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It's Thursday, October 3rd.
Tonight: Ever since Israel began bombing Gaza after the October 7 attack, one of the most pressing questions has been whether this would lead to a broader regional war expanding not only beyond Gaza to Lebanon, but to the West Bank, Syria, Yemen, and, most dangerously, to Iran. That is no longer a question. By every metric, regional war has indeed broken out in the Middle East.
There still are questions about the extent to which this escalation will deepen but that regional war has now begun is beyond question. Nor is it a question whether the United States will be drawn into this conflict. It already has been. The Biden administration, whatever that means these days, has been steadily increasing the amount of U.S. military assets and service members deployed to that region with the explicit goal of protecting Israel from the start of this war and from the start of that other war that the U.S. has been arming, funding and fueling the one in Ukraine against Russia. Remember that one? There has been no more prescient and informed analyst than the good friend of our show, University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer.
Among other works, he was the coauthor along with Harvard professor Stephen Walt of the 2006 book “The Israel Lobby,” which documented the extensive pro-Israel factions in the United States that ensure that American policy continues to align with and promote the interests of Israel.
We'll spend the show discussing every aspect of this multi-front war in the Middle East, the U.S. role in it now and what might be in the future, the latest developments in Ukraine, of which there are many, how the 2024 election is impacted by all of this and how it might impact these policies in the future, and much more. Professor Mearsheimer is always one of the most popular guests that we invite on, for good and self-evident reasons, and we are very happy to have him back with us tonight to analyze all of these complex and highly consequential issues.
And for now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.