I cannot think of anytime in history where such a relatively small violent act on the people of Israel had such profound consequences for the world. From that heinous act came the decapitation of Hamas and Hezbollah leadership, and now the near destruction of Iran’s leadership and nuclear weapons capability. The only thing that comes to mind for me is the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, which cost 10s of millions of lives, became the basis for the Cold War with a Communist Russia, erased an empire and redrew the map of Europe.
I can’t remember anything like this on the geopolitical scene in my lifetime besides the fall of the Iron Curtain from 1989-1992, and there I don’t remember one act that started the fall of the dominos.
One would like to ask any remaining members of Hamas how that murderous deed worked out for them.
It was said years ago that Israel’s Mossad is everywhere in the Middle East and one amazing act they did, besides blowing up much of the leadership of Hezbollah with pagers, was creating or infiltrating a network and telling much of Iran’s senior military leadership to attend an urgent meeting at a location, then bombing it.
We are still in perilous times in the Mideast with no clear path of the renewal of Iran – the Mullahs have killed most of the opposition. But nobody in the Gulf States or Saudi Arabia is voicing any opposition. They don’t want a nuclear Iran any more than Israel or the West.
These are interesting times. There is a chance that there could be peace in the Middle East for the first time in generations.
For Hamas, that had to be the miscalculation of the century.
Erased an empire? It also erased the German Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire.
I think you could also add that it led to the eventual erasure of the British Empire as well.
it arguable the Empire was unsustainable, at least the largest bloc like the Indian Sub continent, later acquisitions like the Levant and Mesopotamia, were equally so, would that have happened without the wars, thats a harder thing to gauge,
Niall Ferguson and Michael Burleigh have pointed out in rather dispassionate ways, how the Great War, was a loss for all, in the final calculus,
with the soviets the massacre at the Talbeg palace in Afghanistan, related in Shaun Walkers the Illegals, might have been the first domino, the story is told in part by Drozdov, the on scene commander, who formed the elite Spetznaz commandos, the death of Tarik Amin which resulted from a tragic misunderstanding, lead to the invasion, and some 10 years of brutal war, which birthed Al Queda and the Taliban out of the ruins in part because the policymakers in Washington and London, wanted ‘the Soviets to bleed’ like we had done in Vietnam, or Aden, to cite two examples they were negligent as who was the recipient of such aid, like Bin Laden through third parties, there were some funds given to Shah Mahsud but not enough
I’m pretty sure that Princip desired the end of Austrian rule of Bosnia. Whether he expected his act would lead there is questionable. There’s no question that was one of the consequences.
The Mullah’s have desired a war with the West and Israel for 45+ years, they have succeeded. The consequences are entirely predictable although not what they probably intended.
It’s my understanding that Franz Ferdinand’s liberal stance towards Bosnia was one of the reasons they wanted to assassinate him; a Hapsburg-approved Bosnian client-state wasn’t what they wanted.
The Bosnians thought such a state wouldn’t be truly independent (while defanging nationalist sentiment,) and the Serbians funding them were rather hoping for the opportunity to annex Bosnia to ‘protect’ them from their imperial rulers.
Keep in mind that Princip was being guided by the Black Hand, a radical secret society that had permeated the Serbian military and intelligence services and whose goal was the expulsion of Austria-Hungary not only from Bosnia but eventually Slovenia and Croatia allowing the South Slavs to be united under Serbian rule. The other European powers might have looked away from an Austrian punitive expedition, but the latter knew this was where the crisis of the Empire was and was prepared to settle all family business and in doing so set the process in motion for a general war
Two years Israel was in a dire strategic position. It was surrounded on all sides by Iranian proxies and allies. Hezbollah had 150,000 rockets/missiles and once they could attach enough guidance packages to them they could overwhelm Israeli AA defenses and makes the country north of Tel Aviv unlivable. Keep in mind that Golden Dome is based on determination of which missiles/rockets would hit anything of value and then intercept only them. If you could dramatically increase the number of threats that Golden Dome needed to intercept then you could negate it.
