I've come to believe with strong conviction (rare for me as a skeptical person) that there is no redemption to be found in Washington, and that the American Congress would gladly see Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Tehran, Baghdad and countless other cities wiped off the map if it means continued Judeo-Christian self-glorification and strategic stranglehold over the region. The solution now and forever is for the region to make that too costly, and that can only happen if there is a viable alternative to American power in the region or self-reliance by the Arab states. Neither of which appear to be forthcoming in the next decade. Maybe after.

Hyperconservative religious zealots of the kind who refuse to learn a new language aren't even a majority in the nations these people come from. The "religious fucks who don't learn the language" are small population which detracts from the millions who already have. Go look up the statistics on Syrians in Germany. The only people not learning the language are those who were already old when they got there.

No... the alternative already exists, which is to put up with people who "stick out."

I am - it doesn't seem all that apocalyptic. If you take the Syrian population, it's a huge improvement. Besides the typical issues associated with taking a big refugee population like that, I'd say the biggest issue was that ISIS was still highly active.

Trust me, we in this region know exactly what Trump means by "run the government like a business" - it means superficial transactionalism. I was living in the Gulf during his presidency, and everyone knew the Saudis were trying to buy him on the cheap LOL! In fact, that's why some people in the region want him back, hoping that his unpredictablility, stubbornness, contempt and seeming aversion to getting the US into a war may actually lead him to snub Israel or at the least make it reconsider whether the US would follow it into a regional war. As it stands, I can't blame them for thinking that. You cannot imagine the rage and anxiety that this latest massacre of Lebanese by Israel has created.

What do you do if - let's assume- integration is proven to require a generation? If you have large migrations, they will lead to ethnic enclaves, which means the strongest point of integration will be when the children of the migrants enter the education system.

Uh, no it's not a technical term.

I don't know what you mean by "technical" here. There are several contexts where it is used academically. For example, here in Turkey the term is pretty ubiquitous when discussing the 80s ultranationalist, anti-communist state bureaucracy. It's certainly in several of the English language political and international relations glossaries I've read.

I don't dispute that US politics is complicated and has many democratically elected players who shape policy. That's why I put "deep state" in quotations, because the concept fits much more loosely when discussing US foreign policy bureaucracy.

After all, when Trump got in, he fired a whole lot of State Department workers, raising fears that he was crippling it by removing indispensable experts. But what's interesting is that his move was considered unprecedented, which sort of goes to prove the point that these individuals are embedded into US foreign policy and kept on as a matter of necessity or simplicity even if their overall strategic and moral outlook is detrimental to US interests and the world.

Not that Trump made any improvements, he just replaced them with incompetents, extremists and yes-men.

And you're right, it was Ben Rhodes who coined "the blob". No need to be rude, my point still stands. I am not a Trump supporter at all. His administration was a collosal failure for the Mid East's future, but unfortunately the current crop of Democrats have taken after him on nearly all issues - from JCPOA to normalizing MBS to letting Israel run amok.

They have no response to this, because it's completely factual and they're more concerned with Trump's rhetoric than Biden's actions.

Sure! The Muslim ban will be defeated in court again, and the Biden administration will not accept refugees from Gaza in any real number regardless.

She met with Netanyahu regardless, and did a photo op with him. Every since her poll numbers drastically improved, she has become less and less pensive about her unconditional support for Netanyahu's Israel.

It's really silly to point to the provocations and one-sided policy of the Trump administration at this point. Biden not only kept to them, he doubled down on them, and none of them were as monstrously deterimental to the Palestinian people than what Blinken and Biden have done.

They have jettisoned the entire domestic and international humanitarian framework to allow Israel to punish, slaughter, herd and humiliate millions of civilians. And Harris sees no reason to contradict them or abandon this policy. She has made it unequivocally clear that she is with them on this. They've really gona above and beyond in doing so. And at the end of the day, a majority of Democratic senators gave Netanyahu a standing ovation in Congress. Her party, her president, her position.

It isn't "Trumpian", it predates Trump and is an actual phrase that comes from the social sciences and was then adopted and abused by conspiracy theorists. In the American context, it's a useful concept because it helps to explain the continuity in unpopular or discredited policies between administration that tout different outlooks, but end up railroaded into these policies. It's just a different name for what Obama called "the blob."

This is a false hope every single time. Once she is in office, the structures she will face - Pentagon, Congress, "deep state" (long-standing war-on-terror era bureaucracy) will constrain her even harder. ASSUMING she isn't another ideological and moral Israeli loyalist, which is a little hard to believe about someone who celebrated Seder in the White House with her Israeli-American husband by serving wine from a West Bank settlement.

Because it is an indicator of personality disorder and a likely refusal to concede a point when you are wrong.