The Last American Vagabond - Here’s Why Israel Is Trapped & Not Even Trump Can Save It

Episode Date: October 4, 2026

On this episode of Foreign Policy with Robert Inlakesh, we explore the mindset driving Israel’s expansionist endeavors and the strategic mistakes that have left Tel Aviv’s decision-makers trapped in a quagmire.The seven-front war is expanding again—and yet Israel has failed to secure a strategic victory on any single front. At best, it has pulled off tactical victories before agreeing to freeze fronts without any resolution.How will this affect the Trump administration’s next moves? Will Israel finally be put in its place, and are we slowly seeing the cracks inside the regime that has been plotting this regional war for more than three decades?Bitcoin Donations Are Appreciated:www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/bitcoin-donation(3FSozj9gQ1UniHvEiRmkPnXzHSVMc68U9f)The Last American Vagabond Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Last American Vagabond Substack at tlavagabond.substack.com/subscribe

To have dignity, to have respect, to have our human rights. The occupation is not just the soldiers, it's not just the settlements, it's everything. What will separate the condition of humanity from the barbarism of the past, which we like to think we have since changed and progressed from. That might have been the work of American imperialism and international Zionism. We've come here to investigate what this means for the people living here. It's a violation of international world. It's a war crime.

These are the real journalists, achieving liberation to unite the people in a way that we've never seen before. Welcome back to another episode of foreign policy with me, Robert In Lekesh, for the last American vagabond. As Israel is threatening war, once again with all its neighbors on its so-called seven-front war that it insists it is going to win and dragging the United States deeper and deeper into a crisis which is now impacting Americans at home because of the rising costs of gas at the pump. It's important to look at what has brought Israel to the position it currently is in and whether it has any off-ramps and what kind of moves it possibly could take in the near future.

In order to understand this, we have to go back, and this is something the Israeli propagandists Love to do to October 7, 2023. Now, the reason why we have to look back to this date is not because we have to look back to the 40 beheaded babies and the babies thrown in ovens and the mass rape campaign and all of this, but we had to focus in on something key that happened on that day. That was the day that the Israeli military and political leadership decided that they would go and accelerate their project to achieve the so-called Greater Israel. That's the day that they decided they would no longer hold themselves back from committing any action anywhere in the region. And it's also the day on which the Israelis decided they're going to drag the United States, even if that means. kicking and screaming, not in the case of the Trump administration, of course. They did it very willingly, and Donald Trump is still claiming every day that he has won the war, or is winning it. But they were

going to drag the United States to war with Iran, to finish off the job, and to secure Israeli supremacy across the entire region at everyone else's expense but their own. Now, when Israel got hit with the Operation El Uxafl flood on October 7. What happened is to its own public and in the minds of the Israelis, it suddenly triggered this reaction, a very violent reaction that in their minds justified genocide as the means and the goal of ethnic cleansing and destroying the Gaza Strip. Now, why did they have to do a genocide and have to try to get ethnic cleansing as the ultimate outcome and destroy all of Gaza. Well, it's very simple. It's a instinct within the supremacist mindset of an Israeli and the Israelis that says to them, if we destroy Gaza, if we do this,

what we are going to do is send the message to the rest of the Arab world surrounding us that you cannot beat us. In other words, they restore their so-called deterrence capacity. This is something that we hear come up throughout Israeli think tanks throughout its history. And it's one of those issues that is almost sacred to Israelis, that they have this security deterrence, right, and a deterrence capacity in some way, shape, or form against the evil Arab hordes. Despite the fact that if you look on a map surrounding them, all of the countries in the region either have normalization agreements with them, are owned by the United States, and are actively trying to pursue resistance groups that try to fight back against Israel.

The Lebanese government has signed a recognition agreement of the Israelis and is openly opposed to Hezbollah wants to disarm them. So on the northern border, you have that. Syria, it now has a U.S.-backed regime that is controlled by the United States. States, Jordan long signed a normalization agreement in the 1990s with the Israelis. Egypt to the south also has a normalization agreement with them. Saudi Arabia has an open communication with the Israelis and Israeli intelligence for decades upon decades. Now it doesn't have an actual normalization agreement, but it's collaborating and cooperating with them

in its ongoing war against Yemen, and of course the list goes on. So Israel's not actually surrounded. But it's the Arab public that it is scared of. It's the people. It's the resistance organizations that have been formed over the years to fight back against Israel, and it wants to instill that fear. So destroying Gaza would be part of that. Also it would destroy what's known as the axis of resistance, which is led by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

