terms of objectives as well as capabilities. This reality is lost on the MAGA administration.

Beyond the issue of a blunderbuss approach to defense spending in the aggregate, something that perhaps is because of the US’s own history of weapons development and procurement, it is not the total amount of GDP spent on defense that matters but what that money is spent on. Spending money on soon-to-be obsolescence platforms like the recently announced “Trump class” battleships (actually, non-battleship surface warships), is utter folly and often driven by non-military or non-strategic considerations like providing jobs to local constituencies (as is the case with the AUKUS nuclear submarine project in Australia). In an age of AI, minituarization and automated weapons technologies like drones, satellites and submersibles, military procurement and replenishment policies must be driven not by some arbitrary financial baseline but by literally getting more efficient bang for the buck. Threat environments and internal resource constraints should determine what weapons systems and support infrastructure are needed and what strategic policies should be used to deploy them. After that, the guiding principle should be to maximize value per dollar, not reach some arbitrary spending threshold.

All of this presumably happens against the background of a well thought-out geopolitical and geostrategic perspective. “Strategic culture” refers to a State’s historical approach to its external environment, one that weaves political, diplomatic, economic and military theory and capabilities into concrete practice. In this light NZ represents a somewhat odd case, as it has a Army-centric military despite being a maritime state (with a very weak Navy and virtually no Air Force), responds more to allied threat assessments than its own, adopts contradictory if not juxtaposed trade and security policies (trading preferentially with an emerging Great Power while aligning itself with a declining Great Power that is an avowed adversary of the former), professes to be idealist and pacifist in orientation (self-styling as a “champion” of the international rules based order and having an “independent” foreign policy) when in fact it behaves in an internal interest group-driven and externally clientalistic, ethically-agnostic fashion governed by short-term objectives. Some might say that this is a pragmatic approach; others might call it amoral, unprincipled and opportunistic.

Although many Defense White Papers and other policy papers have been produced outlining NZ’s purported vision of its place in the world, the threats it believes it must confront and the means by which it proposes to do so, what emerges from reading them is something more akin to strategic incoherence. We get much description of events and conditions that are influenced by the perceptions of larger partners, but we are not told precisely why we configure that NZDF and intelligence services in the way that we do. For example, the PRC is clearly considered by NZ and its security partners to be the major extra-regional threat to the South Pacific, but we are never told exactly why (Influence operations? “Dollar diplomacy?” Security pacts with Pacific Island nations? Other covert activities? Different value systems?). Much is alluded to but little is presented in the way of concrete evidence.

The same was true for the nearly two decades of NZ intelligence community intelligence assessments that jihadists, both foreign and domestic, were the greatest terrorist threat to NZ and its interests. This responded more to the expectations of NZ’s intelligence patrons in the 5 Eyes network and beyond rather than the probability of a jihadist attack in NZ. In fact, not a single such thing occurred in spite of many media-driven scares and episodic arrests, during a period in which rightwing neo-Nazi extremism, including a well documented presence in NZ that remains to this day, were virtually ignored in annual intelligence threat assessments. Until March 15, 2019, that is.

Recent NZ threat assessments like those mentioned are presented as fact at a time when the US has gone rogue under Trump, killing hundreds of civilians on the open seas without warrant or evidence, kidnaping the leader of a sovereign state, threatened to annex NATO allies, launched an opportunistic war of aggression under false pretences against Iran at the behest and in conjunction with another, in fact genocidal rogue state, kowtows to an authoritarian neo-imperialist aggressor in Europe, threatens the overthrow of the Cuban regime while subjecting that country to a total fuel blockade, slaps punitive tariffs for political reasons on governments that do not come to the US heel and spends US taxpayer money on openly influencing foreign elections in favour of its preferred candidates–who exactly is the clear and imminent threat here? And yet the US is not mentioned in NZ threat assessments once–not once–other than in oblique mentions of “Great Power Competition” affecting our part of the world. Yeah right. Meanwhile our military brass and civilian defense establishment court favour with US weapons manufacturers and government security officials without a shred of light cast on their activities and the reasons for them. So US good, PRC bad–but we trade more with the bad guys than the supposed good ones.

There are no parliamentary debates about these issues, much less public discussion of things like why the 2%GDP spend on defense criteria must be followed by NZ in the first place. Is it because NZ is a NATO partner? Is it because Trump threatens us with sanctions or tariffs if we do not obey? Or is it because in order to provide for some measure of self-defence we need to increase budgetary allotments for specific weapons systems and their logistical infrastructure? What, in fact, is the purpose of our defense forces? Territorial resistance against foreign invasion and occupation? Expeditionary service to our security masters? Global good citizen participation in multinational operations? What should be the emphasis of our forces? Peacekeeping and/or humanitarian operations (using military engineers and medics)? Special forces? Infantry without armor or air support? Coastal defense? Regional policing? Force support to Australian or other partner militaries? Civil defense?

In sum, there is much more to drawing up a defense budget than using some drunk US official’s number blocks as a guideline. But because the toddler’s math logic is strong with that one, and because he sits atop a very powerful death machine to which NZ is connected in multiple ways, NZ must be very calibrated in its response. For that it needs to truthfully know exactly what it needs to defend against, for how long given current and near future government resources and threat scenarios, and what tools are best suited to the task once national security priorities are honestly defined and operationalised given the fluid context of the times.

Having done that, and only then, can NZ tell Hegseth to shove his 3.5%GDP demand where the sun don’t shine.

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Will Israel nuke Iran? Some background.

