https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ne ... 779396.cmsU.S. general warns Pentagon he lacks sufficient forces to protect Israel
A shortage of Navy destroyers, used to defend against Iranian ballistic missile attacks, will force the head of U.S. European Command to prioritize the U.S. homeland instead, officials said.
'Kind of madness': Iran vows to target US, Israeli energy assets if attacked as Trump weighs fresh strikes
Generational Dynamics Web Log for 21-May-2017
What's most interesting about Trump's visit is the symbolic flip-flop from the previous administration to the current one in attitudes towards Iran and Saudi Arabia.
President Barack Obama repeatedly showed his contempt, in one way or another, for the Saudis, and the feeling was mutual. However Obama, through his Secretary of State John Kerry who believes that America's soldiers are terrorists, repeatedly sucked up to the Iranians, making one humiliating concession after another to close the nuclear deal. However, the feeling was not mutual, as Iran repeatedly insulted Kerry, Obama, and the American people, and still does.
So now president Trump has made a symbolic reversal. Trump is contemptuous of the Iranians, and the Iranians are contemptuous of him. Trump loves the Saudis, and the Saudis love him.
This is a good time to remind readers that it's a core principle of Generational Dynamics that, even in a dictatorship, major decisions are made by masses of people, by generations of people. The attitudes of politicians are irrelevant, except insofar as they represent the attitudes of the people. So the relations between American, Iranian and Saudi leaders is much less important than the attitudes that the masses of Americans, Saudis and Iranians have for one another.
So we note the following:
Although the Supreme Leader and other Iranian politicians say they hate the United States, their attitudes are not shared by the younger generations, who are generally pro-Western and pro-American. So it really makes little difference what Obama and Trump think of Khamenei.
As illustrated by the 1979 terrorist attack on Saudi Arabia's Grand Mosque, there's a major split in Saudi Arabia between those who support the al-Saud government and the Salafists. How this split plays out in the approaching Clash of Civilizations world war remains to be seen.
I believe that a great deal of information can be determined by detailed generational analyses of the various tribes and ethnic groups in the Mideast. I believe that this analysis could be used to predict how events will unfold in the coming years. I certainly don't have anything like the resources to perform such an analysis, but any college student interested in this kind of analysis could make an invaluable contribution to understanding what's going on in the world today by taking on, as a thesis topic, a generational analysis of the tribes and ethnic groups in the Mideast. AP and Arab News
The future in the Mideast
What will be the causes and the timing of a new Mideast war?
The causes will be among those listed by Huntington in [The Clash of Civilizations].
The timing will be determined by the last crisis war, which occurred in the 1936-49 time frame.
Few analysts seem to have any idea of what's in store in the Mideast. They all look at the 1967 and 1972 wars, as well as the late 1980's intifada, because that's as far back as they can remember, and they say, "Any new war won't be any worse than those."
That's completely wrong. Those were mid-cycle wars, led by veterans of the extremely violent and bloody 1940s wars who were willing to compromise before allowing that much violence to occur again. Those veterans are dying off now, and the next war won't have their influence. Today we're repeating the steps of the early Palestinian-Jewish confrontations in the late 1930s, leading up the extremely violent and bloody wars of the late 1940s. History shows that there's no guarantee that the state of Israel will survive the new wars.
When will the generational change take place?
There's an incredible irony going on in the Mideast today, in that the leaders of two opposing sides are, respectively, Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat.
These two men hate each other, but they're the ones cooperating with each other (consciously or not) to prevent a major Mideast conflagration. Both of them fought in the wars of the 1940s, and neither of them wants to see anything like that happen again. And it won't happen again, as long as both of these men are in charge.
The disappearance of these two men will be part of an overall generational change in the Mideast that will lead to a major conflagration within a few years. It's possible that the disappearance of Arafat alone will trigger a war, just as the election of Lincoln ignited the American Civil War. (It's currently American policy to get rid of Arafat. My response is this: Be careful what you wish for.) Most likely, the disappearance of Arafat will lead to increased violence, but not a full-fledged war for a few months.
Furthermore, as I've pointed out many times, the median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.6, indicating the Gaza is being controlled more and more by a population of young people with no concept of the nuances of international geopolitics.
It's worth taking a moment to see what attitudes were like following the end of World War II. There had been two horrible world wars, and it was generally accepted that we might well be headed for a third world war, this time with the Communists.
So there was no Nash equilibrium after World War II. There was no paralysis, no fear of doing something to solve the world's problems; instead, the great fear was that doing nothing would lead to disaster.
Here's what Hannah Arendt wrote in the preface to her 1950 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism:
"Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena -- homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest -- forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.
On the level of historical insight and political thought there prevails an ill-defined, general agreement that the essential structure of all civilizations is at the breaking point. Although it may seem better preserved in some parts of the world than in others, it can nowhere provide the guidance to the possibilities of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors. Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center of such events than balanced judgment and measured insight. The central events of our time are not less effectively forgotten by those committed to a belief in an unavoidable doom, than by those who haven themselves up to reckless optimism."
It's amazing what the survivors of World War II did. They carefully set up worldwide organizations -- the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, etc. -- whose purpose was, most of all, to prevent another world war. They accomplished huge things. They set up country boundaries, set up world monetary policies, as well as trade and commerce policies. They made sure everyone would be fed. They attacked all of the miseries of the World Wars -- poverty, famine, disease and war -- so that nothing like World War II would ever happen to their children or grandchildren.
But the people who set up those organizations and did those great things are gone now, and the people left behind don't have the skills to make them work effectively.
Today we're much closer to World War III than we were in 1950, but there's no will today to do something to prevent it. What we're seeing is that nations around the world are trying not to disturb the equilibrium, trying not to make things worse, with the result that nations around the world are becoming paralyzed into inaction.
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