And so if you take Gaza out of the mix and you defeat the Palestinian resistance, then all of the other sort of links in this chain become weaker somewhat. Their cause has been undermined and their motivation to fight also will be weakened. That's the thinking. And as they do that, they can conquer more territory. The regime change operation in Syria meant that they could expand their territory into Syria. So, again, this was the mindset. Kill, kill, kill, destroy, genocide, by any means necessary, wipe out these Arabs, right? We are supreme, right? because their mindset is that of what Betselaum, Israel's top human rights organization, says, Jewish supremacy, a regime of Jewish supremacy from the river to the sea.

Now, these aren't my words. These are the words of Israel's top human rights organization, Betzelm, in its report which accused Israel of operating a system of apartheid. And this was a report that was produced, by the way, before October 7 happened in 2023, But Israel was in that mindset. But until, and this is a key date, September 17, 2024, the Israelis were not able to score any sort of victories in the region. Hamas and the other some dozen Palestinian resistance factions in Gaza were still fighting them. They couldn't eliminate them.

The Egyptians wouldn't agree to allow the mass ethnic cleansing of the rest of the Gaza population that hadn't already been. killed into their country because they knew the instability that would come with a move like allowing that. And so on the northern border, you had Hezbollah, which is of course much more powerful than the Palestinian factions. And it is committing daily operations against the Israelis. And Israel is not really able to do anything to throw them off and to stop them from resisting. So what it does up until the 17th of September 24 is it is just constantly destroying buildings, attacking civilians, and getting nowhere. And it's really embarrassing. It carried out some assassinations, of course, but it didn't actually achieve anything that could be called victory. They didn't really have a

plan to achieve a victory over Lebanon and Gaza. It's not something that they actually knew how to achieve because they didn't want to actually fight on the ground and go after the armed groups and sacrifice the men in their armed forces that would be needed in order to do something like that. So what they did instead is they just bombed from the air, they killed civilians, but then September 17 happened. And again, the reason why I'm fixating on this date is because that is when the Pager attack happened inside of Lebanon. an attack that even Leon Panetta, the former head of the CIA called an act of terrorism,

it wounded about 3,000 people across Lebanon. And this was a major moment. The Israeli Mossad had pulled off an operation that demonstrated they had infiltrated Hezbollah. And then afterwards, in the subsequent weeks, what the Israelis were able to do was assassinate the first line of Hezbollah's political leadership and its military leadership, and take out a portion of their weapons. Now, in the minds of the Israelis, this was a major victory. But what made it sink in as a huge victory even more so was the fact that right after a ceasefire was signed by the 27th of November in that year, so the war had gone on for a few months at that point, and it was

not a favorable ceasefire to Hezbollah, then immediately afterwards in December of that year there was regime change in Syria, which meant that this is another blow. Netanyahu got up very publicly and said that, you know, basically he's responsible for it. Okay. Which is not entirely true. Of course, the United States more so are responsible for the regime change operation. inside Syria than Israel is, but of course this was something pursued for Israeli interests. So in a way, he sort of is right. But that being said, that image of Israeli victory, they got carried away with it. What had happened is they had, in their minds, turned a number of tactical victories,

the pager attacks, the assassinations, and then the fall of the Syrian government, into the idea of strategic victory. When they spoke about Lebanon and Hezbollah, they spoke about Hezbollah as having been defeated. They spoke about Gaza as if it's on the brink of destruction. But then we start crossing over into the next year in 2025. Now, another big problem that Israel had is Yemen's Ansar al-La. The Sena-based government in Yemen decided to use their armed forces to impose a blockade in the Red Sea, which ended up bankrupting the Israeli port of Yilat

and destroying the sovereign economy for the Israelis. Now, the Israelis themselves, despite committing air strikes against Yemen and killing civilians, didn't have all that much intelligence inside of Yemen to be able to actually go after anything that meant anything for them that they were going to achieve any sort of goal and they weren't able to lift the blockade in the Red Sea. The Biden administration did two separate,

operations on Israel's behalf and failed. 2025 Trump comes in and suddenly Trump is being ordered by his Israeli masters to commit a large-scale bombardment of Yemen. So he is ordered to go to war and he goes to war. And he commits this large-scale bombardment of Yemen for around a month and a half at the start of 2025. And he also fails. He fails miserably to stop.