Israel had fought several wars with Hezbollah and there would be no return to Beirut as Israel did with the PLO in 1982-83, Hezbollah would extract a very heavy price and therefore was inviolate. Then of course was the ultimate trump card, an Iranian nuclear weapon.
Could Israel survive as the advanced society it is today under such a long term state of siege? It’s easy to say today, yes of course, but I am not so sure long term. It’s one thing to gear up the emotional energy to live under the Blitz, but quite another to live under a daily strain with no specific enemy to direct it against. Not that many or even most Israeli wouldn’t accept the challenge, but it doesn’t make many to go the other way. Israel would be under an existential state of siege just as dire, even if more slow-moving and less dramatic, as 1967 and 1973.
So what happened?
Two questions that have yet to be answered satisfactorily is what did Iran really know beforehand about 10/7 and why did it sit on his hands afterwards,
The received conventional wisdom is that Iran was surprised by Hamas and 10/7 and that is why there was no coordinated action, physical and informational, from Iran and its other proxies.
Ok if that’s true then the second question why didn’t Iran adequately respond to the situation? Iran and its proxy network presented Israel with a multi-front strategic problem.
Israel decided to deal with Hamas decisively, which meant to conquer and occupy Gaza with infantry. The lesson of 10.7 for Israel was that Hamas could not be managed. Israel lacked the military power to fight on all fronts – Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran- simultaneously and in a decisive manner so the logical response from Iran was to engage it once Israel entered into Gaza.
However ti didn’t do so. Yes Israel evacuated some 100,000+ civilians from Gaillee due to the threat but Hezbollah did not decisively engage with Israel, in fact it never did decisively engage with Israel until those days last Fall when Israel emasculated its leadership nearly a year after 10/7.
Then the next month, Israel killed a Hamas official in Tehran and in the ensuing exchange it destroyed Iran’s AA defenses leading to what we have today with Israel owning Iran’s national air space, doing whatever it wants whenever it wants.
They key to strategic advantage is to engage the maximum amount of the advantage siumtaensoely thus not allowing your opponent to respond to any of them adequately. The reason you need 3 to 1 advantage in tactics is that you use part of that advantage to establish a base of fire, another part to maneuver/flank, and a third to exploit. An advantage like that doesn’t help if everyone is just looking at everyone else.
Iran committed the strategic blunder of allowing Israel to engage each of those fronts separately and in sequence. What Iran should have done was engage all of those fronts against Israel simultaneously, to put northern Israel under a full-scale missile barrage while checking an Israeli response with its own missile inventory or by its Syrian proxy. Better yet wait a year or two until it a had a nuke in order to provide cover.
Why didn’t Iran respond? Well it didn’t right away maybe because it was surprised but also keep in mind that this time last year, Israel was a strategic trap. It not only failed to achieve victory in Gaza, but that war had undermined its support in the West and more importantly in the US. Perhaps Iran thought it could hang back and let events take their course. Didn’t work out that way
Iran had the strategic advantage in 2023, it still had the strategic advantage in 2024, and it failed to cash in and instead ceded the initiative to a more determined and innovative enemy. The other lesson is that whether it knew about 10.7 ahead of time, Iran should have recognized from Israel’s response to it that the latter had crossed an emotional threshold and would seek to settle all family business, that the more general war was now on.
Maybe Iran simply didn’t have the ability to fight that more general war, that the regime was far weaker than it looked to be, riven either by internal divisions or undermined by military incompetence, and therefore decided to be more passive. It failed to recognize that this was the decisive moment. Israel did not
For Israel now, it is in a position that it could not have dreamed of 24 months ago. This is one of those strategic opportunities, of how to deal with Iran’s regime, that will never come again – at least not as painlessly as it occurred here. Nothing is inevitable, when your opponent has one foot in the grave you must at all costs make sure to push him all the way in.
The assassination of Franz Ferdinand caused a cascade of unintended events, each one worse than the last, leading to an unforeseen catastrophe. The Oct 7 attacks catalyzed a series of actions by Israel that were intended, and seem likely, to forestall the catastrophe that many reasonable people long feared. Oct 7 is thus the inverse of rather than a parallel to Sarajevo. Perhaps Pearl Harbor is a better parallel for Oct 7.