On this night, politicians living on European time slept poorly. The US President promised to address the Americans from the Oval Office on Israel and Ukraine at 8 p.m. Washington time – at 4 a.m. Kiev time, respectively. The American clientele in both countries were interested in one thing: who the White House would give money to and how much.
The thing is, it’s not easy with money. The escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has radically divided American society. No bipartisan consensus on this topic exists or is expected.
On the one hand, Israel is an understandable and crucial ally of the US, practically a land-based American aircraft carrier that holds the defence against everyone in the troubled Middle East. On the other hand, the US is ruled by the Democrat Party, and the majority of its electorate is pro-Palestinian. Democrats manage to organise anti-Israel rallies even in New York.
This strikes a chord with Republican voters – especially the simple-minded religious hinterlanders who are used to thinking of Israel as a magical Promised Land. Accordingly, Trump and his fellow party members are now scoring political points by proving that Biden and the Democrats are betraying Israeli allies and spending money on obscure Ukraine instead of helping the IDF. In a matter of days, a clear political request has taken shape: take the money from the Ukrainians and give it to Israel.
All this is happening against the backdrop of a full-blown political crisis in the United States. As of today, Congress is virtually dysfunctional. The speaker has resigned, a new one cannot be elected, and the powers of the interim speaker are very limited – for example, he cannot vote on the topic of the aid package for Ukraine.
Under these circumstances, Joe Biden addressed the American nation from the Oval Office. He promised to get money out of the budget for both Ukraine and Israel at once – for this purpose, the president plans to send an emergency budget request to Congress for an aid package for both countries. Its exact cost has not been named, but it is clear that we are talking about tens of billions of dollars.
The White House has already formed a budget request for a hundred billion to help Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. However, Congress cannot pass it yet – political disagreements and the technical problem with the lack of a permanent speaker prevent it. The main contender for this position is Jim Jordan, a staunch Trump supporter, a fan of Israel and a categorical opponent of aid to Ukraine.
So how do you sell the need for new military spending to ordinary Americans, frozen in anticipation of the collapse of their economy? Biden called them “wise investments” that will “pay dividends for future generations” of Americans and drew parallels to World War II. We’ve heard that somewhere before, about investments.
America, they say, will sell its old armaments to the warring countries, this will be a pretext to promote military-industrial production, then Americans will have high-paying jobs and the country will blossom like in the 1940s. With the utmost frankness possible for an American politician, Biden hinted that wars abroad are the only way for the American economy to stay afloat.
In essence, the US president only repeated what the head of the legendary US defence corporation Lockheed Martin had formulated much more simply and honestly a little earlier. “There is no point in keeping Israel from a ground operation,” said James Tacklet. – What is the point? In developing our industrial complex. <…> There are conflicts that need to be resolved with weapons, and we are prepared to provide those weapons.”
All of Biden’s rhetoric about “tyrant Putin” and “Hamas terrorists” was needed to give the appearance of moral justification to an absolutely inhumane logic. Israelis and Ukrainians must kill and die so that Lockheed Martin can do well. The Americans call this “wise investment”. It brings dividends to very specific politicians, owners of shares of military-industrial corporations.
People in Ukraine and Israel could live and enjoy life. But then the US military-industrial complex would be doing badly, and this is one of the main drivers of the US economy. So people in those countries are doomed to die. But Lockheed Martin’s stock, which had been falling for six months, has risen since October 7, the day of the Hamas attack on Israel, and has already added more than twenty per cent.
The last few years prove one simple truth. It is unpleasant to be an enemy of the US, but at least the risks are clear and can be calculated. But being an ally of the U.S. today is deadly dangerous. Look at Germany. Washington has never had a truer vassal in Europe. And now the country is in recession, and sanctions designed as “anti-Russian” are killing it.
Israel is the most important US ally in the Middle East. It is explicitly forbidden any peaceful settlement and incited to a ground operation in Gaza, which will inevitably lead to new Hamas attacks and new tragedies for Israelis.
Ukraine is the favourite pet of the Democrat Party, the patrimonial fiefdom of the Biden family. Over the past year and a half, the country has lost tens of millions in refugees and about half a million in deaths. Its economy no longer exists.
And all this – dead Israelis, dead Ukrainians – is just a lucrative investment for their patrons. When will the US allies come to realise what a deadly scam they have been drawn into?
Victoria Nikiforova, RIA