Regular reader Barbara Matthews asked me in a comment on a previous post about Israeli nukes. I replied on the comment thread on that post but have decided to flesh out the answer and post it here by way of a primer on Israel’s nuclear weapons since many people do not know much about it. Here goes:

Israel is estimated to have around 100-400 nuclear warheads (more likely closer to the lower figure). The throw weights (explosive power) of these warheads is classified but estimated to be variable but relatively low yield (20-300 kiloton (kt), with 1 kiloton=1000 tons of high explosives), along the lines of US and Russian Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) throw weights but far smaller than the megaton (one million tons of high explosive) + throw weights of US and Russian “heavy” strategic warheads. It is believed that most Israeli nukes are of the “tactical” IRBM type rather than strategic in nature.

Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and is believed to have some of its nuclear weapons technology passed on to it by an Israeli spy in the US government (later imprisoned and deported to Israel) who was part of the Lakam nuclear spy ring that operated from the 1950s that helped apartheid South Africa develop a bomb and test it in 1979 over the South Indian Ocean and which supplied nuclear technology to the Argentine military dictatorship in the 1970s, plus a lot of other covert shenanigans. After years of silence and ambiguity and nebulous statements by previous government officials, Netanyahu has implied in public comments that Israel will use nukes on Iran in specific circumstances because it sees Iran as an existential threat. If so it would be the first “first strike” since Hiroshima and Nagasaki and violate the second strike retaliatory premise of modern nuclear deterrence theory.

Israel has a standard delivery system triad of air, sea and land-launched nuclear weapons. The land leg has the “heaviest” warheads that are mounted on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) known as Jericho-1 and Jericho-2s that potentially can reach distant adversaries such as North Korea. I do not know but assume that Israel has MIRV (Multiple Re-Entry Vehicle) technologies in its nuclear fleet, presumably for the heavier warhead-bearing platforms like the Jerichos.

Its main nuclear research and development facilities are at Dimona in the Negev desert, which also serves as a civilian power generating facility that, besides the power generation aspect, produces around 20 kg of Plutonium each year as waste that is directed to the weapons program. 5-6kg of Plutonium is needed for a 20 kiloton warhead, so there are constraints in the Israeli weapons production process, especially for larger-yield warheads. By wy of comparison, the Hiroshima bomb had 15 kilotons of throw weight while the Nagasaki bomb had 20-22 kt of explosive power.

The use of Plutonium is interesting for several reasons. First, its is by-product of nuclear energy production so is not enriched uranium such as those used in both civilian energy (<20–usually 3-5 precent– enriched) production and most advanced nuclear weapons programs (90 percent enriched U235). It is also very unstable and dirty when compared to enriched uranium, which means that besides the risk of accidental chain reactions, the radioactive cloud and plume from a detonation will be far more lethal than those produced by more refined nuclear weapon detonations. That means that detonations in the air at any altitude and on the surface will generate plumes that will then drift hundreds of miles traveling on the prevailing winds, contaminating everything. along the way.

In the case of Iran, Israel would presumably use “bunker-busting” deep penetration missiles to destroy Iran’s nuclear stockpiles and delivery platforms widen deep underground. That might minimise or partially contain the fallout contamination that follows such strikes. But Israel has shown little regard for civilian casualties when levelling Gaza, Lebanese neighbourhoods and parts of the West Bank as well as Iran itself, so we cannot discount the possibility that it might use air- or surface-burst weapons, including against civilian targets (these are known as counter-value strikes) as well as “hardened” military targets (known as counter-force strikes).

In my opinion, there is at least a 50-50 chance that Israel will use nukes against Iran if this conflict does not go the way that Netanyahu’s regime wants it to go, especially of the US–yet again– loses interest and withdraws from the conflict as midterm elections approach and GOP political fortunes turn South as commodity prices continue to rise, etc.

If I were to be charitable I would say that unlike the US, which sees Iran as hostile but containable, sort of like North Korea, Israel views Iran as a threat to its very existence. Why? Not because of nukes but because hardliners in Iran have repeatedly uttered serious anti-semitic as well as anti-Zionist rhetoric towards the Jewish state. The former include grotesque stereotypes and caricatures, betraying a profound and twisted hatred of Jews as a people rather than Israel as a nation-State. In light of that Israel wants to eliminate Iran as a functioning State and partition it into various ethnic nationalities in which Persians are just one of many, albeit a dominant group in whatever demographic mosaic is constructed out of the ashes of the Revolutionary Republic. That removes Iran as a threat to Jewish, not just Israel’s existence.

If I were to not be charitable I would say that Bibi and co. just want to degrade but not destroy Iran so as to keep it as a convenient scapegoat and enduring threat that helps them justify their rogue actions and avoid having to account for their own crimes and atrocities. In that perspective, it is the tail that wags the imbecile dog that is the MAGA administration, but that dog is about to turn tail for domestic political reasons in the US and at that point the spectre of Israeli nukes against Iran becomes real.

One other factor must be considered in Israel’s strategic equation to launch such strikes: who will retaliate against Israel in the event that it does engage in the first use of nuclear weapons against Iran, much less retaliate in kind with a nuclear counter-strike? Quite frankly, I do not see anyone being capable or willing to do so.

The “Doomsday Clock” run by the Association of Atomic Scientists already sits at 85 seconds before midnight, the closest it has ever been to nuclear armageddon day, and that was set before the US and Israel launched their war against Iran.

The moment of deadly truth may be fast approaching.

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Regime transition sequencing.

