The two major ongoing wars are due to US foreign policy and could be over tomorrow if US government fully stopped supporting their respective belligerents.
A good chunk of the human population has never known a "Pax Americana" and regions such as East Asia are clearly better off due to declining American hegemony.
If you’re referring to Ukraine as one of the two, we already heavily reduced our support under Trump and there is no chance in hell that removing the leftover support causes Ukraine to capitulate by tomorrows, especially after recent territory gains and destruction of Russian logistical supply lines with Wildberries and their refinery infrastructure.
Also if the other is Iran, lol at “stopped supporting respective belligerents” as if the US itself was not one of the major belligerents.
The USA is heavily supporting Ukraine with intelligence sharing, private financial support, StarLink, and """indirectly""" providing arms through European middlemen.
The latter was Trump's innovation so that he can pretend he is upholding some foreign policy campaign promise without materially changing anything.
Private financial support doesn’t count, that’s private actors.
I’ll accept Starlink as US support despite their back and forth on supporting Russia, because they are a large corporation requiring on government assent the same way Wildberries is for Russia.
The indirect one you’ll have to sell me on as support. We’re selling shit, and like to make money. Someone buying our shit to give to Ukraine doesn’t count as support or antagonistic to me but as a neutral position.
I think the other example is Israel which seems like the much more obviously belligerent, actively colonial nation state that the US is largely propping up (and wouldn't exist otherwise)
also, arguably, the half-century of creating, establishing, funding, and build-up of NATO largely supersedes the point that Trump cut spending there temporarily. that all came from American coffers and the current conflict there is a long hangover from that
> colonial nation state that the US is largely propping up (and wouldn't exist otherwise)
This is a baseless, American-centric notion I've heard frequently in New York and San Francisco.
If America pulled support from Israel, it would find partners in other countries. India and China are at the top of the list–they want Israeli weapons technology and intelligence. Russia would probably play too. And depending on the kind of mess we leave Iran in, some Gulf countries may also find a way to come to a nuclear technology transfer deal with Tel Aviv.
I don’t know why so many people take it as a given that Israel only exists because of America.
They used to be aligned with the USSR and we did a lot of work to peel them off into our own domain. They also have their own military industrial complex and are perfectly capable of manufacturing the weapons they need domestically.
And they can redirect resources to the war if we removed it.
If anything, removal of our support probably leads to the use of dumber less targeted weapons like carpet bombing or good ole white phosphorus that they’ve already demonstrated use of in past conflicts.
If we were giving them 30+% of their gdp then yea, dropping that probably stops the conflict. 2% is just a budget reshuffle.
you should look up how much the 2008 financial crisis shrank the US GDP. 2% of an entire nation state's GDP especially with aid concentrated in gov\mil sectors of which a huge part of Israel's private sector is dependent on for grants is not a 'budget reshuffle'
It is when there’s an existential threat which, agree with Israel’s government or not, they believe the neighboring Islamic factions are.
I’m not claiming it would be easy but it’s definitely not an amount that losing would end the war overnight, which was the original claim I responded to
Israelis can't carpet bomb. They don't have the tech.
Are you saying 10's of thousands of bombs US supplied to level the entire cities and countryside to the ground is preferable to IL having to get this elsewhere, because why exactly? What does precision have to do with it?
You can scroll around here to see what US did by providing all those mostly free bombs:
> Israelis can't carpet bomb. They don't have the tech.
What? I’m not even responding to the rest if this is how you open up.
Carpet bombing is so low tech I can’t imagine a country in the modern age that couldn’t create the technology even if they couldn’t afford actually deploying it. It’s a matter of logistics and having enough bombs.
It’s literally just dropping a fuck ton of dumb bombs on an area to “carpet” it, unless we’re talking past each other and you were referring to something else.
Give me enough guano, charcoal, sulphur, steel, and flint and I can cobble together carpet bombing from my kitchen without ever having to go up the tech tree past a few hundred years ago.
Hell Hamas themselves under heavy sanctions have shown they have the technology, they merely lack the surfeit of resources to implement it.
This isn’t me arguing with you, I’m just flabbergasted that someone could say with a straight face that Israel doesn’t have the technology to carpet bomb.
