Why would they need to afford them? The whole point of territorial expansion is to gain land, resources and other forms of wealth. I think you’re referring to the occupations, in which case Israel is a wealthy developed country with a strong tech sector that also gets billions upon billions of US aid money annually. They also don’t overextend themselves, and many empires past and present have occupied many more people and much more land compared to their core population/area. I mean their only active military operations are on and off bombings in Gaza, more intense bombings in Iran and an actual invasion in Lebanon. This isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things, assuming they can control the fallout (which they’ve been somewhat failing at recently).

Political assassinations and kidnappings aren’t any more normal than they were two years ago; Trump is just more blatant about it. I mean when Western countries overthrow this or that regime, they don’t exactly give the old regime flowers. Not that they didn’t deserve it, but Saddam Hussein for example was executed after a show trial by American-appointed judges and Gaddafi was killed as a direct consequence of NATO bombings after his Western-backed overthrow.

Guys I think EU countries might be growing a teensy tiny bit of spine. Someone call the lobbyists ASAP.

War crime moment + leopards eating faces moment + death to America.

Hell, it’s the only reason Israel even exists.

This is an understandably common view, but it’s not true. The only fundamental change WWII brought to Palestine was weakening the British Empire; Zionists, partially due to British support, were by far the ascendant group in Palestine as early as 1939, so Israel was going to appear as soon as the British left Palestine. Zionist wealth and diplomacy, Arab weakness and division, Western colonial ambitions and British colonial policy made something resembling the current situation inevitable with or without WWII.

And EU will be stronger than ever.

I doubt it. The EU faces the same fundamental problem as the US: Powerful, greedy and unresponsive elites unwilling to compromise with their subjects. I think we’re more likely to see an overall weaker and somehow even more dysfunctional EU with Ukraine as a counterbalance to its traditional Western and Northern European power base (assuming the EU doesn’t drop the ball on Ukrainian recovery like it repeatedly did on the war).

How?

Like I said, compared to the sheer scale of horror inflicted by these countries’ foreign policy, a few thousand dead protesters is a rounding error. What domestic evil committed by any of these countries compares to this?

This is a case where the “both sides are equal” is true.

Absolutely not. The Iranian regime has a lot of blood on its hands, both at home and abroad, but it doesn’t even come close to the sheer amount of evil exercised by Israel and America. The worst thing the Ayatollah regime has ever done was support the Assad regime during the Syrian Civil War. That’s obviously evil as fuck, but it looks downright cute compared to Israel’s literal genocide and America’s War on Terror (let alone its even worse historical crimes). In this class of absurd evil, killing a few thousand people is literally a rounding error.

Have you ever been told you’re a piece of shit?

Because of Cuban exiles. Obama’s attempt at rapprochement with Cuba pretty much turned Florida permanently red and was immediately overturned by Trump. Not to say it’s impossible, but you’d need a committed progressive president, a popular mandate and a cooperstive legislature, three things the Democratic party has been doing its damnedest to avoid over the past two decades.

Not really. You basically have to be either a superpower or a pariah state to do something like this and not be immediately pummeled into oblivion.

True in general (see the India sanctions debacle), but why in this specific case? This war is giving Russia tons of extra oil revenue to fuel their war machine.

That’d be ideal, but Americans don’t have the organizational infrastructure to go on strike on a moment’s notice. Building that would be step 0.

I guess if even Trump can do good things occasionally, so can Russia. Infinitesimally rare Putin W.

Afaik there was a drone launched “in the direction of” Cyprus that never actually hit the island or the UK base. That was the UK’s excuse to help the US, and it was a whole nothingburger.

You can’t get people to coordinate on voting because voting, with few exceptions, doesn’t do shit. There are things that do shit (mutual aid, ICE watch, labor action, etc) that it’d be more realistic to build a national movement towards. Also it’s possible to shoot ICE agents with only a local movement; it’d just be an insurrection and treated as such.

Destroying America’s democracy and welfare state was a collaborative project; something can be both Obama’s fault and Reagan’s fault.

And do… what, exactly? Europeans don’t want to touch this mess with a 10ft pole (they might, but it won’t be because of this), the Gulf is already on America’s side, Russia only stands to gain from this, China is already getting free passage and neutral countries for the most part have no way of pressuring Iran here. That’s the thing about being a pariah state: They already have nothing to lose.

I mean 99% of the time it is, but on this specific topic Obama actually did a good job.