the Yemeni armed forces from imposing their blockade on the Israelis in support of the Gaza Strip and fails to prevent the Yemeni armed forces from firing ballistic missiles and drones at Israeli targets. So that's the loss number one in 2025. Then June in 2025 comes, Israel launches its surprise attack on Iran because it wants to go after the head of the snake now. It's so incredibly empowered by what is going on and the fact that the Trump administration has taken over. It completely controls the Trump administration. And so here it is, fighting Iran head on. It assassinates a number of members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,

and it gets in this exchange of fire, which ends, of course, with the United States coming in and bombing some of Iran's nuclear facilities with its B2 bombers. Now, of course, they declared this. massive victory, and the Israeli public sort of, they bought it. They bought that they had secured some sort of victory, because they saw, well, we assassinated a bunch of Iranian officials, it was just us, basically, the U.S. didn't even get involved, and we're being told we destroyed their nuclear facilities. So that is a victory. So the Israelis became even more emboldened. But as that was happening, intelligence reports were flooding in, and even the Washington-based think

tanks like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is sort of the think tank arm of the Israel lobby in the United States, are starting to report on the transfer of weapons through Syria, because Syria now is destabilized in a major way. The central government does not have the power that the former government in Syria had. And so you can just pay people off and weapons were still coming in to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hesbollah was re-arm. These reports were coming out. The Israelis, you know, sort of ignored this. And in Gaza, they launched two more major operations.

The first was called Gideon's Chariots One, and then Gideon Chariots 2. Both of them were supposed to be these massive plots to seize the north of the Gaza Strip and kill everybody, put everyone remaining into a kill zone, force the rest into the south, exterminate them all, right, go in, take out of all of the... resistance fighters. And of course, Gideon's chariots won. It didn't work. Okay, it was a failure. So they did number two, the second edition. And this second edition was supposed to be an operation that would occupy Gaza City in the north of Gaza. And all of the experts were saying, well, this is going to take up to 10 years to do if we want to establish a West Bank style occupation of

Gaza City and we're going to lose a lot of soldiers in the process. This is not going to be easy. So about a few weeks later after this operation is announced, suddenly on October 8, there is a ceasefire declared. So the ceasefire enables the Israelis to sort of get out of this predicament of inevitable embarrassment because they don't have the military capabilities. They don't have the soldiers necessary even to go in and commit the operation that they're pledging to do inside of Gaza that would allegedly win them the war, right, and ethnically cleanse all the Gazans and destroy Hamas, right? Or Hamas, if you're going to speak like them. For some reason, they like to add a kha into everything, even though those words don't start with that. They can say Hitler and they can say the Houthis, but they can't say

Hamas and Hezbollah, it's Chamas and Khazbullah. Anyway, I'm going off a little bit here. But they signed this ceasefire agreement, which of course is not actually a real ceasefire. They're doing the same thing that they did in Lebanon after their ceasefire November 27, 2024, where for 15 months they just violated every day, carried assassinations, kill anyone they want, use chemical weapons, whatever it is, you know, you know, kill as many people as you like. Just don't go over a certain threshold because then we call it a war again. But it's still a ceasefire if you only kill like a dozen people a day and, you know, destroy their crops and poison their lands and stuff. That's fine. That's just all part of a ceasefire, apparently.

But anyway, they're doing that in Gaza. They get their prisoners back in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, and then they just have no plan on what to do with Gaza from there. Because Israel, again, wants to ethnically cleanse it and is still every single day destroying buildings in Gaza. That's the majority of what they've done the entire time is just to destroy infrastructure. They want to destroy it, so there's nothing there. And when they ethnically cleanse the population, there's nothing to return to. That's in their minds what they want to do. But they haven't been able to achieve it because they've got no real plan.

And their military is not capable of carrying out these sort of maneuvers necessary to actually go after the Palestinian armed factions. Quite frankly, because they're a bunch of cowards and they don't actually have a real military, it's a participation trophy army. That's what they have. So here they are in this situation where they now don't have a solution for Gaza and don't have a solution for Lebanon. And both of those fronts are sort of quiet. So they're like, well, we're going to try it again with Iran. They try to do a color revolution using the Mossad and of course the CIA is involved in trying to stir up a revolution in Iran. and Iran puts this down very quickly within 48 hours, so that fails too. So next, they dragged the United States into an all-out war on Iran.