I was reading a recent article in which the author wrote that the US has actually made the transition to democracy in Venezuela more difficult than it could have been by removing Nicolas Maduro and his wife from the country but leaving the rest of his regime intact. In the author’s words, “they took the dictator but left the dictatorship.” He went on to write that the usual order of things is to embark on a political regime transition (presumably to democracy if the starting point is authoritarian) followed by an economic regime transition (say, in simplistic terms, from communism to capitalism) or at least significant economic reform. In Venezuela’s case, the US has pushed for US-investor friendly economic reforms in the extractive industrial sector but left the Bolivarian regime otherwise intact and has not bothered with broader economic reforms that promote market diversification, income redistribution, decreased dependence on primary good exports (including but moving beyond petroleum), and more value-added domestic commodity and service production.

That got me to thinking about one major theme of the first generation regime transition literature of the (late) 1970s-1980s, which focused on the transition from democracy to authoritarianism in Europe, East Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and early 1970s and then the transitions form authoritarianism to democracy in the rest of the 1970s and 1980s. One theme that emerged was the sequence by which regime transitions occurred. We might call it a type of “chicken or egg” question.

Some argued that what was needed first for democracy to obtain was an economic transition from state-centric (e.g., Keynesian welfare or socialist) to free market models, which was believed would promote the civic freedoms needed for democracy to emerge as the corresponding political form (this was grounded in what was known as “modernisation theory,” which was a 1950s-era prescription for overcoming underdevelopment in the “Third World”). That was the “egg” answer, which was used as one justification for the US support for China’s admission into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. As with original modernization theory, the underpinning syllogism proved incorrect.

Instead, both in the PRC and in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) as of the 1990s, communist party leaders engineered the move from a state-controlled command economy marshalled along what might be described as Stalinist or Maoist lines to a state capitalist economy in which investment and production was incrementally opened to private (including foreign) investment while the State controlled overall economic management decision-making and kept a stake in specific productive assets (e.g., telecommunications in both instances).

In effect, capitalism came but democracy did not. In both the PRC and SRV change occurred within the political regime, not of it, regardless of economic change. Communist Parties still control both countries and staff the leadership of the State. Their respective leadership architectures and other partial regimes within the larger whole have been subjected to reforms of various magnitudes, including those deemed required to accommodate the economic changes undertaken by the national political leaderships in question. The same is true, in another variation on the theme, in Singapore under the PAP regime: the overall regime remains and reforms (in Singapore’s case by “liberalising” when it comes to political and civil rights without giving up ultimate authority) while the economy changes (from post-colonial trading to techno-finance capitalism). In other words, rather than a transitional sequence, in some instances economic change can occur under the aegis of a stable political regime (at least if it is authoritarian).

Others have disagreed with the economic–>political change thesis, noting that political regime change was required before economic regime change could happen because economic policy is ultimately a political choice made by regime leaders. This is the “chicken” answer. The 1948 Chinese, 1959 Cuban and 1979 Nicaraguan revolutions are considered emblematic in this regard.

In both types of sequence, the key issue is one of parametric change: the boundaries of political and economic life are fundamentally altered as a result of the major institutional changes that define regime transition as a social phenomenon no matter which way the chain of causality proceeds.

Among other subtopics, one part of the debate about regime transitions in the 1980s centred on the preferred “regime change sequence” leading to democratisation. It was a simple, perhaps crude measure, but it had the virtue of forcing scholars and policy practitioners to address the linkage between political change and economic development and reform rather than just one or the other. It also broadened the “chicken or egg” question with regard to the linkage between economic development and political regimes, Was there a correlation or causal relationship between specific regime types and certain levels of development? If so, in which direction and of what specific type in both categories? Capitalist to socialist, socialist to capitalist or somewhere in between? Authoritarian to democratic or democratic to authoritarian and if the latter, what type of authoritarian? The possibilities of political-economic regime change are not as straight forward as might seem at first glance.

There is a third type of regime change that is also theoretically possible> It is simultaneous rather than sequential in nature. This is a situation where economic and political regime change occurred simultaneously, as part and parcel of the same transitional dynamic. This alternative was particularly of interest to students of the fall of the USSR and Eastern bloc regimes grouped in the Warsaw Pact as well as of the revolutionary transitions such as that of Nicaragua and Iran in 1979. In the former the hope was they would transition to both democracy and capitalism in short periods of time. In the latter the expectation was that with revolutionary overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship, socialism as an economic model could be rapidly imposed. The 1979 Iranian revolution represented a variant on that model, with many hoping that the post-Reza Pahlavi regime would be a theocratic democracy wedded to an Islamic market economy rooted in traditional Bazaari social relations of production.

Sadly, in both instances the 1979 revolutions eventually brought economic changes, but under a different type of authoritarianism than what existed before rather than the democracy that was promised. This may have been partially a product of the hostile reaction and pressure placed on the revolutionary regimes by the US and other Western states, but the fact is that be they simultaneous or sequential, the 1979 revolutionary regimes delivered something different than what was hoped (and fought) for.

The simultaneous transition possibility was also considered in the rise of Hugo Chavez and Bolivarianism in Venezuela in 1979 via electoral means, which presumably would have paved the way for a peaceful revolutionary change towards popular democracy and socialism, much in the way hope was previously raised along the same lines by the 1970 election of Salvador Allende in Chile. Alas, neither expectation was met: Allende was overthrown and killed in 1973 by a US-backed military coup d’état supported by rightwing forces while Chavez and his successor Maduro descended into authoritarian-kleptocratic rule culminating in the US military kidnapping of the Venezuelan leader in January of this year. As the author mentioned at the beginning of this post noted, the Venezuelan political leader has been forcibly removed but the regime has not.

