Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick have just published a terrific new book called Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power. It appears twenty years after Steve Walt and I published “The Israel Lobby” in The London Review of Books (March 2006), which we turned into a book a year later. Much has happened regarding Israel, the Israel lobby, and the US-Israeli relationship in the two decades since Steve and I first addressed those subjects. Clifton and Lustick do a great job explaining those fundamental changes. In this episode, I will discuss their new book and explain how it differs from what Steve and I wrote in our article and book on the lobby.

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BUY THE BOOKS

1. Israel's Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power
by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick
Purchase Here: https://amzn.to/4gMNJey

2. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
Purchase Here: https://amzn.to/3SL2M0o

(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

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CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro
0:28 The book: Israel's Lobby by Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick
2:38 The core arguments
5:15 The conceptual framework: discourse vs. policy
7:29 Where the new book breaks from Mearsheimer & Walt
8:01 How the discourse changed: dual loyalty and "Israel Firsters"
12:42 The internet and the collapse of media gatekeeping
15:08 Israeli behavior after October 7th
17:45 Israel as a "crazy state"
22:11 Israeli identity: "a nation that dwells alone"
27:51 Why Americans turned on Israel
29:29 The lobby fights back: redefining antisemitism
32:54 Government crackdowns on campus protests
35:40 Plutocrats, Citizens United, and policy capture
39:11 The bottom line and the big question ahead
41:14 Closing thoughts

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MUSIC

"The Ice Giants" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Music modified (edited/remixed) from the original.

In recent months, Western news coverage of the Ukraine war tells us that Russia is suffering huge casualties on the battlefield while making hardly any progress capturing Ukrainian territory. At the same time, Ukraine’s long-range drone attacks on the Russian homeland are wreaking havoc, which will improve Ukraine’s position at the bargaining table. In short, Russia is in deep trouble and Ukraine’s situation is hardly dire. This episode explains why this perspective is wrong. Russia is winning on the battlefield – albeit slowly – and its ramped-up bombing campaign is doing egregious damage to Ukraine’s economy, which is essential for Kyiv to sustain the war on the front lines. This situation is unsurprising, as this is a war of attrition in which the side with an advantage in manpower and weaponry invariably wins. In that regard, the Russians have an overwhelming advantage. Indeed, were it not for the effect that drones have had on the battlefield, the Ukrainians would have lost a long time ago.

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Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:34 What This Episode Covers
0:50 The Story the Western Media Is Telling
3:25 The Battlefield: A War of Attrition
4:20 The Balance of Manpower
6:41 Force-to-Space Ratio: Gaps in the Line
8:13 The Balance of Firepower: Artillery
10:51 Drones: What's Keeping Ukraine in the Fight
12:02 Russian Casualties: The Numbers Don't Add Up
15:01 Ukrainian Casualties: 30,000 a Month
18:18 Why Russia Takes Territory So Slowly
20:11 The Air War: Russia's Inventory
28:45 Why Punishment Campaigns Don't Work
29:35 Russia Changes Strategy
33:49 Warehouses and the Energy Grid
36:11 Ukraine's Drone Campaign Can't Win the War
37:40 Outside Support for Ukraine
38:12 Trump and the Shifting Burden
42:29 Inside Ukraine: War Weariness
43:51 Zelensky's Political Troubles
45:31 Where the War Stands Today
47:48 The Cost of Rebuilding
49:16 The Best Ukraine Can Hope For
50:34 Conclusion

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Music

"The Ice Giants" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Music modified (edited/remixed) from the original.

There is considerable evidence that the US is interested in “expanding its options” for using its nuclear arsenal. In particular, it appears that the Pentagon would like to increase its reliance on tactical nuclear weapons for both deterrence and warfighting should deterrence fail.

I will argue that fighting a war with tactical nuclear weapons is unlikely to produce a meaningful military victory and is likely to have catastrophic consequences. In fact, the US and NATO embraced this very option in the 1950s in the context of a war in Europe, only to realize that they had to find a different way to deter the Soviet Union and fight it should deterrence break down. The same basic logic that applied then still applies today. Simply put, tactical nuclear weapons are not war-winning weapons.

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CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction
00:31 Why tactical nuclear weapons, why now
01:52 From massive retaliation to flexible options
03:04 The real driver: weakened conventional forces
04:46 Ukraine, Iran, and depleted munitions
05:07 Balancing conventional and nuclear deterrence
06:24 The appeal of tactical nukes on the battlefield
07:04 Why that thinking is misguided
07:55 Defending Europe in the 1950s
10:26 NATO's nuclear answer — and why the US never adopted "no first use"
11:54 Carte Blanche: the June 1955 war game
14:41 Destroying Germany to save Germany
15:38 The escalation problem
16:47 Command and control in a nuclear war
18:50 MC 14/2: NATO doubles down in 1957
20:20 Shift one: rebuilding conventional deterrence
23:03 Shift two: nuclear weapons as coercion, not warfighting
25:19 A handful of weapons and the slippery slope
28:00 MC 14/2 vs. MC 14/3
29:30 Recap: how NATO moved away from warfighting
31:30 What this means for the US today
33:49 Conclusion

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MUSIC

"The Ice Giants" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Music modified (edited/remixed) from the original.