I want us to decrease or end our alliance with Israel for political reasons related to how their government has interacted with ours(the US) but I am constantly surprised by these people who honestly think that Israel wouldn’t collapse the moment US support ended, like they didn’t fight several existential wars and win previous to our support.
Carpet bombing requires delivery vehicles and bombs IL does not have. Best they have are F-15s (and not a lot of those) fighter bombers which can carry about 7 each of the 1 ton bombs they're getting 60 thousands of for free from americans soon again.
So all in all if they send 50 of F-15s fully loaded they can drop 350 bombs. Which is about 3x their normal day in Gaza the whole 2 years after oct 2023. If this is carpet bombing, they were carpet bombing Gaza for 2 years already.
I don't care what anyone thinks IL could do if they developed the capability. I'm telling you what they can't do because they don't have it now. They don't need it either, because it's not worth it.
So where are the Israeli bombers? Nowhere. All they have is fighter-bombers, which are quite limited. And clearly they don't even have the bombs. Otherwise why the need for US to send them 10s of thousands of bombs for free in early months of the genocide?
Not enough for anything close to what WW2 or Vietnam war like area bombing operations were done with.
oh? I didn't know China and Russia had such solid relationships with Israel. my understanding was that Israel has been repeatedly condemned by both and last I heard, the free-trade agreement with them has been stalled for years. but what do I know?
> my understanding was that Israel has been repeatedly condemned by both and last I heard, the free-trade agreement with them has been stalled for years. but what do I know?
India-Israel trade has been growing since diplomatic relations between the nations were established in 1992 (including since the war in Gaza) [1]. In 2025 they signed a bilateral investment agreement. And Israel is a growing defence provider to India.
I know less about the China relationship, but it remains a major trading partner with Isrel [2]. (I do not believe there are significant military relations. China has recently been calling what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide, and I'll note they started doing this a year ago, before Trump bungled into Iran, though for obvious reasons Beijing isn't dwelling on the question.)
Russia is currently embedded with Iran, but nothing about that is geostrategic. Israel and the USSR once had close relations. Putin needs weapons for Ukraine. An Israel searching desperately for partners would be useful to Moscow.
Note, too, that both China and India have governments in power that explicitly reject the rights of their domestic Muslim populations.
Israel sanctioned BYD and China sanctioned Israeli cybersec firms back recently to my knowledge. The average Chinese citizen also is much more willing to call it a genocide and if there's one thing the Politburo knows to do, it's not to unnecessarily foment unrest by collusion
I don't personally think it's likely relations would improve on this and I consider myself much better read on the goings-on of the PRC than most
For the other nation states you discussed, I'm far from an expert on them so you very well might be right. But I doubt it'll be straightforward if the US were to cease aid. I also seriously doubt Israel would be so aggressively expansionist without the 300 billion or so they've received from the US. An un-invaded Iraq in combination with Iran would have put its existence at major jeopardy
> Israel sanctioned BYD and China sanctioned Israeli cybersec firms back recently to my knowledge
Yup. China is also shipping arms precursors (and very likely intelligence) to Iran. China and Israel aren't friends. But Israel pivoting from the U.S. absolutely brings it back to the table. China isn't, like, sanctioning Israeli firms in general, or even Israeli firms in the West Bank.
> doubt it'll be straightforward or that Israel would be so aggressively expansionist without the 300 billion or so they've received from the US
My personal hypothesis is the aid turned Israel into a monster. Removing the aid, however, won't change that. It just means more broad-based munitions.
Israel and Gaza have natural gas. The world has shown it will tolerate a lot of nonsense from an energy supplier, particularly a nuclear-armed one.
Israel vs Palestine is not a major conflict, especially given the one sided nature of the fight.
Israel + US vs Iran is a majorish conflict but the US is directly a belligerent in that one.
> also, arguably, the half-century of creating, establishing, funding, and build-up of NATO largely supersedes the point that Trump cut spending there temporarily. that all came from American coffers and the current conflict there is a long hangover from that
Glossing over the Russian propaganda points accusing a defensive pact as a reason for starting a war, that still means that the conflict “ could be over tomorrow” is incorrect even if the US ended all support today.