As for former Soviet states, the record is very mixed. Russia has reverted to authoritarianism with a state capitalist/oligarchical hybrid economic model grounded in fossil fuel extraction and modernised Soviet-era industrial production.. Some former Warsaw Pact states have gone both democratic and (mostly) market capitalist. Others have gone autocratic and state capitalist/kleptocratic. Some have gravitated towards the European Union and even NATO. Others have remained within the Russian orbit on both political and economic grounds. This is especially true for Central Asian former Soviet republics (the so-called “Stans”), which have not undergone appreciable political regime change except to use elections as legitimation devices while economic control of extraction-based primary good production remains in the hands of nepotistic political elites and politically-connected interests.

It can be argued that simultaneous regime transitions cannot happen simply because of the turmoil and complexities involved in attempting to manage profound political and economic changes all at once. The cases cited above support that view regardless of what eventuated after the old political regime was displaced or the economic model substantially altered. But the issue of transitional sequencing remains an important one, not just conceptually but also as a matter of policy practice, especially if the goal is to restore or revive democratic governance.

As an example, my stay in the Pentagon in the early 1990s was based on a successful fellowship application that was centred on a proposal on how to democratise civil-military relations in post-authoritarian Latin America. I had noticed the difficulty with which new civilian elected governments were coping with entrenched authoritarian traditions in the (sometimes Prussian) military cultures of several Latin American nations, and so outlined in the fellowship proposal ways in which US non-lethal military aid, weapons sales and peer-to-peer training programs, coupled with legal and normative changes to the institutional relationships between the armed forces and civilian government, might help “democratise” the relations between political leaders and the military hierarchies of the time.

This was just one part of the political regime transition from dictatorship to democracy in that region–what was called “partial regime change,” where the sum of a number of reforms in the constituent parts of an electoral democracy (civil rights, election procedures, interest group intermediation systems, inter-agency accountability, policing authority, budget-setting agendas, federal-state relations, and even the relationship between civilian and military authorities)–were reformed, reconstituted or revitalised with the purpose being to provide institutional underpinnings that would support, then sustain and eventually reproduce democratic governance structures.

Again, the results were mixed but for the most part I am pleased to see that in places like Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, the changes that my colleagues and I proposed seem to have stuck.

Getting back to the subject of Venezuela and now the attempt at forced regime change by the US in Iran, the folly of the move becomes clearer (as if it was not already). Not only were the “decapitation” strikes simply instances of state-sanctioned murder (by proxy, since the Israelis did the actual bombing of targeted leaders like the Ayatollah Khamenei), the Islamic regime and its constituent partial regimes remain intact, albeit with a stronger military influence replacing a weakened clerical caste headed by Khamenei’s badly injured son Mojtaba (something that is more the result of Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) dissatisfaction with the cleric’s enforcement of theocratic social policy prior to the US/Israeli attacks rather than the US/Israeli strikes themselves). If anything, what political regime change might be underway is, by several accounts, one from a theocratic to a military-dominated regime, conveniently reinforced by the foreign aggression waged upon Iranian society.

Lines of succession, promotion, policy and operational authority remain in place. So do the underlying civic structures, including the Bazaari social networks that even if now in opposition to most of the hard-line elements in the regime, remain fiercely anti-Western and Persian nationalist in orientation. In other words, the partial regime mosaic that when taken together constitutes the institutional edifice of the Islamic regime continues in place and functioning. Like in Venezuela, some former leaders are gone (dead) but the regime remains even as it evolves from within. Nor has the economy changed–although porous sanctions and the Revolutionary Guard toll booth blockade of the Hormuz Straits has strengthened the Islamic Republic regime’s control over it.

In effect, we have seen leadership change without regime change, little significant economic change other than a shift in beneficiaries in the Venezuelan case, and no real transitional sequence at all. This demonstrates the shallowness of what passes in the US for strategic thinking, comparative political analysis and foreign country expertise, to say nothing of the ahistorical ignorance of the MAGA elites in and outside of government who enable and support US foreign adventurism under Trump.

In fact, it might do well for scholars, politicians and economic interests alike to return to that literature on authoritarian regime demise to develop a US-focused idiosyncratic conceptual and practical framework for studying the late stage dynamics of the second MAGA administration. Because it is quite feasible that its demise will more resemble that of dictatorial collapse rather than that of democratic decline even if certain electoral trappings and procedural niceties cloak the entire process. The question for the US then is: if the transitional sequence begins with political change away from MAGA, will it a) result in its elimination from political society? and b) what if any economic and other partial regime reforms will come from the anti-MAGA political change if it occurs?

Without both, regime (or at least government) change in the US away from what exists today will not happen. Depending on one’s perspective, that may or may not be a good thing.

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Rumble in a strategic jumble.

In boxing terms, Iran is doing an Ali rope-a-dope defense against the US. Strategically, the US, like Foreman, sought the fight in order to burnish its fearsome (some might say brutish or thuggish) reputation. In return, Iran had to take the fight because it came to it as a matter of reputation, honor and physical defense. For one. the fight was an (ill-advised and ill-conceived) opportunity; for the other, it is existential.

Theoretically a mismatch between a much more powerful state and a far weaker adversary, at a tactical level the conflict has turned into an asymmetrical war of attrition. Asymmetrical because it is not just about weapons capabilities but also about political and social will and comparative timetables. The US has midterm elections, domestic economic factors and the global system of trade to consider and operates on chronological calendar-defined notions of political, military and economic time. The Iranians have their existence to consider and operate on cloud time, not because they are dreamy but because like the movement of clouds, they operate with a different, far slower and longer conceptions of temporal movement. The US initially said that it would win in 6 or so weeks, and because that time frame has now been reached without a win, it has rushed to seek a means of saving face and going home–or even to the status quo ante. It will not achieve the latter but will have to do the former sooner or later. This is an own-goal that makes W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq look like strategic genius.

