The wars are continuing to heat up

The wars in Europe and the Middle East have always been somewhat parallel, with the democratic nations of Israel and Ukraine, both supported (somewhat shakily) by the West, facing off against the murderous ideologies of jihadism and Russian imperialism respectively, which seek to destroy them.  The Iranian and Russian regimes have also given each other direct military aid of various kinds.  Now there is another link -- the disruption of global energy markets and Trump's bumbling and corrupt efforts to deal with the issue, if only because of its effect on the upcoming US elections.

Trump's behavior has lately become surreal.  He demanded that Ukraine stop attacking Russia's oil refineries; Ukraine ignored this and continued the attacks.  Trump's cutbacks in US aid to Ukraine, largely replaced by European aid, have left him with no leverage over that country.  He announced a deal to import diesel from Russia, supposedly to ease prices here, although the amounts he cited would be too small compared with US diesel consumption to make much difference, and in any case Russia is so short of fuel (Ukraine said a week ago that it has knocked out half of Russia's refining capacity) that it now has to import it, so it cannot spare much to export to the US.  Then he declared an "energy ceasefire" between Russia and Ukraine, a ceasefire which both countries quickly confirmed did not exist -- it may have been an inept pressure tactic, or simply a hallucination of Trump's which he confused with reality due to his obvious dementia.

All this provoked a furious bipartisan backlash from the Senate, since Trump was cravenly trying to backstab Ukraine in the hope of bringing fuel prices down and thus mitigating the predicted blue wave in the election here.  He will likely keep announcing various random nonsense about Ukraine and Russia, but none of it will have any impact on real events in those countries.

In any case, the recent problems with fuel prices owe much more to the Middle East war than to the European one.  Direct fighting between the Israel-US alliance and Iran has mostly stopped for now, but oil exports are still threatened and obstructed, and the war continues in the form of a conflict between the Houthi rebels in Yemen (aided and influenced, though not really controlled, by the Iranian regime) and Saudi Arabia (aided and influenced, though not really controlled, by the US).  Please see my earlier post for background on the Houthi/Saudi conflict, the details of which I assume are not familiar to most Americans.  Over the last few days this fighting has escalated with two Houthi missile attacks on the international airport at Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's capital city, each of which killed several people.  Here is some video footage of yesterday's attack:

Imagine if something like that were happening at the most important international airport in the US -- we would know we were in a real war.  The Saudi regime is sure to retaliate against the Houthis, but it's unclear how effectively it can do so without direct US help.  Trump has shown reluctance to get involved in the Houthi/Saudi war, perhaps having learned from the earlier Iran fighting that plunging into complex Middle Eastern conflicts he doesn't understand tends to bring bad results.  The Houthis have shown that they can hit important targets in Saudi Arabia at will and do not fear consequences for doing so -- and we already know the same is true of Iran.  This strikes me as a warning to Trump:  the whole Saudi oil industry is a sitting duck, and if that goes up in flames, then gasoline and diesel prices will shoot into the stratosphere and not come down again.  Ever.

There are no good guys here.  The Houthis are barbaric religious fanatics who engage in the usual Islamic-extremist abuses of women in the territory they control, and sentence people to death or prison for homosexuality.  The Saudi regime, of course, does the same, despite the veneer of fake modernity made possible by oil wealth.  Both the Houthis and the Saudis are vicious enemies of human rights and democracy.  The best outcome for the people of Arabia would be if both gangs destroyed each other.

Coping with the simultaneous European and Middle Eastern wars would pose a major challenge to even the most skilled American leadership, never mind to a bumbling narcissistic ignoramus who kowtows to the Russian gangster-regime and employs real-estate grifters to handle negotiations instead of real diplomats.  But there is a deeper lesson here -- climate change is not the only reason why we need to shift from fossil fuels to clean energy as fast as possible.  The reliability of fossil fuel supplies will always be heavily impacted by events in the Middle East, and the Middle East is doomed to a long period of turbulence as it works through the slow and messy transition from religious wars and autocratic rule to democracy that the West passed through generations ago.  The standard of living in Nebraska should not be held hostage to the squabbles of the murderous religious tyrants in Tehran and Riyadh.  Our technology is gradually solving this problem -- but we need to work faster.