Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza wars: "darkness ahead in both regions" for US policy?

The US is heavily politically and to some extent militarily invested in two wars with far-reaching effects, both actually and potentially.

The more immediate risk of a expanding war at the moment is in the Middle East, where Iran sees its own interest as supporting the Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories.

Given the heated polemics at the moment, I suppose I should specify that “resistance” does not imply some special virtue of the resisters or partisanship to their side. Resistance is resistance, and international law applies to it, as well. Even when the power being resisted isn’t following it.

I haven’t posted a John Mearsheimer video in a while. So here’s one addressing the current situation with the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza wars.¹ As always with Mearsheimer, if you aren't irritated by something he says, you aren't paying attention. Like: “The situation with Ukraine and Russia is going to get worse with time, for us [the US], and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the problems in the Middle East are going to get worse, as well. Darkness ahead in both regions.“ (Just after 8:00 in the video.)

Israel-Gaza

Mearsheimer in the video seems to think that a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine is already impossible. The official US position, which President Biden has emphasized, is for a two-state solution with separate Palestinian and Israeli states. Any major negotiations with Israel in the short run for stabilizing and improving the situation - which Netanyahu’s current government doesn’t actually want - will have to take place in context of discussing a two-state solution.

Gideon Levy wrote this past May that he considered the Netanyahu had already successfully made a real two-state solution impossible:

In killing [the two-state] solution, Netanyahu has left us with only two possible solutions. The vast majority of Israelis, including Netanyahu himself, are relying on the perpetuation of apartheid for all eternity. Ostensibly, this now appears to be the most reasonable scenario. But the growing strength of the Israeli right, and the spirit of resistance among Palestinians, which has not completely dissipated, will not allow this to continue forever. Apartheid is a stopgap solution, possibly a long-term one – it has already been in place for over 50 years and it may persist for another 50 – but its end will come. How will it play out? There are only two possible scenarios. One is preferred by the extreme right, and horrifically, perhaps by almost all Israelis – a second Nakba. If things come to a head and Israel is faced with a choice of one democratic state for two peoples, or a mass expulsion of Palestinians in order to maintain the existence of a Jewish state, the choice will be clear for almost every Israeli Jew. The moment a two-state solution was taken off the table, they were left with no other choice.²

In other words, there are three things that many and perhaps most Jewish Israelis presumably want: a democratic state, a Jewish state, and a state that includes what is now the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, aka, Greater Israel. And actually they can only have two of the three, i.e.:

• A democratic state in Greater Israel that does not define itself as a Jewish state.

• A democratic and Jewish state within the 1967 borders of Israel (or something very close to them)

• A Jewish state in Greater Israel that is not democratic, i.e., an apartheid state with Palestinians either second-class citizens or expelled from the country.

Ukraine and Russia are (quietly) talking - but not short-term end to the war is in sight

Adam Tooze considers Ukraine’s stabilization of its wartime economy during 2023 to be an impressive achievement.³ But it doesn’t change the fact that the Russian invasion and partial occupation has hammered the Ukrainian economy severely.

This collapse in economic activity [since the 2022 invasion] reflects the disruption and destruction, the mobilization of workers for war and the flight of millions of Ukrainians out of the country. Ukraine’s exodus was the biggest and most rapid refugee movement seen worldwide in almost half a century. …

The war has left a huge percentage of Ukraine’s population dependent on humanitarian assistance. In 2022, 15.8 million people in Ukraine [out of a prewar population of 44 million] received different types of humanitarian assistance.

Any talk of stabilization is thus strictly relative. [my emphasis]

He writes that Ukraine’s “GDP has stabilized at 30 percent below its prewar level and the worst case scenario - in the event of further massive Russian attacks on the energy system - now foresees a relatively modest further contraction.” But he notes, “Ukraine’s heavy industrial sector was completely devastated by the outbreak of the war.” The most industrialized section of Ukraine was the western parts, a big part of which Russia now occupies.

But the basically reality he describes in his first sentence: “With the frustration of hopes raised by the summer offensive, it became clear that Ukraine is locked in an attritional struggle for survival.“ And he quotes from a Bloomberg report:

… the [Ukrainian] central bank sees war risks extending through 2024 — a previous assessment cited mid-next year — as a grinding counteroffensive makes little progress in recapturing Russian-controlled territory and winter weather threatens to halt any advances.

Isobel Koshiw reporting for the Washington Post describes the current state of the very non-public diplomacy going on being Ukraine and Russia at this point:

The countries, now sworn enemies fighting a grinding war, are managing to negotiate on a few core humanitarian issues: exchanging prisoners of war and dead soldiers’ bodies; the passage of ships from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports; and, most recently, the return of Ukrainian children from Russia.

In some cases, Moscow and Kyiv use intermediaries, including Turkey, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, the Vatican, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

But most of the wartime bartering is done directly, by individual representatives, including in tough and unpleasant face-to-face meetings on the Ukrainian-Russian border and in Istanbul, as well as phone calls, according to some Ukrainian officials involved in the discussions.

Neither side is keen to advertise the existence of these back channels.⁴

Near the end of the article, she posts a bit more on the good news that at least some Ukrainian children taken to Russia are being returned to their families in Ukraine:

There is a line of communication on missing children between Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets, and his Russian counterpart, Tatiana Moskalova, but Lubinets said, it has not produced any results. They have met twice in person, once on the Ukraine-Russia border in October 2022 and once in Istanbul in January, on the margins of a conference.

Starting in March, however, groups of children have come back to Ukraine on a semiregular basis. They have been dropped off at a far western part of the Ukraine-Belarus border, cross over by foot, and are met in Ukraine by Save Ukraine, a nongovernmental organization. [my emphasis]

As Mearsheimer says in his lecture above, the big geopolitical winner of the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza wars at the moment is China. Although the biggest official strategic concern for the US is China, the US now finds itself dealing with those two wars that certainly detracts from the diplomatic and military bandwidth the US has to devote to countering China, at the moment.

1. Israel-Hamas, Ukraine-Russia and China: John Mearsheimer on why the US is in serious trouble! Centre for Independent Studies YouTube channel 10/30/2023. (Accessed: 30-10-2023).

2. Levy, Gideon (2023): Only Two Options Remain for Israel: Another Nakba or One State for Two Peoples. Haaretz 05/28/2023. <https://t.co/4A4G3d0R6z> (Accessed: 29-10-2023).

3. Tooze, Adam (2023): Chartbook 250: The precarious stabilization of Ukraine's war economy. Chartbook (Substack) 10/29/2023. <https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-250-the-precarious-stabilization> (Accessed: 30-10-2023).

4. Koshiw, Isobel (2023): Back-channel talks keep Ukraine and Russia in contact, despite war. Washington Post 10/25/2023. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/24/ukraine-russia-backchannel-talks-war/> (Accessed: 2023-30-10).