On the empire and powerlessness - Zvi Bar'el in Haaretz:

‘"During my Administration, we had peace in the Middle East, and we will have peace again very soon!" Donald Trump told his more than 30 million followers in a post on Truth Social October 30. "I will fix the problems caused by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and stop the suffering and destruction in Lebanon. I want to see the Middle East return to real peace, a lasting peace, and we will get it done properly so it doesn't repeat itself every 5 or 10 years!"
Trump's comments were aimed at the large community of Lebanese expats in Dearborn, Michigan, to whom he also promised to "preserve the equal partnership among all Lebanese communities." But he depicted them as tidings for the entire Middle East.’

(…)

‘In general, the Middle East – and that includes non-Arab countries like Turkey and Iran – isn't divided between Trump supporters and Harris supporters. It is divided schematically into two main blocs, but these blocs aren't Sunni and Shi'ite or pro-American and anti-American, as they are commonly depicted.
Rather, one bloc consists of countries whose leaders have already begun strategic planning for the new administration in Washington. The other comprises countries that are waiting for a savior to rescue them from the crisis of wars that have gone on for years, some of which threaten the entire region.’

(…)

‘That's because even Trump's great diplomatic achievement, the "deal of the century" that gave birth to the Abraham Accords, didn't lead to any real change in the web of regional threats. Unlike the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, the Abraham Accords didn't end any wars or violent conflicts.’

(…)

‘This is also true of the wet dream of creating a regional defense coalition that would include normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia and would be aimed at building a defensive wall against Iran. Trump didn't make it happen in his last term, while the Biden administration spent four years delicately taking that single "step" that separates Jerusalem and Riyadh without managing to complete it. It turns out that a "negligible" local conflict, the Palestinian one, is still a spoke in the wheel of that multinational coalition and is still disrupting the big game.’

(…)

‘Both Trump and Biden, like Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George Bush before then, learned the bitter lesson that there is no real connection between the amount of aid Israel gets from America or the quantities of American arms piling up in its warehouses and Washington's ability to extract a real diplomatic achievement in exchange.
Nor is this a lesson unique to U.S.-Israeli relations. The trillions the American taxpayer spent in Iraq and Afghanistan also didn't ensure long-term alliances between those countries and America. Shi'ite Iraq has largely become an Iranian trustee, while Sunni Afghanistan is controlled by the Taliban.’

(…)

‘It also fails to account for the fact that in the shifting Middle Eastern kaleidoscope, a local conflict can spark an all-out war, while the region's countries have a status and heft that enable them to determine at least a sizable portion of the rules of the game with no connection to who the next U.S. president is.’

Read the article here.

In other words, Trumps wants to be unpredictable, Harris will be forced to be unpredictable.

Trillions of aid is no guarantee for any real influence. See, Iraq, See: Afghanistan, yes indeed. But the destruction of Iraq might serve as a deterrent – other countries in the region will think twice before disobeying the empire.

And the Saudis couldn’t care less about the Palestinians but before the wet dream of the Sunni-Jewish alliance will become reality the minor issue of the Palestinians needs to be resolved, at least cosmetically.

The US/Israel-Iran war might still be coming regardless of who is going to win today’s elections.