What War with Iran Would Look Like | For Washington, All Roads Lead to Minsk | Israel’s War in Gaza & Counterinsurgency Theory, and more

Given the scale of the recent regional disruption and the blowback that Washington has received as a result, a sober reconsideration of the military edge commitment and U.S. military aid to Israel makes sense. But Netanyahu’s implicit formula of ending U.S. military assistance, whilst keeping a qualitative military edge, would be the worst of all worlds. Minimizing U.S. input in Israel’s decision-making process will remove the scant existing constraints on Jerusalem’s recent revisionist grand strategic turn. Ending all U.S. military assistance to Israel, as Netanyahu advocates, is unrealistic. However, making assistance more conditional could recalibrate the dynamics of this relationship more in Washington’s favor. It will not give the United States a cast-iron veto over Israeli policy. Yet, it will end a something-for-nothing dependency that is in neither party’s interest. Equally, perpetuating the qualitative military edge commitment would continue to confine America’s ability to deepen ties with other non-Israeli regional partners. This not only hamstrings the United States and its allies — it also creates a space for great-power rivals such as Russia and China to fill the gap.

How Israel’s War in Gaza (Partially) Rehabilitated Counterinsurgency Theory  (Rafael S. Coehn, Lawfare / RAND)
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in late summer of 2021 brought more than just the collapse of a country and diminished American prestige. It discredited an idea that was part of U.S. military strategy for the better part of two decades—population-centric counterinsurgency. Premised on Mao Tse-tung’s famed analogy likening guerrillas needing popular support to fish needing the sea, the theory posited that by winning over the population through a series of economic and political inducements, a government could starve an insurgency of its lifeblood. Advocates pointed to lessons from Cold War insurgencies like the Malayan Emergency and Vietnam to argue that this approach held the key to winning the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
America’s fascination with population-centric counterinsurgency proved short-lived. For a time, the adoption of this strategy during the 2006 Iraq “surge” seemed to vindicate this theory. But a similar “surge” in forces and shift in tactics failed to yield comparable success in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010. And while Iraq remained relatively stable for a period, eventually the Islamic State came roaring back in 2013. And so by the time the United States ceded Afghanistan back to the Taliban in 2021, many analysts viewed population-centric counterinsurgency theory as an ill-conceived recipe for costly, bloody defeat.
Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza has prompted another reevaluation of counterinsurgency. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, the Israeli security establishment never embraced the population-centric counterinsurgency model. Indeed, some Israeli analysts were openly disdainful of it, partly because they believed that trying to win hearts and minds among the Palestinian population was impossible. Oct. 7 only reinforced this long-standing belief. Polls taken a couple months after the terrorist attack showed that more than seven in 10 Palestinians surveyed supported the Hamas attack. And so Israel tried a different, far more kinetic, method in Gaza. As the war progressed, Israel learned that there may have been some merit to these ideas and that alternative approaches have their own shortcomings.