With so much going down in and around the Persian Gulf, few of us noticed, let alone paused to make sense of, Israel’s airstrikes last month on the Iranian port of Bandar Anzali: eight hundred miles north of the Hormuz on a Caspian Sea at once the world’s largest landlocked expanse of water, and two-way supply line between two of the West’s most economically targeted states.
Also known as Russia’s lake.
Israel’s most widely distributed newspaper, israel today, could barely hide its glee …
… not, we may safely conclude, because Israel could hope to win a war with Russia but because such blatant goading might see Moscow responding militarily, so drawing in NATO to scupper whatever remains of Team Trump’s hopes of an off-ramp. 1
Nor was the significance lost on America’s cold war mouthpiece, Radio Free Europe:
For reasons set out yesterday in my post on Israel in Lebanon, Israel needs the US to remain in this badly timed and disastrously executed war on the Islamic Republic. It’s not just that Iran has predictably weaponised – and less predictably monetised – the Strait while exposing American inability to protect Gulf State clients. It’s also that Hamas stands undefeated, the Houthis once more poised to block Red Sea and Suez, and a Hezbollah Netanyahu had declared a spent force raining missiles on northern Israel while taking out IDF tank columns, their crews exhausted or dead, and not even close to control over Lebanon from southern border to the Litani.
Given these realities – and the myth of Israeli immunity shredded by Iron Dome failure – the attacks on Iran’s Caspian seaboard seem acts of desperation.
Acts, moreover, which if the Frum Report 2 – a now go to source despite its AI tweaks – is right, badly underestimate the escalation ladder of non military responses available to Moscow. The Frum case, made in just twenty minutes, is nothing if not compelling …
* * *
- Provoking Russia to prevent a US withdrawal from its war on the Iranian people is of a piece with IDF murders of moderate Iranian leaders, and Israel’s slaughter of civilians in its northern neighbour. See Israel in Lebanon.
- As best I can tell the presenter has nothing to do with Zionist David Frum (a collaborator with genocide apologist Douglas Murray, and looking nothing like our man) nor with the Yiddish word, frum, for Judaist piety. As best I can tell – though I can’t rule out allusions, ironic or not, above my pay grade.
I imagine Russia can exert severe pressure on Nazioland if it chooses to. Russia seems to imagine that because there is a large contingent of ethnic Russians there that these scum need special treatment, but that won’t last if they become a significant threat to the economy or to security via Iran.
At the other end of the area, what do the Yanks do now that ‘talks’ are in the bin? It would be sensible of Trump to declare the war won, and hand the problem over to the rest of the world to clean up, but that’s not very likely to happen. They have been building up troops in the area, but if they attempt a landing in Iran things will very quickly get much worse for them. Blockading Iranian tankers bound for China would lead to an extra layer of defeat, one way or another. So . . . invade Saudi Arabia ? Speed up the mission to settle on Mars (how appropriate too!)?
“what do the Yanks do now that ‘talks’ are in the bin?”
Depends what the objectives are:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nt1CgQsgpI
Medhurst seems to be giving us just more US exceptionalism – they can do anything they want, according to him. But what he says the US is trying to do depends on everyone else tolerating it. That will be fine, until countries like Russia and China start to get really damaged. So far, this hasn’t happened, but when it does then they will put a stop to it, and without needing to go full nuclear exchange. The US is not self sufficient in everything, it also needs to trade, and other countries possess Navies, including submarines – a few judicious sinkings of illegally operating pirate ships caught in the act would bring about some changes in behaviour.
Also, Yankeeland has already used at least one third to a half of all missile stocks. Getting numbers back to previous will take years – if China releases critical materials to them – but why would they, if their tankers are being hi-jacked. So if Russia or China want’s to exert pressure back, the US would be in a losing position from the start.