How Hamas is aiding Putin and Xi’s ideological war against the West: US and Britain ‘must see Israel and Ukraine as part of a global conflict that could see Russia and China achieve economic and military predominance’

The wars between Russia, Ukraine, Israel and Hamas have become a battlefield for Western and Eastern influence, with any conflict threatening to disrupt the international order.

Hamas‘s bloody invasion of Israel came at an opportune time for Vladimir Putin – with the October 7 attack distracting from significant Russian battlefield losses and desperate efforts to regain occupied territory in Ukraine.

Russia maintains warm relations with the terror group’s leadership and recently welcomed members to Moscow. The Kremlin is also fkindly join us Iran – supporters of Hezbollah, which has launched attacks on Israel from Lebanon in the north.

And as the world’s eyes turn to Israel, analysts have warned that the US and NATO could be distracted from the threat from China as the country continues to put pressure on it. Taiwan.

Meanwhile, Russia is also believed to have sent satellite technology to the volatile nuclear state North Korea in exchange for more than 1,000 containers of military equipment and ammunition for use in Ukraine.

As a result, the West now faces an existential threat from a coalition of hostile powers, according to economist and foreign policy expert Mark Toth and former US Army colonel and intelligence officer Jonathan Sweet.

Here they discuss why the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East should be treated by the West as part of a ‘global war’.

The conflicts between Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Hamas are separate and distinct, but mutually beneficial – especially as Putin’s military is no longer able to conventionally cause ‘shock and awe’ on Ukraine’s battlefields, eliminating the Kremlin’s ability to cause ‘blockades and awe’. Support from the United States, Great Britain and NATO for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his generals is being blocked.

Kinetically, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are unlikely to merge; however, they are part and parcel of the same overall ideological global war that Russia, together with China, is aggressively waging in the wings against the West.

To understand this growing symbiosis between Ukraine’s struggle against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war against Hamas, it is essential to examine the second- and third-order effects of both wars on a global basis .

Putin has been waging a structural war against the post-World War II world order for some time now.

Putin shares Chinese President Xi Jinping’s goal of creating a multipolar world; however, that’s just code.

While both men take different approaches – Putin on the kinetic front in Ukraine, Xi’s strong armed military mismanagement against Taiwan and the broader Indo-Pacific, including most recently the Philippines – their goal is the same: Russian and Chinese economic and military domination. But it is a marriage of convenience.

Moscow and Beijing’s multipolar design can only be realized if what they see as US global hegemony is destroyed or marginalized – and as a result, the West would be sidelined in a world then dominated by Russia and China.

To try to achieve this overall strategic goal, given Putin’s unraveling ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, a severely weakened Kremlin is limited to deploying its ‘arsenals of evil’ – Iran and North Korea – for military support in the form of weapons and ammunition. .

While conventionally weakened, Putin desperately needed a distraction to launch his counter-offensive on October 9 along the Avdiivka axis in eastern Ukraine.

Iran and Hamas – likely by coordinated design, as we argued on The Hill in Washington DC – gave Moscow just that on October 7, brutally attacking Israeli civilians and Jews on a scale not seen since the Holocaust.

Hamas’s ISIS-like depravity has achieved its goal. The world was shocked and little attention was paid to Putin’s attempts to encircle Avdiivka two days later.

As we said at the time, “There was only one real winner last Saturday when war broke out in Israel: Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

Nevertheless, Putin’s counteroffensive in Avdiivka is failing and his land gains to date are militarily insignificant, especially compared to his enormous losses in men, armor and artillery. The losses were enormous.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense reports that between October 9 and November 12, 29,120 Russian soldiers were killed, 526 tanks, 947 armored personnel carriers, 853 artillery pieces and 61 multiple rocket systems were destroyed.

Yet there are reports that Russia has amassed another 40,000 troops to continue the carnage.

Now more than ever, Putin is desperate to weaken US, UK and NATO support for Ukraine.

Escalating the Middle East conflict against U.S. national security interests in Israel is one way to try to “block and stall” the White House, given the Russian military’s continued inability to “shock” by conventional means and awe on the battlefields of Ukraine.

Exploiting Iranian influence to bring Hezbollah into the fight would deepen the conflict and potentially force the US to kinetically support Israel.

However, Iran is likely to hesitate to comply – especially the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – given the relative ease with which the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has been able to divide and encircle the Gaza Strip and penetrate deep into the north of Gaza City.

Likewise, ahead of Xi’s meeting next Wednesday with US President Joe Biden in San Francisco, China could benefit militarily from any prolonged US military involvement in Israel – especially in light of Beijing’s plans for unification against Taiwan.

While not a global kinetic war, it is nevertheless a global ideological war fought by proxies on multiple kinetic fronts.

It is therefore essential that the US and Britain treat this war as a ‘global war’ and, existentially speaking, win it.

The White House and Whitehall can achieve this by ensuring that Ukraine and Israel both win their wars against Putin, Iran and their allies.