I have always taken a "realistic" position on IR, but this growing world anger, and anger at home, the emotions or passions that drive everything, emotions esp anger seem more and more to be overriding reason and common sense.
Look at Gaza. Any analysis would say that Hamas has performed an almost miraculous feat in getting this decades-old conflict back at the top of the world's priorities, and that there is little to be gained from Israel's military intervention.
Nonetheless, Israel charges back in, hammer and tanks, because the people demand revenge and demand their government restore dueish superiority. (They demand of Netanyahu, even though it is his fiasco.)
You can kill the Hamas leadership, but you can't stop this movement which has the backing of the Palestinian people (about half theaccording, accordingto polls) - the leadership and the arms will only return.
So what's the point? Is it revenge? Or is it dissuasion - teach those civilians not to support an organisation dedicated to the destruction of Israel? Or is it driven by the Zionist Ideological vision of ethnic cleansing to create a greater Israel?
Seems to me it's purely emotional, the desire for revenge and to re-establish fear and respect of Israel in the neighborhood.
But there's no plan for "the day after". Gaza has been flattened - will the people of Gaza file out into the Sinai? 40 years in the desert stuff?
Or will something "unexpected" happen? Ok, the Arab elites would be happy to see the brutal destruction of Hamas, which is Muslim street Brotherhood that threatens Wahhabi power; but what about a changing mood in American and European public opinion, especially the young like us, who take sensible, if radical, positions; or the Evangelical Christians who apparently want all Jews to collect in Israel and wait for the Messiah? You see how mad and magical the emotions get.
And Ukraine was much the same story - the emotions seemed to be in the driving seat, the West took what it considers a moral position and for a long time that position was buoyed by the story around the initial defeat of the Russians, by the emergence of plucky Zelinsky on the world stage, we all remember his crowd thumping speeches, and by the heroic resistance of the courageous Ukrainian people.
No one seemed to notice that actually Ukraine had made itself a most powerful enemy ("poked the bear in the eye with a sharp stick") and that the West's reserves were depleted, its army a paper tiger etc.
Some of us saw all that ... with a spot of help from Mearsheimer and Mercurios and the rest, because we took a realistic point of view, analysed the facts and were not influenced by public opinion or government propaganda. That is the starting point: analyst and consultant. In other words, we present an analysis and the customer, or the politicians, then frame it to their liking, give it Vision and Direction.
Surely Boris' visit to Ukraine last year was the triumph of hope and emotion over realism and reason. Far as I remember, the Western militaries were telling the politicians the score, but the politicians went ahead anyway and now there are half a million dead, Ukraine is flattened, the world economy split in two, debt piled up even higher and decline sped up. Thank you neocons and Boris
(Brexit, Covid, Ukraine - what a total disaster Boris was, but he drew the crowds - shows how difficult it is to pursue realistic negotiations when you have a baying crowd in front of you, stoked up by neocon insecurities and harangued by the msm!).
Anyway to finish this piece on "The Triumph of Hope over Despair", or emotions over reason, we have reached actually the opposite: now reason has been proven right and it's "The Triumph of Despair over Hope" after half a million deaths in Ukraine, the utter failure of the offensive and a very cold winter ahead with the energy supplies knocked out. All of which is likely to finish off the people of Kiev. Similar script for Tel Aviv.
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