“Israel’s strategy leads to nuclear war”

Times of Israel, June 17 2025

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Yesterday Dimitris Konstantakopoulos, former colleague of Yanis Varoufakis in the government of a people royally shafted by EU/EC/IMF in 2015, wrote in Defend Democracy Press under the self explanatory title I have adopted for this post.

For reasons I’ve given many times – most recently two days ago in Israel is a US proxy, not its puppet master – I don’t share Dimitris’s view, and that of distinguished pundits Jeffrey Sachs, Scott Ritter and John Mearsheimer, that “Israel is not a U.S. protectorate today, rather the U.S. is a protectorate of Israel.”  I regard Brian Berletic’s take, also given many times, as closer to the mark:

People tell me Israel controls the US. When I ask how, they tell me AIPAC. But the arms industry spends far more. So do the Banks, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture. A cartel of industries fund think tanks producing papers which become policies and bills that the media sell to the American people. That’s how it works and the Israel lobbyists are a tiny fraction of that. if Israel truly controlled the US, all its forces would be in the Middle East. But they’re also in Ukraine and South Asia because the US is waging proxy war in all three …

Indeed Dimitris comes close to contradicting himself when he invokes German Chancellor Merz – quoted, inter alia, by Alarabya, Haaretz and Times of Israel – that “Israel does the dirty work for us”. But Brian’s words notwithstanding, when I wrote recently that “if Israel is the mad dog, the madman holding the leash is Uncle Sam”, I might usefully have added that mad dogs often display a will of their own. Think of such other rottweilers for empire as the “loyalists” of the Six Counties … Algeria’s pieds noir … apartheid South Africa …

You spotted, I’m sure, where my analogy breaks down. None of those had nuclear weapons.

Israel’s Strategy Leads to Nuclear War

The absolutely predictable and predicted military conflict that erupted five days ago in the Middle East is one of the most serious and dangerous to have broken out globally in decades. Like all major crises, it simultaneously allows us to draw highly useful conclusions about the most critical issues of the global situation, such as the nature of the present forces in power in the U.S. and Israel and also the relationship between these two states. A key question is whether the U.S. will actively engage in the conflict, and particularly whether Israel and the U.S. will use nuclear weapons against Tehran. Another enormous issue is the stance nuclear powers like Pakistan, India, Russia, and China will take in this crisis, as their interests are directly involved. The outcome of the crisis may well depend on their stance.

The adventurist attack launched by Ukraine (i.e. America) against Russian strategic nuclear bombers, violating all written and unwritten rules of “nuclear stability,” on the very eve of Israel’s attack on Iran, could in fact, objectively, be interpreted as a warning to Moscow not to intervene in the war against Iran.

The war between Israel and Iran must itself be understood within the broader framework of the effort of the “collective West” to prevent the emergence of alternative power poles on the planet that would challenge its five-century-long global dominance—and also to destroy states and regimes with significant independence, such as Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China (after having destroyed Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Libya, Somalia). Western motivations are not coincidental. They are the product of structural factors, stemming (as happened with World War I and II) from the very nature of global capitalism and its inevitable, vital for its very survival result, the phenomenon of Imperialism. Iran does not possess nuclear weapons, making it the weak link in the anti-hegemonic bloc.

Those fond of historical analogies and mathematical pattern comparisons might consider the year 1942, when Hitler, having failed to capture Moscow, turned to Russia’s soft underbelly, aiming to seize the Caucasus hydrocarbons for himself and deny them to the USSR. Had he succeeded, the war’s outcome might have been different. But his armies were crushed at Stalingrad, leading to Germany’s defeat.

Today, we see something similar. After the West’s failed attempt to overthrow the Russian regime and dismantle Russia, Israel—with U.S. and other Western support—is attempting to destroy the Iranian regime, if not Iran as a state (as they did in Syria. Iran being the last independent state in the Middle East and the last ally of Russia, China, and the Palestinians. Thus, by destroying it, they would complete control over the entire Middle East, the “strategic center” of Eurasia, if not of the entire world. Transforming it with a “new 1989” into a springboard for further attacks against Russia, Central Asia, and China, and a launching pad for global totalitarianism—as we warned and, unfortunately, accurately predicted last December regarding the war that has now erupted 

We cannot know for sure whether there is a “general headquarters” of the collective West processing these plans, but ultimately, this is not even of great importance. What matters are the facts, which are more than sufficiently explained by the West’s core strategic objectives. As the German Chancellor himself said “Israel does the dirty work for us” 

Both the global tolerance of the live-broadcasted 20-month genocide of the Palestinian people and the war Israel has now launched against Iran prove, beyond any doubt, that Benjamin Netanyahu is today the leader with the greatest global influence in the collective West—and even beyond it, evidently due to his support from the Empire of Global Financial Capital and its allied Empire of Information Technology, as well as the various omnipotent Zionist lobbies all around the globe. The Israeli Prime Minister, about whom it has been written that he could “teach Machiavelli lessons,” certainly has the wit and ability to conceal his leading role in global affairs as much as possible and, whenever possible (as with the 2003 invasion of Iraq), to have others do the dirty work and bear the consequences. As Professor Jeffrey Sachs notably observes, it is not Israel that is a U.S. protectorate today, but rather the U.S. that is a protectorate of Israel. 

Since the 2014 Ukraine crisis, we have been living in an environment pregnant with a new and nuclear “August 4, 1914″—unless it is prevented by the decisive reaction of forces, especially in the East but also within the West and the Global South, who realize that the stakes are humanity’s very survival.

This article is being written amid reports from serious sources – here and here – about the imminent direct involvement of the U.S. in the war Israel has launched. There are already clear signs – here and here – of their participation in its preparation and execution. It is utterly absurd for this U.S. administration to claim that Israel acts independently without consulting Washington. This charade has been played for decades and has become a wretched farce. Israel is entirely dependent on U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic support. It cannot take half a step without Washington’s backing.

We hope all this will not happen, but it might even occur before you read this article. However, we must emphasize that Iran is not an easy opponent and cannot be subdued with conventional weapons. This is why the use of nuclear weapons is not an aberration but inherent to some degree in the very logic of the Neocon program—at least as long as Israel does not fear a proportional response. It organically stems from the very program, from the internal logic of American-Israeli imperialism, as we warned alongside Gilbert Marquis as early as 2006 and 2007 in articles published in the French review Utopie Critique (founded by Michalis Raptis Pablo) and in many articles in the Greek newspaper Kosmos tou Ependyti. At that time, the U.S. administration had elaborated operational plans to bomb Iran with tactical nuclear weapons, halted only by the reaction then of U.S. military officials themselves. Senior officers threatened to resign and leaked the operational plans to renowned American journalist Seymour Hersh, who wrote about them, helping at the time to prevent this nightmarish scenario, which now risks returning.

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