The Pentagon has halted shipments of critical US Patriot air defence systems and other precision weapons to Ukraine after concern that US stockpiles are running too low, prompting alarm in Kyiv.
At the end of last week’s Nato summit, Donald Trump hinted that supplies of Patriot missile interceptors were running down because some had been supplied to Israel, though he suggested he would like to help Kyiv.
After a meeting with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the US president acknowledged that Ukraine did “want to have the anti-missile systems, as they call the Patriots, and we’re going to see if we can make some available”.
But Trump added: “They’re very hard to get. We need them. We were supplying them to Israel,” implying that supporting Israel in its war with Iran – a priority for the Republican administration – had set back its willingness to help Kyiv.
I’m not ignoring that! What I said was that this was inevitable after Israel started sucking up military aid. Once that process began they would suck the US dry to bomb all their neighbors, and no one in the US government would even try to stop them because they all support this course of events. I don’t mean to imply that Israel is unstoppable, but rather, that everyone in the US government loves helping Israel do genocide so much that the few voices against it would always be drowned out.
But you really want to wind this back to Trump’s first term, so let’s do that.
If you actually think about why Operation Al-Aqsa Flood happened, I’m not entirely sure the nuclear deal actually would have prevented it. The attack was launched because of normalization with the rest of the Gulf states, because normalization with Israel is a death sentence for Palestinians and a direct path to ethnic cleansing of both Gaza and the West Bank, and normalization was always the goal. Iran isn’t the puppet master behind Hamas. Hamas has its own agenda and leadership, Iran is just an ally.
If anything, in a situation where Iran has a nuclear deal and normalization with the Gulf states is progressing, Hamas would be under even more pressure to launch an attack before it was too late to fight back at all!
I also take issue with “There was no problem supplying Israel” - it was a big fucking problem because they’re fucking colonizers. They were colonizers before Oct 7th and now they’ve ripped the mask off, but they’ve always been settlers and colonizers and genocidiers.
Israel has been sucking up military aid for over 70 years. Yet only right now, after Trump bombed Iran, it became a problem to supply Ukraine.
Trump claiming there aren’t weapons for Ukraine is because of Iran missile strikes. It has nothing to do with Gaza. Iran missile strikes happened because of Iran’s uranium refinement program that started because of Trump (This is Iran’s statement.).
That’s an extraordinarily gross misreading of my statement. The US was able to supply Ukraine and Israel until Israel bombed Iran because of their nuclear weapons program.