Prolonging the war while waiting for Trump
It is an open secret that both Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu and Russia's Vladimir Putin are betting on Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential elections in November. Both consider the current occupant of the White House, Joe Biden, to be detrimental to their own interests and do not miss the opportunity to dispute his hypothetical strategy of appeasement with facts.
There are thus at least eleven dramatic months ahead, since pending Trump's desired return to power, the respective wars in Gaza and Ukraine will intensify to the maximum, as both leaders have already announced in no uncertain terms. And it is clear that this dramatic escalation of operations of annihilation and destruction will also substantially alter the geopolitical map before Trump becomes the most powerful man in the world again.
Both Netanyahu and Putin are confident that Trump will eventually overcome the fourteenth amendment impediments to his re-election. It won't be long before we find out. After the Colorado Supreme Court ruling and the Maine Secretary of State's decision declaring Trump "ineligible" to run in his party's primary, and the states of Michigan and Minnesota doing just the opposite, it will be the US Supreme Court that will make the final and unappealable ruling. In any case, it will be an unprecedented ruling, with no previous jurisprudence on the matter, since there has never been a case of a president of the nation having committed acts of insurrection in the exercise of his office after having been sworn in under the Constitution.
If the verdict of the Supreme Court (nine justices for life, three of them appointed by Trump himself) were to be favourable to him, his nomination as the Republican Party's candidate would be beyond doubt, not for nothing that polls give him up to 65% of voting intentions. An advantage that he would also repeat, obviously without being so overwhelming, in his final confrontation with a Joe Biden who appears increasingly tired and overwhelmed.
While all these hypotheses are confirmed or not, Netanyahu on the one hand and Putin on the other are taking advantage of the situation to accentuate their efforts to achieve their main objectives. The Israeli Prime Minister will continue to reduce the Gaza Strip to rubble. For Netanyahu, the discovery of the immense network of tunnels built by Hamas and their connection to underground installations under public buildings such as hospitals, schools and universities is more than enough evidence and reason to raze them to the ground, and to ignore and resist calls for truces, which are also being demanded by many relatives of the hostages still held by Hamas.
At the same time, Netanyahu has ordered the Mossad to liquidate all senior Hamas officials and in particular all those responsible for the assault, kidnappings and carnage of 7 October. In addition to the dozen mid-level commanders killed in the nearly three months since, the first senior official to be "definitively neutralised" was Saleh al-Arouri, vice-chairman of Hamas's political bureau and commander of the group's military wing in the West Bank. The drone that took him out in the office he used in Beirut is meant to be proof to the world that Israel will not stop until its revenge is complete.
Aware that Israel is losing the battle of the narrative in the eyes of international public opinion, Netanyahu is also preparing to face a decisive judicial battle at the International Criminal Court. There he will face the charge of "genocide of the Palestinian people", brought by the South African government. It will be the most important episode in its hasbara, the series of public diplomacy campaigns, international media, universities and forums of all kinds, in which Israel has sought to explain the "truth" of its policies towards the Palestinians. To this end, it is putting together a fearsome team of lawyers, whose most prominent representative is the American Alan Dershowitz, a veteran in the art of blaming anyone who dares to see "excesses" or "abuse of power" in Israel's actions towards the Palestinian people.
As for Russia's president, all it took was for the US Congress to withdraw support for Biden to send more funds to Zelensky's Ukraine to unleash a deluge of fire on the entire country. The Kremlin leader has also changed the tactics of his attacks, so that he now saturates Ukrainian defences with massive drone strikes before launching his missiles simultaneously at dozens of targets across Ukraine.
If the Ukrainian resistance does not urgently receive new supplies of weapons and money, it will be hard for it to withstand further waves of Russian forces, which appear to have rebuilt their ranks despite heavy casualties.
Trump is tired of repeating that he will end the Ukrainian war with the stroke of a pen. Putin thinks he knows that the end would be nothing more than recognition of Russian gains and something else, at best half of the country west of the Dnieper at most, for the Ukraine that wants to be part of free Europe.