Saving face will be hard to do, so the MAGA administration may decide to double down and as Trump suggested a few days ago, turn the conflict into a religious civilisational war of annihilation with apocalyptic objectives. That may be delusional, but given what else has happened with the Trump 2.0 administration it is no longer in the realm of the impossible save for the intervention of the global community. Meanwhile, the Iranians have expected and prepared for as much.

For the moment the Iranians are doing the rope-a-dope, Middle Eastern style. Absorbing blows, shifting its centre of gravity, counter-punching just enough to stay in the fight–nimble, agile and patient. Under Trump and Hegseth the US is a lumbering Foreman looking for a knockout but, because it has no strategic rationale, instead is exhausting itself politically/diplomatically while doing so. Meanwhile, after the initial US/Israeli onslaught, Iran is recovering, conserving its resources, digging (further) in and keeping its powder dry for the next rounds.

The difference with the original Ali-Foreman bout is that Iran will not eventually counter-punch a knockout blow, but will force the US to retreat, reduce its barrages, stumble about seeking a different type of military opening, hope for a draw and/or quit. The apocalypse scenario will only delay and raise the costs of the eventual stalemate, even if Israel or the US decide to abandon all rationality and exercise their nuclear options against what still remains a non-nuclear weapons state. Then yes, armageddon may come.

Short of that, the post-fight scenarios will be negative for both aggressors as well. Neither the US or Israel will have the eyes and ears inside of Iran that they once had, Iran will still have its maritime toll system in the straits of Hormuz (basically a pay to play scheme in order to guarantee safe passage), will still have weapons and U235 stockpiles hidden away, and former US and Israeli allies and clients will re-calibrate their relationships with both while the world trade systems adjusts away from Western-centric financing, insuring and perhaps fossil fuel dependency itself (to include derivatives such as plastics and fertiliser as well as non-renewable energy supplies). As others have written, the ultimate irony is that Iran may well come out of this strengthened and the global of system of trade less US-dependent than they were before the preventative US/Israel wars of preventative aggression were launched against the Persian nation-State.

Think of it this way: the Arab oligarchies that thought that they sat safely under the US security umbrella now are being bombed by Iran because they allow the US to attack Iran from bases on their soil. Yet they are too afraid to counter-attack Iran because they fear the implications of a wider regional war on their material fortunes. NATO has now seen what the US security guarantee looks like in practice, and with Trump ranting about quitting the alliance and taking Greenland (while appeasing Putin with regard to Ukraine), they see what the future holds if they persist in trying to accomodate the bully. As for Taiwan and its US security guarantee–may the goddess protect them. Meanwhile, other Great Powers or Great Power wanna-be’s bide their time…

Getting back to the original boxing analogy, this juror’s score is TKO or win by points for the Iranians. Someone needs to tell the self-proclaimed champ that it is time to retire.

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An analogy and an axiom.

Some words to the wise.

Analogy: Trump’s war against Iran might be the geopolitical equivalent of Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn. Built on arrogance born of easy bullying in lesser conflicts, he has overestimated his capabilities and grossly underestimated his opponent. Iran may be Trump’s Sitting Bull, but the analogy holds only if Custer had a malevolent manipulator like Netanyahu leading him to his ignominious comeuppance.

Axiom: History shows that the side that prevails in war is not always the one that can deliver greater punishment to the adversary but the one that can absorb the most punishment and keep on fighting. Superior weapons do not always overcome determination and will.

Remember that “asymmetrical warfare” does not only refer to differences in weapons capabilities, kinetic mass and quality of forces brought into battle. It also refers to the motives and commitment that adversaries bring to the fight.

The US is an instant gratification, short attention span culture with a low social pain threshold and technology fetish, especially when it comes to gadgets, weapons and war-fighting (which feeds into the other cultural traits). Iran is the birthplace and seat of a 6000 year old Persian culture that invented chess and carpet weaving. Both of these endeavors require consummate patience, perseverance, imagination, complex multidimensional thought and extended foresight that sees the “play” several moves ahead of the current moment. At the behest of an international pariah client-state partner unable to “go it alone,” the US has launched an opportunistic expeditionary war of aggression against Iran during a midterm election year. Iran is fighting an existential defensive war of attrition in and from its ancestral homeland against the US and its regional (including Arab) allies, including the pariah state.

Given these differences, the axiom could well explain the analogy.

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Podcast Update: Latest “A View from Afar” is now available..

Selwyn Manning and I will be discuss the how’s and whys of the illegal Israeli/US war of aggression against Iran but with a different angle than most because we eventually focus on potential upsides to the conflict. Yes, you read that right. Rather than dwell on war porn and weapons fetishism, we outline some positive systemic repercussions and consequences looking forward.

That is our bias for hope.

You can find the show here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtJOeVMshc8

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Counter-Force versus Counter-Value in Conflict.

Given the amount of dis/misinformation being pushed about the nature of the conflict between the Israel-US alliance and Iran, it might be good to understand some basic concepts. I will leave aside for the moment that blatant illegality of the US/Israel preventative war of aggressive choice on Iran and instead concentrate on the nature of their respective approaches to the conflict when seen in broad context.

Counter-force strikes are lethal kinetic operations against “hard” targets like military installations, command and control bunkers, air, land and naval platforms, missile depots, launchers and launching sites, and anything that is involved in an enemy’s ability to mass and project force. This includes intelligence-gathering and military communications grids and even satellite surveillance and sensor stations. The key to the definition is that the targets are identifiably military or military-related in nature. The purpose of counter-force strikes is to degrade or eliminate the enemy’s military capabilities and ability to fight whether or not it has the will to continue to do so. Along with strikes on airfields and naval depots, Ukraine’s attacks on missile and drone production sites in Russia are examples of counter-force targeting,

Counter-value strikes are lethal kinetic operations undertaken against “soft” targets. The include all non-combatants and non-military infrastructure like civilian power grids, water treatment plants, hospitals, schools, churches, athletic and community facilities and anything that is not directly involved in a military effort. Counter-value strikes are generally prohibited under international law, including the Laws of War, but have continue to be used as a psychological weapon whose purpose is to undermine the collective morale of and willingness to continue support for the fight by the targeted population. This can be done to provoke a popular uprising, prompt socially disruptive internal refugee flows and to foment political unrest, or can simply be designed to psychologically break people and destroy the material and social cohesion of society.

