Prof Amit Gupta, Senior Advisor to the Forum of Federations in Ottawa, is no stranger to our regular readers and subscribers.
A former faculty of the US Air Force Air War College — where he also coached the College Soccer team — Dr Gupta works mostly on international security, pop culture, and politics, and the intersection of these three domains. And he’s spoken to us earlier about India’s need for a six-month stockpile of weapons, and more recently, about why we seem a bit shortsighted in our dealings with China.
This time, he discussed two of the major conflicts that have been dominating the global headlines for a while –the situation in the Middle East/West Asia, and the Ukraine Conflict – and their impact on the upcoming U.S. Elections, less than a month away.
“Good things, and not so good things have happened to Israel” over the past year, he said. The assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the devious use of exploding pagers and walkie talkies to take out many of their supporters in Lebanon and elsewhere “inflicted a tactical loss on Hezbollah, but it hasn’t taken away from it’s full military capability,” he said. The problem for Israel, he argues, is that they seem to have lost that aura of invincibility, particularly with the two missile attacks by Iran, which required U.S. assistance to defend against.
As for “the naïve belief” in Washington and some European capitals that “If you get rid of the Ayatollahs in Iran, it becomes this wonderful liberal democracy like Belgium…No it won’t,” he says.
“The Iranians are extremely nationalistic people, and while they may think of the Ayatollahs, they are going to fight against any attempt at regime change quite viciously.”
George W Bush labelled Iran as the Axis of Evil some 25 years ago, “so what do you think they (the Iranians) have been 25 years?” he asks. “They’ve been preparing for this.”
Israel, on the other hand, is now fighting the Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and with Iran. How long can this continue, he wonders.
Besides, he notes, after the October 7 attack on Israel by the Hamas, which sparked the current war, “470,000 Israelis left the country. Jews, not Palestinians.” He then goes on to quote an article in The Wall Street Journal, a pro-Israeli newspaper, as saying that a lot of the “High tech crowd in Israel wants to leave.” And if that happens, Israel will face not only a population drain, but also a brain drain.
As for the U.S., its diplomats and military officers do not really have a good grasp of what is happening in foreign countries. “America lost its Iran experts with the revolution. There are very few Americans who go to Iran. If they do, the Iranians pick them up for all kinds of reasons and harass them. So you don’t have Iran experts, you don’t really have Houthi experts. And where is the American expert on Hamas? The all claim to know Hamas, but where’s the expert?” asks Gupta.
And while the Israeli lobby in the US wants the Democrats and the Republicans to support Netanyahu, “to suggest that every Jew in America is blindly supporting Israel is just silly…there’s a huge group of Jewish activists who feel things should be different. That what Netanyahu is doing is wrong.” But then, all communities in the world have seven different opinions on an issue, he points out.
Movimg on to Ukraine, Prof Gupta notes that the “Ukrainians have suffered heavy casualties…and the average age of the Ukrainian soldier is now 43.” And war, “as we know, is a young person’s game.”
Two, they “have been subsidised to the tune of nearly 300 billion dollars, which is not going to happen to any other country in a modern war,” says Gupta, quickly noting that even Israel has been subsidised too, “otherwise this war wouldn’t have happened.”
Then, there’s a demographic and economic disaster in Ukraine, he points out, citing figures which indicate that by 2050, the country’s population will go down by 20 million people. On top of that “They have a lot of people in the age group of 35-70,” and that is likely to go up to more people in the 45-70 group soon.
Zelenskyy says Ukraine will need 700 billion dollars to rebuild itself, which means the west will have to fork out 20-to 30 billion dollars a year to do any meaningful economic reconstruction in Ukraine, he says, adding: “and the sense that I get is, the day the war ends, people will forget about Ukraine.” Like Cambodia, Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Then, “the Russians are not bluffing about using nuclear weapons” in case it believes NATO is directly getting involved in the war. Also, “we don’t know how long (Ukraine’s President Volodymyr) Zelenskyy is going to last. Legally, his presidency ended in May this year, and they haven’t had an election,” notes Dr Gupta. Whatever you might say about the Russians, they did have an election, he notes.
Besides, a lot of weapons given to Ukraine are surplus legacy weapons systems out of eastern Europe. Portugal gave three Leopard tanks to Ukraine, which is bigger than Germany, he says. Apart from the fact that most younger Europeans are unwilling to join the military and go to war, “this is not a serious military attempt by NATO , except to fight the Russians to the last Ukrainian,” Says Dr Gupta.
In other words, “while NATO talks the big talk, NATO is not delivering.”
So how do these two conflicts, in which America is deeply involved, impact the upcoming elections in U.S.?
Watch the full interview to find out.
