Author: Daniel Larison

The Israeli government is vowing to resume the war in Gaza:

“In recent days I’ve heard a question: Will Israel return to fighting after this stage of returning our hostages is over? My response is an unequivocal yes,” the premier [Netanyahu] says. “There is no way we won’t return to fighting until the end.”

The Biden administration is reportedly asking the Israeli government to fight the war in a “more targeted” way in the future, but there is no reason to expect that Netanyahu and his coalition allies will pay any attention to this. The U.S. isn’t trying to use any leverage to pressure them, and the Israeli government knows that it will face no consequences if it ignores this request. A few senators are finally entertaining the idea of putting conditions on US assistance to Israel, but it is hard to imagine that this administration would ever do that. Regardless, the people of Gaza need an end to the war and not just a “more targeted” continuation of it.

Continue reading “The Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza Is Catastrophic”

I wrote about the Israeli government’s starvation of the people of Gaza in my new column this week:

There is a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding before our eyes in Gaza. People are not just starving, they are being starved, and it is happening with the support of our government.

Ever since the Israeli government announced the cutoff of food, water, fuel, and power to Gaza, millions of people have been living under siege conditions. This is criminal, and it threatens the population with death from hunger and disease. Even before the war, the people of Gaza lived under severe restrictions, and now conditions are far worse as their infrastructure and homes have been destroyed and they are being deprived of the most basic necessities.

Continue reading “The Starvation of Gaza Is a Crime”

Susan Glasser seems surprised that Americans are paying more attention to a devastating war that their government is backing unconditionally than they are to a visiting foreign leader:

It says much about this moment in U.S. politics that, on Thursday, when demonstrators staged a die-in on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge timed to the APEC summit, they were protesting Biden’s strong support for Israel in the wake of the October 7th terrorist attack by Hamas and subsequent Israeli attack of Gaza, not anything having to do with Xi.

Continue reading “Gaza and Biden’s Failure of Leadership”

The Biden administration is now admitting that the death toll in Gaza is likely much higher than the count from the local Ministry of Health:

A senior Biden administration official said the death toll of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is likely far higher than the 10,000 number being reported by the health ministry amid Israel’s war against Hamas.

Barbara Leaf, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, told a House panel that those killed over one month into the war are likely “higher than is being cited.”

Continue reading “The People of Gaza Need a Ceasefire Now”

Surprising no one, Danielle Pletka wants the US to seek regime change in Iran:

Rather, it is the Reagan doctrine and the collapse of the Soviet Union that should guide a policy for change in Tehran. Like the Soviet Union and its satellites, Iran’s regime is deeply unpopular with its own people. Three major uprisings took place in 2009, 2019, and 2022, despite the government’s increasingly repressive police state.

In none of those instances, did any Western country provide more than token support for the Iranian people.

Regime change is a misguided and destructive policy. If it “worked,” it would be destabilizing for the wider region and it would probably trigger civil war in Iran. The current regime would not go quietly. That could create a disastrous conflict like the one that engulfed Syria, but on a much larger scale. If the Reagan Doctrine’s record is anything to go by, the US would be plunging Iran into years of bloodshed and atrocities committed by death squads, but the casualties and the number of refugees would be far greater than in Nicaragua or Angola.

If the US managed to bring the current system down, there is no guarantee that it would lead to a better government. It is not at all certain that it would lead to the changes in Iranian foreign policy that many Westerners want to see. The assumption that this “solves” anything is baseless. More to the point, the US has no right to interfere in Iranian affairs, and I suspect most Iranian opponents of their government would want nothing to do with Washington’s “help.”

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Ross Douthat wants you to be very afraid of China:

The establishment of Chinese military pre-eminence in East Asia would be a unique geopolitical shock, with dire effects on the viability of America’s alliance systems, on the likelihood of regional wars and arms races and on our ability to maintain the global trading system that undergirds our prosperity at home.

All of this exaggerates what is at stake for the U.S., and it inflates the threat from China to U.S. interests. That makes it a very conventional hawkish argument, and like other conventional hawkish arguments it gets the most important things wrong. If Americans want to avert a “debacle in East Asia,” our government should reject hawkish recommendations on China policy.

Continue reading “How To Avert a Debacle in East Asia”