The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo in WW2, as well as the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were counter-value strikes. The Japanese military campaigns in East Asia, particularly in China and Korea, were mostly counter-value in nature. The Russian drone campaign against civilian targets in Ukraine is a recent example. So are most terrorist attacks regardless of who commits them. Assaults by military forces on civilian targets with the objective of eliminating popular support for insurgencies, be they in Gaza, El Salvador, Guatemala, Chechnya or Afghanistan, are another instance of counter-value targeting. All hark to a previous era where unlimited wars of annihilation were waged by societies, not just military forces representing them. As exercises in collective punishment, they are all contraventions of international law.

Long term readers will remember when I posted here at KP about the error of thinking that the nuclear doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) still applied to contemporary nuclear targeting strategies. Killing cities is a counter-value proposition, and in the days of dumb bombs and inaccurate guidance and surveillance technologies, was deemed the necessary means of bringing wars to their earliest conclusion (although the repercussive effects would remain for decades). Heavier throw-weights (warheads, as measured in mega or kilotons of nuclear explosive yields) compensated for inaccuracy (as measured by Circular Error Probables (CEPs), which is the circumference around a target point within which a warhead can be expected to fall). But as military technological advancements took hold by the 1970s, MAD was replaced with “flexible response,” where nuclear strikes were first directed at counter-force targets like ICBM missile silos, air and naval bases with nuclear weapons presence. CEPs were reduced to meters as distances and numbers of warheads increased per missile launched, which along with real-time manoeuvrable guidance systems allowed the use of lower throw-weights on more accurately designated counter-force targets.

Having killed the enemy’s response capabilities, surrender can be compelled or negotiated with the defenceless decision-makers on the other side. If that fails, their societies remain as easy counter-value targets. That logic now spans the spectrum of warfare capabilities from the battlefield to the strategic level.

In conventional wars, militarily superior actors–those with dominant military capabilities and resource bases–prefer counter-force targeting because it suits their strengths and degrades the opponent’s military capabilities without excessive “collateral” damage amongst civilians. As the old saying goes, after the strikes have achieved their strategic objectives there needs to be someone to negotiate with and a society that is capable of restoring some sense of functionality to its institutions and administrative and logistical capabilities. Removing a threatening military presence without removing or destroying its host society is seen as the most cost-effective means of achieving post-war peace and stability on the dominant actor’s terms.

Military inferior actors–say, guerrilla groups or less powerful states (as measured in military capabilities, resource bases and social support for political decision-making processes and institutions)–prefer to engage in counter-value strikes. They cannot afford to fight toe-to-toe against a more powerful foe or engage in a counter-force wars of attrition. That only plays to the stronger opponent’s strengths and hastens inevitable defeat. Think of Saddam Hussein’s strategy in the first Gulf War (Desert Storm), where he tried to use old Soviet era tactics to confront the US military and its allies in Kuwait and Iraq as if they were peer competitors. Instead, “Shock and Awe” did not go well for Saddam’s forces. The war lasted six and a half months and although Saddam was allowed to remain in power because no better options were deemed to be available, it was believed that he had learned a lesson and returned to his “box.” As it turned out, it just set the stage for the second Gulf War and his overthrow a decade later.

Most militarily inferior leaders are not as foolish as Saddam was and do not “stand up” to fight countries like the US and Israel on symmetrical terms. Instead, their best bet is to resort to unconventional, irregular warfare tactics that place a premium on counter-value targeting and flexibility of maneuver as part of widening and prolonging the conflict into non-military spheres. They seek to involve the enemy populations and neutral actors in the fight, making it an ongoing engagement with economic and social repercussions that extend far beyond the conflict zone. That raises the direct and indirect political and material costs of the militarily-superior opponent.

That is what Iran is doing in response to the US/Israeli attacks. While it does some counter-force operations against Israeli and forward-positioned US forces, its strategy is also based on counter-value targeting of civilian infrastructure in neighboring Arab countries as well as Israel. That includes key shipping lanes and transportation/logistical hubs. The counter-value targeting is illegal, to be sure. But from the Iranian perspective it is a necessary part of its defensive strategy against the military superiority deployed against it. It cannot win the war on military terms, although it might be able to force a stalemate if the will of the US (and perhaps Israeli) public turns against continuing the war, something particularly significant given that the US holds midterm elections in November.

Raising the economic, social and political costs of the war, including but not limited to oil prices, is one way that the Iranians can compensate for their militarily inferior position. Threatening civilian targets in the Arab oligarchies, along with the threats to shipping through the Straits of Hormuz, has an adverse ripple effect on tourism, air and sea passenger travel, merchant cargo and air freight prices and supply chain schedules, insurance premiums, and much more. It also sows fear in the populations of states that Iranians target because of their alignment with the US and Israel, even if they do so in a passive way (say, by allowing military overflights and/or forward US basing). That in turn can pose domestic problems for Gulf oligarchies because even if they aren’t democracies and are as closed when it comes to governance as is the revolutionary Islamic regime in Iran, most have significant Shiite minorities living and working in them. Killing the Shiites’ spiritual leader as well as the head of the Islamic State of Iran, Ayatolla Khamenei, does not sit well with his millions of co-religionists, so Iranian attempts to stoke tensions along sectarian lines via kinetic operations on civilian targets inside Sunni Arab territories can be expected as part of its counter-value campaign. In other words, it brings the war home to the Arab oligarchs.

