A Problem of Resolve

A very short post, for now, but in the hope of my having more time later today or this weekend…

There is no disputing that Israel has hit a Hezbollah shelter or bunker in Beirut where there were several Hezbollah leaders present, together with visiting members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (amidst serious tensions between these groups, given Iran’s failure to respond to anything just yet).

Israel claims that one of the killed was Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, although this is still disputed.

Iran is now under peak pressure to decide whether or not it must now be lured, as a result of deliberate Israeli provocations (of an extraordinarily murderous character), into a regional war which it has long tried to avoid.

It is not impossible that Iran is playing a long game but, if so, it is both very unclear as to what that long game is or, if there is one, that it makes very good sense. The principal concern is that a pro-Western and possibly infiltrated section of Iran’s elite is set on a path towards making nice with a West that can be depended upon to screw it in the end.

In this game of who is a pussy, Russia too is implicated, given the closeness to a mutual security agreement between Iran and Russia (an agreement which has been tortuously slow in the making and the signing). Of course, Russia must prioritize its war with NATO over Ukraine, but there are so many links between the two combat zones in the context of a general war between the Global South (led by the BRICS) and the West, that a failure to respond to one challenge may facilitate a failure in the other. And the BRICS group is looking strangely fragile in advance of its Kazan meeting on October 22nd. It is clear that many of its members including Brazil and India, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are trying desperately to please both West and East on board a moving train. Some of the would-be members, like Turkey, are in the same boat.