The United States will not withhold military aid from Israel, the State Department said Tuesday, after top Biden administration officials warned a month ago that they would consider doing so if the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza did not improve.
State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said there would be no change to U.S. policy at the end of the 30-day deadline the U.S. set for Israel to improve conditions in Gaza. Aid groups and U.N. officials say Israel has largely failed to comply with U.S. demands, a Washington Post analysis found.
Empire isn’t profitable to the workers. What’s good for the genersl population is not what’s good for the beneficiaries of empire. Ask Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Haliburton and ExxonMobil if they’d rather Israel not exist.
I mean, in theory you could overpay Raytheon execs to provide free school lunches or something. Using weapons of mass destruction as your specific grift to funnel money to the overlords is a choice.
This is a misunderstanding of the economic imperatives of imperialism. The US and its billionaire class can only achieve their lavish way of life by way of robbing the entirety of the global south, where most raw resources and manufactured goods come from, via capital extraction.
They force foreign governments to deregulate their economies and open up trade with the US, which means the US getting cheap goods with inflated dollars it can issue at will and poor countries getting dollars it can either reinvest in treasury bonds or redeem at extortionate rates. More often, it’s getting cheap labor to produce goods it will sell in the US at ridiculous margins to the American public. The vehicle for this deregulation is often the IMF imposing those rules to get loans to repay debts (often owed as reparations for declaring independence or irresponsibly issued loans at adjustable rates) but it is understood that the alternative is getting a barrage from one of the 900+ military bases the US has scattered around the world or a visit from the CIA.
After WW2, when the US emerged mostly unscathed with a huge industrial base and nuclear weapons to boot, the American public got a slice of the profit off the US making the dollar the reserve currency of the world, but that wasn’t enough for corporate America. As the world slowly recovered and the rate of profit diminished there’s been scheme after scheme to rob the rest of the world via the petrodollar, or ever more frequent military intervention, because the dollar can’t be allowed to fall.
To cut a long story short, the American public has been paying for every loss of the MIC and the bourgeoisie at large, while financing all of their operations with their dollar and, most importantly, their labor. As long as the US tries to be the hegemon, somebody has to provide them with research, weapons, and boots to put on the ground. That industry must be handsomely rewarded, because it’s the militant arm of the ruling class. The empire feeds off the republic.