For their part, the US and Israel have engaged in a hybrid or mixed conflict model: they use both counter-force and counter-value strikes as part of their military campaigns. They both emphasise to the public the successes of the former, including the Israeli strike on the compound that killed Khamenei (along with his wife, daughter-in-law and grandson and his son-turned-successor badly wounded). The MAGA administration boasts of destroying dozens of Iranian warships (including a lightly armed frigate that was over 2000 nautical miles from Iranian waters when it was torpedoed off of the coast of Sri Lanka after participating in an Indian-led naval exercise) and aircraft as well as hundreds of land-based military targets (e.g., missile launchers and weapons storage facilities).They are less keen to acknowledge their counter-value strikes, such as the bombing of a girls school that resulted in over 170 deaths (the US says it had dated targeting coordinates for the double Tomahawk missile strikes on the site), a desalination plant and an oil refinery in Tehran, to say nothing of numerous civilian buildings throughout the country. (Incidentally it is against international law to target water supplies and bomb facilities that result in great environmental damage, such as the refinery Tehran).

From the various US statements about why it chose to make war on Iran–first to destroy its nuclear program (supposedly destroyed last year), then eliminate it as the “greatest sponsor of terrorism in the world” (although the 9/11 attackers, al-Qaeda, Taliban and ISIS are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim and unrelated to Iran and recent mass attacks in the West have been carried out mostly by rightwing extremists), and then to pursue regime change, to now a bit of “all of the above”– it is clear that the hybrid warfare strategy is basically a catch-all assault blanket designed to destroy Iranian society as much as its military and political regime. In other words, it is an attack on the Iranian nation-State, not just those at the top of the bureaucratic ladder (and now subjected to “decapitation” strikes).

Perhaps the US believes that a popular uprising will emerge from the rubble and that someone like the son of the ousted dictator Shah Reza Pahlavi will restore the Peacock Throne. If so and inspire of what Iranian exiles in the West claim about the strength of organised opposition to the Islamic Republic inside and outside of Iran, they are deluded and will be disappointed because the revolutionary regime is resilient, determined, well-prepared for a protracted struggle and very much infiltrated into every aspect of Iranian life. Plus, Persian ethno-nationalism is a very strong ideological bind in Iranian society, so even if the US and Israel attempt to “Balkanise” Iran via the arming and funding of irredentist ethnic groups like the Kurds, it is unlikely that Iranian society will atomise along ethnic lines over the long-term. But if it does, that will only lead to more instability and conflict as primordial divisions spill into modern conflict modalities.

Israel has a different strategic agenda. Convincing the US to join it in its attack on Iran citing “existential” grounds is just part of the larger plan to redraw the map of the Middle East in an image more favorable to Israel. With an accommodation having been reached with its Sunni Arab neighbors on regional security issues (including intelligence-sharing and non-support for an independent Palestinian state), October 7 was the catalyst-precipitant for the move, which has been decades in the making amongst Zionist strategists and intellectuals. Once Hamas gave Netanyahu the excuse–and saved him from his ongoing legal troubles in the process–with its indiscriminate as well as ill-fated assault on Israeli civilians as well as military personnel, the gears were set in motion for a multi-fronted/multi-pronged hybrid war involving conventional and unconventional means (and perhaps nuclear weapons if the desired geopolitical outcomes of the war look increasingly unachievable by conventional means).

US and Israeli war-mongering is also a double “wag the dog” scenario. Netanyahu needed to divert attention from his court case and the costs of occupying Gaza and the West Bank, whereas Trump needed to divert attention from the Epstein files and his unpopular domestic policy agenda. For Israel, destruction of Iran as a nation-state is seen as a way to remove a longer-term existential threat to not only Israel but Jews is general (because Iranian proxies have targeted Jews around the world). This is why the possibility of an Israeli first strike use of nuclear weapons on Iran cannot be discounted. Should the US quit the fight and/or the war bog down and become a Ukrainian-style quagmire, then the resort to nuclear strikes may be put on the table. Given Israel’s record when it comes to international conventions and the Laws of War, that is a worrisome prospect. Given the global community’s record when it comes to stopping aggression and thwarting nuclear weapons first use (even the US refuses to renounce first use strikes and Israel certainly does not), who is going to stop them?

When militarily-superior actors become frustrated by their lack of success in forcing opponent’s capitulation via counter-force targeting, they are tempted to resort to counter-value targeting in order to intimidate and force the opponent’s population into submission. That denies the opponent its support base and cannon fodder in a protracted war scenario. But it also is a type of state terrorism in wartime and as such a war crime. And it often has the opposite effect, as besieged populations abandon short-term internecine enmities in favour of uniting against the common aggressor. Think of it this way: whether the parent’s of the murdered schoolgirls opposed the ayatollahs or not, they all know very well who killed their daughters. It was not Khamenei and they will not forget.

Given that the US has been the most consistently at-war country in the world over the past 60 years and Israel has consistently used counter-value targeting as a social control instrument in occupied Gaza and the West Bank over the same period, both have dark records of moving from counter-force to counter-value operations depending on tactical circumstances, This is more the case for the US, where failures in strategic framing and overly-optimistic reliance on weapons technologies and belief in “effects-based” results have left gaps in short-and medium-term goal-setting and contingency planning. Be it in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran, the US has consequently veered into counter-value operations well beyond the counter-force objectives of its initial rules of engagement. In a sense, the move to counter-value targeting is a sign of the desperation on the part of political and military leaders when their counter-force superiority does not produce the results that they anticipated in the (short) time frames that they hoped for (remember that the US likes its wars short and snappy, much like the video games many of its soldiers played before they joined the kinetic real world).

