The Israeli dream of regional hegemony risks the entire world
The world isn’t worrying enough. I will try and translate typical nytimes doublespeak about the severity of this war into realspeak. We are in a place where tiny wins for Israel can have global human and environment consequences.
While I understand the @nytimes can’t talk about consequences for brown ppl (until after they have died), it would be useful to note that this is the worlds biggest gas field- supplying about 20% of global LNG and more importantly (depending on how you math it) ONE THIRD of the world’s fertilizer.
It is befuddling to me that India is willing to starve hundreds of millions of its own citizens (40% of India’s total fertiliser comes from this ONE GIANT GAS FIELD) all in the interests of one tiny nation of 7-9M. Why support Israel when its actions could destroy India’s region?
One of the saddest sights in modern history has to be Modi setting on fire 70 years of pro-Palestinian policy just to join the big boys zionist leagues so he can hobnob with the likes of Trump and Bibi.
India has money to buy fertiliser - but if the fertilizer doesn’t exist, where does it come from? What about neighbours like Pakistan who are close enough to the brink (since day one!) that faced with tens of millions starving it could go into all out collapse, possibly triggering nuclear Armageddon.
Like most projections - hopefully these terrible things won’t come to pass because something will have happened to stop billions of people starving. What’s different/interesting here is that all the global powers that be, the US being one, India being another, don’t seem to be all at all concerned about the catastrophic consequences of what they’re doing today.
So that’s really the alarming part. If the world leaders don’t care about consequences, then why would they bother putting the war genie back in the box?
And where are all the environmentalists when you need them? Sadly, most of them are so pro-zionist that they would rather see the world burn than say anything which might offend a Zionist. If we assume even a small percentage of the Pars gas field is either burned or vented - we are looking at DOUBLING the entire worlds CO2 output - and the resulting toxic rain would destroy, oh not much, just about whatever crops remained after the fertiliser shock for a couple of billion ppl (assuming they haven’t launched nukes already to ease the shock of mass famines).
Lets say Israel does a proper bombing run on Pars, and in retaliation Iran bombs the Qatari LNG trains a min away. Well then WE (yes we, the whole world, not just Iran) are looking at 5-10 YEARS of total global emissions in ONE FUCKING event triggering irreversible global warming loops.
Now, the lower bound is more likely - but say we don’t want to trigger a global warming event killing billions and just want to take out Pars so Iran makes a bit less money - a few dozen drones nicely targeted would do the job. So in this Israeli dream scenario of breaking up Iran, where they take it easy and only use a few nice bombs on Pars (not the 20x kind) we are only looking at catastrophic famine for a billion ppl.
Once Israel wins the war, who is going to rebuild the world’s energy+fertilzer supply? This mega buildout in Iran and the GCC happened in a very different world - after this war will there even be a Qatar? The Israeli dream is a “mosaic” of fractured powerless states perpetually at war with each other in this region. Good luck getting them to rebuild and with who’s trillion.
But don’t worry guys, Israel will be fine, the US and EU will make sure of it. The EU will achieve its dream of going back to a Tolkienian past with no industry as they think fondly back to the good old days of cheap Russian and Middle Eastern energy. The US, Canada and Australia will struggle with depressions and rising discontent at home as their immigrant population see tens of millions starving in their other homelands.
footnote 1: no llms were harmed in the production of this post - and talking of LLMs who is going to fund Sam Altman’s dream of AI domination when some of the biggest AI funders are going to be a bit busy trying to survive.
footnote 2: The rise and rise and rise of China. The billions of ppl outside the firm grip of Zionism (i.e not in the western orbit) would be crazy not to go all in on Chinese everything - tech, solar, EVs, batteries - the future is electric and China is by far the world leader. We are looking at not a multipolar world but a Chinese one - where it’s economic output is far past the combined US+EU one in a few years.
footnote 3: As a young man I read a lot of Western philosophy and literature, and for a brief period of time even believed in enlightenment ideals and a bunch of these Western moral frameworks which said human life is the ultimate value? Pick a biblical or say a Kantian framework - they all say you have to weigh human life equally. Turns out that was completely bullshit - the only value to survive so called “western enlightenment” has been Zionism - it has eaten up the very souls of the west.
footnote 4: What happened to all of these westerners who understood the world and wrote books like The Prize - a broad sweeping story of oil - It has its flaws and is really one sided, right? The whole thing is about we want your oil. But at least those writers understood the region and what was going on. I mean, many of these people still are there, right? Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer have been talking regional implications of this decade long push by the West to go all in on Israel first, Israel only. Sadly, they’ve been sidelined for decades and called alarmists and all kinds of other bad names. We have replaced them with thinkers like Pete Hegseth - a guy so cartoonishly evil with a worldview so racist and destructive that even a fiction writer would not dream of such a crappy storyline.
footnote 5: Once upon a time, humans debated the cost of winning. Whether its Cain and Abel, the US and USSR agreeing not to end human life on earth, or India and Pakistan only killing a few hundred ppl instead of a few hundred million - where is that restraint now?
footnote 6: It’s been really interesting watching influential right wing figures like Tucker Carlson who loved every American war turn America first after decades of being Israel first. This wave is so strong that we might see the first third party candidate American president in 2028 on the platform of not killing the US economy for Israel.