They assassinate Ayatollah Khamanai, the leader of Iran, but then in March, suddenly stuff starts going sideways. Hezbollah starts firing rockets against all these targets across Israel, Israeli held territory. Suddenly, Hezullahs carrying out anti-tank guided missile attacks and killing soldiers, and it's clashing with them and posing a real problem. Suddenly, Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz. All of these U.S. bases in the region are getting blown to bits. The Israelis are getting hit with cluster munitions, and they're not defeating Iran. Iran is responding, and every single time the Israelis and Americans escalate Iran.

escalates to match it. So then they get stuck after 40 days in a ceasefire period. Now the Israeli public have caught on to what the Israeli leadership have been lying to them about. Hezbollah is not defeated. You didn't win in Lebanon. In Syria, you didn't even stop weapons transfers. You just remove the government, but that doesn't really mean anything. The weapons can still flow through. You know, at the end of the day, Syria and the, and the, and the Israelis were not actually in an active war. They were fighting Hezbollah, sure, but they were not fighting the Syrian Arab army. In Gaza, they still haven't won. In Yemen, the U.S. couldn't even help them there against Yemen's Ansar al-Nah. Now the Yemeni armed forces have liberated their

entire coast and have seized control of Babel-Mandab. So now the Babel-Mendab Strait and the Strait of Hormuz are in control of what is called the axis of resistance. Iran is able to put a chokehold on the global economy. And Saudi Arabia that Israel so desperately wanted to normalize with is having all of its infrastructure blown up because it continues to pursue this war of aggression against Yemen. Of course, Israel is urging them to continue and giving them all the intelligence to bomb civilian areas like we're seeing happen inside of Yemen, these civilian massacres that Saudis now committing with Israeli intelligence that's been fed to them, very surprising, and they're just not able to secure a victory. So now what the Israelis are doing is

they're having to make up their minds. They have their elections coming up at the end of October, and they either have to get the United States to commit to a large-scale attack, on Iran or they simply go after Syria because what's going to happen is if the Israelis and a lot of people feared that the Israelis could perhaps go and restart the genocide in Gaza to try and get more votes for Netanyahu but what will likely happen is if Israel restarts the genocide in Gaza goes full scale they're going to discover that Hamas and the other Palestinians Palestinian groups again possess rockets that are capable of hitting Tel Aviv.

And just that alone, even though the Palestinian factions can't fully defeat the Israelis, nobody is arguing that. But that will be such a blow to the Israeli psyche and the Israeli public that they're going to realize that every single front of this war has been frozen. They haven't won anywhere. And if they get the United States to commit all out against Iran, there's no route to victory that anyone has presented. If the United States could have done it,

they would have already carried out the sort of attack that would have secured them a victory against Iran. So now the Israelis are frothing at the mouth. They seek to secure some kind of victory. And all they've got is the ability to carry out more assassinations, intelligence operations, and then lead the United States into more pointless war where the entire region is going to get blown to bits, and they keep losing ground. They haven't gained anything, this myth of the greater Israel, which at the start of the year, they truly believed they could

achieve. Everyone from Netanyahu to the Israeli opposition leader, Yer Lepid, were talking about pursuing greater Israel, suddenly greater Israel seems like a pipe dream. And this brings us down to the meat and bones of this issue. What we have seen from the Israelis, and this is important to note, is not a well-oiled plan, right? This is not a strategy that is being played out, and they're five steps ahead of everyone else and this, you know, five-dimensional chess and all of that. What we're seeing from the Israelis is desperation.

The same kind of desperation we see in the United States when they're confronted with the reality of public opinion. That's the same kind of desperation we're seeing from the Israelis in the military sphere as we see in the propaganda sphere. And although there is very likely much more. or death destruction, unjustifiable bloodshed that is ahead, horrors that perhaps maybe we can't even yet fathom without them coming into being. The light at the end of the tunnel here is, the Israelis have overplayed their hand, and quite

frankly, they don't have any strategy with which to achieve these. victories in their seven front war. So in order to understand the Israeli mindset we have to understand that arc and understand the different fronts. Because when you start looking at these different fronts and you put it all together, they don't seem so powerful anymore. They seem like a state run by a bunch of genocidal lunatics who are acting emotional and are unable to control the situation that they themselves have created. So until next time, this has been the foreign policy show for The Last American Vagabond

with me, Robert in Lecash. And remember, question everything.