The situation in the Middle East is changing rapidly. Radical adjustments are occuring in the Persian Gulf and Iran as well as in Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Lebanon. My sense and fear are that Ukraine, Russia, both Koreas and Japan, not to mention China are also changing rapidly, though for their own reasons and not because the USA manage to wield their power as efficiently as ever. We are far, to note but a change, from the strange attempt to convert the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean to the economic faith of the Abraham Accords. Who could have thought that through these accords almost ten million Palestinians were going to be abandoned to their daily indignities?
Israel: for a number of reasons, the right wing government is intent on doing war on four fronts: Gaza, the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran. This multifacetet war has goals other than defense. Part of it is a powerful response to Hamas’ vicious attack of October 7, 2023, but other aims are the displacement of large sections of the Palestinian population and the eradication of the last crumbs of political control it may still have. There are about 750,000 people of Jewish background presently living in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Israel is now in a surprisingly strong position not only because of its military successes, but also because the people in the US are worrying about their presidential election—rightly so—and more importantly because the US appears to be losing interest in world leadership. This is happening even though the US economy is far outperforming Europe, China and other countries.
It is clearly in the interest of Israel, itself an undeclared nuclear power, to eradicate the nuclear weaponry that Iran has been working on, according to Iran’s enemies. But now one more factor needs to be taken into account. North Korea has accepted to fight on Russia’s side in Ukraine. What did North Korea get in exchange? Did they get money, which one assumes must be needed when buying the dictator of North Korea? Or more evidently, were they promised atomic weaponry and missiles? Confronted with a much more experienced Ukrainian army, is the use of nuclear weaponry by North Korea imaginable? How is South Korea, which has a very important arms industry, going to react? Is it going to be interested in developing its own military capacities even further? For related reasons, is the conservative leadership of Japan going to accelerate its own rearmament?
On voting day, these are some of the questions that are worrying signs of trouble.