Dimitrios Calculus

Obama can only cope and seethe, because his plan for the Middle East was to use the IRGC and the threat of its nukes as an American proxy to bully Israel into capitulating to maximalist Arab territorial demands. So his legacy is total junk now because: 1. His successor, Trump, put in place the Abraham Accords, which divide the Arab opposition to Israel instead of dividing Israel against itself. These accords are here to stay, since they survived the bloodiest war of the entire Israeli-Arab conflict. No war of similar scope is really in prospect for the next 50 years, and the economic and military ties continue to deepen. 2. Sinwar’s folly brought about the collapse of the IRGC, its proxy network, and its nuclear programme as an existential threat to Israel. Israel is now too powerful, too unconstrained, and too independent of US support to allow that threat ever to reconstitute itself. So the lever in Obama’s plan is gone, and even if some Obama heir enters the White House in 2029, they will not have the leverage over Israel they need. 3. Equally, just as the threat Obama wanted to dangle over Israel to soften it up in negotiations with the PA and Hamas has been neutered by the successes of the last three years of war, the people of Israel have hardened against territorial compromise. Israel is a democracy, so its people have a collective veto on any such compromise. There is absolutely no chance that the younger generations of Israelis, who will run the country until the end of this century, will be tempted into the same kinds of compromises their elders made in the 1990s and 2000s. This is well deserved, since his plan to allow the millenarian psychopaths of the IRGC to reach the nuclear threshold to try to “Free Palestine” risked the future of humanity. He played dice with Armageddon in the name of Third Worldism. In a century, everyone will understand that, but find it hard to believe. Add Obama to the long list of losers of the October 7 War.