this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Death to NATO
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This has been a decade of Western powers realizing they aren't militarily invincible. I was told that NATO weapons would obliterate the inferior Russian hordes, Americans would dominate the Taliban entirely, that Israel would grind Palestine into dust within the first week.
Calling Russia's bluff in regards to NATO joining Ukraine is going to be remembered by historians as the pivotal event of the 21st century in my opinion. Until then, it was simply assumed that NATO was the strongest military force in the world, and that it could not be challenged. Even the humiliation that US suffered in Afghanistan wasn't enough to dispel the myth. And then we saw that Russia could take a NATO proxy all on its own, and that full NATO backing didn't make a lick of difference. Not only that, but it turned out that the G7 couldn't isolate Russia economically either. All of a sudden the sanctions regime fizzled and we're now seeing large parts of the world moving away from the dollar.
Now that NATO has depleted itself in Ukraine, it's a question of how much actual support can even be provided to Israel. The reality is that Israel doesn't have a huge industrial base of its own the way Russia does, and if they end up getting mired in Gaza, they will quickly run through their existing stocks of weapons at which point they could see themselves in an operational crisis. We might actually see Palestine finally freed at the end of all this.
We're seeing what "full NATO backing" really means: we'll sell you weapons, but we're not dying for you or risking a wider war. That's a lot less valuable than what NATO was sold as.
To be fair, Ukraine is technically not part of NATO, but I really can't imagine that the level of support would be significantly different if an actual NATO member was under attack.
I imagine actual NATO members are wondering the same thing, which doesn't bode well for NATO.
They'll start demanding more money from the member states and trying to increase membership. They're already putting pressure on the Irish government to drop our "neutrality".
The most bonkers part being how ambivilent everyone seems to be about it. Not that we were ever actually neutral, but still.
Bonkers as in you expected more people to oppose it, or that you thought more people would support it?
I expected more to oppose it. But I mean, my expectations for people having even the most basic political acumen gets lower and lower every day.
Indeed, and the fact that US is basically the only member of NATO with a serious military must be increasingly concerning for Europe now. If US gets bored of Europe and decides to pivot to China or the Middle East, then European NATO members are going to be in a very difficult position.
Where do I go in 15 years when my kids are drafted to fight for the noble polish invasion of Kaliningrad?
I do wonder how crazy things are gonna get in Poland in the next few years.
Pray that they remembered what you taught them about how to get away with fragging their officers.
I vacillate on this point. Isn'treal, with US backing, has more than enough bombs and fuel to completely ethnically cleanse Gaza, which I believe is its primary goal. What it lacks is the ability to wage an actual war against a state like Iran. Iran is never going to start that war, and in any case, Isn'treal has nukes that it wouldn't bat an eye about using.
There are limits to what you can do with bombing in practice. If you want to hold territory then you have to put boots on the ground sooner or later. And of course, Hamas now has a very extensive tunnel system all over Gaza. This is a great watch on how difficult it is to counter such tunnels. So, all IDF can do is just massacre civilians, and then the whole world sees these atrocities making it very difficult for their western sponsors to continue providing support.
I also don't expect that Iran would want an open war, I think it's much more likely that there's going to be a lot of asymmetric warfare happening. We're also starting to see attacks on shipping from Yemen which could cause serious economic damage in the long term as well.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Unironically big if true. If the resistance's homebrew weapon production can outproduce Israeli arm industry in the long run, even by a little, there is no way Israel will hold.
There already huge stockpiles of weapons in Gaza, so I don't think there even needs to be active production. People are speculating that Israel already lost hundreds of tanks in just a month, and having seen a bunch of videos of RPGs being used successfully I think that's very plausible. Urban environment is absolutely terrible for tanks because you can have a guy with an RPG hiding in every building, and it's impossible to see them until it's too late. There are even videos of guys running right up to the tanks to put explosives right on them. This is how bad situational awareness is for Israelis. Such rate of loss is absolutely unsustainable. Each tank takes millions of dollars and many months to produce, and if it can be blown to shit with using cheap RPGs that's a total clusterfuck from Israeli perspective.
Yemen is also becoming a big problem for Israel because they're attacking shipping, and Israeli economy is already under stress from the war because they had to mobilize a bunch of people. It's entirely possible that Israel is headed for an economic crash in the near future. It seems like this was a huge miscalculation by the zionists, and they don't really have any real plan now.