For Israel, the resort to counter-value targeting pursues both tactical and strategic objectives. At the broadest level, this is what distinguishes Israeli from US military objectives in Iran. It can be argued that there is some legitimacy of the Israeli position in that some of the extreme anti-Semitic statements of Iranian leaders over the last 4 decades have involved threats to eliminate the “Zionist Entity” in its entirety. Clearly that is a poor choice of words when it comes to menacing a nuclear-armed regional rival backed by a declining superpower, but in any event it has given Israel a (largely contrived) justification for its actions along “kill or be killed” lines.

The summary outlook for this war is for it to slow down, widen and become more of a counter-value than a counter-force affair that costs millions in treasure and litres of blood, and eventuate with a status quo that is different at the margins but essentially the same at its core–but all at a far higher price in terms of international stability and global order.

The situation distilled: This war has plenty of background but the immediate reason is that two powerful and malevolent guys and their respective support retinues needed and therefore staged a diversion from their respective personal and political foibles by picking a fight with some other distasteful foreign fellows just because they could.

Others are and will suffer the consequences long after they are gone.

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US and Israel gone rogue.

First the US kidnaps the president of a sovereign state after killing more than a score of civilians on the open seas without warrant or evidence of wrongdoing. Now it kills the head of state and supreme religious leader of another sovereign country, teaming up with a regime credibly accused of committing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank in order to do so. Whatever one may think of the individuals and regimes targeted (I happen to not be a fan of either) or the narrative spin given by Western governments and media, the selective unilateral application of force without international approval in the absence of imminent threat from either country demonstrates two things: 1) the US and Israel have gone rogue; and 2) in doing so they have set a dangerous precedent for others to follow suit (think China with regard to Taiwan).  That this act of belligerence is taken in part as a “wag the dog” diversion from Trump’s Epstein and domestic policy problems as well as Netanyahu’s legal troubles only makes the matter worse.

It also reinforces a core notion of nuclear deterrence theory: having nuclear weapons deters attacks. North Korea, China and Russia are all despotic but nuclear armed. They are not attacked by other nuclear states (and for those who might raise the issue, Ukrainian strikes on Russia are retaliatory and limited). Pakistan and India are nuclear armed but limit their military encounters vis a vis each other to conventional weapons. Same with Pakistan and Afghanistan–their conflict is limited to guerilla and conventional exchanges. Israel has nukes so is not subject to full scale attacks, again, just limited and often unconventional sporadic strikes by missiles and guerrillas/terrorists. 

But Venezuela and Iran are not nuclear armed (even if the latter is trying to develop that capability for the reasons described here), so they are attacked with impunity. This confirms the deterrent value of even a small number of deliverable nuclear weapons, including so-called “dirty” bombs. Even just having one any day will keep full scale aggressors away.

Whatever the outcome of the US/Israeli attacks on Iran both short- and long-term, and in spite of the Western media fascination with war and weapons porn, things seem poised to get worse as a result. Iran has limited experience with democracy (and the CIA helped orchestrate a coup against its last democratically-elected president in the early 1950s), so even if Mossad and the CIA are organizing post-conflict political forces to replace the theocratic regime, there is no guarantee that what follows will be democratic (and if people think that the Shah Reza Pahlavi’s son living in LA is the answer, they are sorely mistaken). Plus, Iran’s scattershot military response against Gulf States is designed to inflame the Sunni/Shiite divisions within them as well as anti-US and anti-Israel sentiment. That could spell trouble for the  Western-backed sultanistic dictatorships that control them (none of the Arab Gulf States are democratic, which makes the hypocrisy of US rhetoric justifying its aggression against Iran and Venezuela more obvious. Especially when Trump honors and does business with Saudi prince Mohammed bin-Salman, who ordered the murder of US citizen and Washington Post columnist Jamal Kashoggi in 2018 ). Moreover, Iran and its proxies have cells in many foreign countries, including the US, which will now be likely activated because of the egregious nature of the preventative and/or regime change-focused war of opportunity (as opposed to a war of necessity) unleashed upon it.

As for the response inside Iran, it is difficult to ascertain. Even with Mossad/CIA agitators in place, Persian nationalism and anti-interventionist sentiment against “the Great Satan” and “Zionist Entity” may prove a significant obstacle to installing a pro-Western regime. The Revolutionary Guards can clearly see that they have nothing left to lose by doubling down on their hardline response to the US and Israeli calls for an uprising and coup, and relying on airpower alone will not allow the US and Israel to impose their political will on Iranian society (which besides the usual rural-urban divides also includes religious hardline and moderate divisions, modern secular elements versus cultural traditionalists, educated versus uneducated sectors, gender divisions, etc.). In other words, while prudent from a US/Israeli perspective, the “no boots on the ground” approach may be insufficient to enforce regime change on Iranian society even if the new regime is autocratic as well. That leaves the field for other actors to get involved, even if in surreptitious ways.

In the previous KP post, I spoke of the death knell of liberal internationalism exemplified by the Epstein client list. Now, with the US and Israel having gone rogue, we witness the demise of Westphalian principles like respect for sovereignty amongst nation-states, to say nothing of concepts like jus ad bellum (reasons for war). On top of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, Israel’s scorched earth approach to its fight against Palestinians and unlawful aggression at home and abroad by a number of other regimes around the world, the package of precedents being opened up is ominous for world peace and international order.

Time to button up and batten down.