SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: American foreign policy in the Middle East does not run on military power alone.

When I heard these nine words from Huckabee, I stopped, backed up the video, and played it again. And again. Four times, I listened to it to make sure I was hearing it right, at which point I looked at Foxy (my Welsh Corgi farm dog) and asked her, “How the hell am I going to get people to see how big a deal that is?” She had no idea, and I’ve spent the last 24 hours thinking about it. Huckabee said, “ It would be fine if they took it all.” Rewind. Play. Rewind. Play. Rewind. Play. Rewind. Play. I could not believe I was hearing that, out loud. I can’t believe Huckabee said it, out loud. On video. In an interview. Like it was no big deal! Let me say this, with all seriousness, and not a bit of hyperbole. That statement from Ambassador Huckabee was the single most patently insane, dangerously irresponsible declaration that I’ve ever heard from an American official, at least, in the context of foreign relations. It takes the cake for dumb comments made. A distant second might be Kamala Harris attending the Munich Security Conference in 2022 and announcing that Ukraine would join NATO- leading to Russia invading Ukraine only five days later and to, thus far, 1.5 million casualties on both sides. Potentially, Huckabee’s claim could cause far, far more casualties. Except it won't lead to a regional conflict, but a world war. Here is something that the average Fox News viewer, nodding along to Huckabee’s Greatest Israel theology, does not understand and has apparently never been required to think about for five consecutive minutes: American foreign policy in the Middle East does not run on military power alone. U.S. foreign policy runs on trust. Specifically, it runs on the carefully maintained, perpetually fragile, enormously expensive fiction that the United States is an honest broker, that when we sit down with Arab heads of state and tell them we want stability and peace in the region, we mean it, and that our word is worth something. That trust is the entire architecture. Remove it and the whole structure falls. The damage is not hypothetical. It is already done. The only question is how much more Huckabee intends to do before someone in Washington with actual authority tells him to sit down and be quiet. Let me tell you what the Greater Israel Project actually is. It is a territorial and theological vision held by a significant and growing faction of Israeli religious nationalists who believe that God promised the Jewish people a specific piece of real estate in Genesis 15, and that the modern State of Israel has not yet collected what was promised. The boundaries of that promise, read literally, run from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River, which flows through Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Everything between those two rivers belongs, in their view, to the Jewish people by divine right. Not eventually. Not symbolically. Actually. Physically. With the current occupants either subordinated, expelled, or dealt with by whatever means history requires. That territory, to be clear about the geography, includes all of modern-day Palestine, all of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, significant portions of Iraq, the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, and chunks of Saudi Arabia and Turkey as well. We are talking about the sovereign territory of a dozen modern nation-states, home to hundreds of millions of people, that a particular faction of Israeli religious nationalists believes is theirs by biblical deed. Egypt has been a cornerstone of American Middle Eastern strategy since Anwar Sadat flew to Jerusalem in 1977 and made himself a target for the bullet that eventually found him. In exchange for that extraordinary act of courage and for the peace treaty that followed, the United States has provided Egypt with roughly $2 billion a year in military and economic aid for nearly 5 decades. What we buy with that money is not just a treaty signature. We buy the Suez Canal to keep it open. We buy Egyptian intelligence cooperation against terrorist networks that would otherwise metastasize across North Africa into Europe. We buy a moderating voice in the Arab League. We buy a government in Cairo that, whatever its domestic failures, keeps forty percent of the world’s seaborne oil traffic flowing without interruption. Jordan has absorbed Palestinian refugees, managed the most sensitive border in the world with more grace than anyone had a right to expect, and served as a quiet intelligence-sharing partner with the United States on threats from Iraq, Syria, and Iran. King Abdullah has spent his entire reign walking a tightrope between his population, seventy percent of which is Palestinian or of Palestinian descent, and the demands of an American alliance that keeps asking him to absorb more and say less. He has done it because the alternative is worse, and because the United States has made certain assurances about what we are and are not trying to accomplish in his neighborhood. Saudi Arabia controls the largest proven oil reserves on earth. The petrodollar arrangement, in which Saudi oil is priced exclusively in dollars, is one of the foundational supports of American economic dominance globally. When we need intelligence on Iranian nuclear developments, when we need overflight rights for military operations, when we need a Sunni counterweight to Tehran’s regional ambitions, we call Riyadh. The relationship has costs, and they are real costs, but the strategic value of a cooperative Saudi Arabia to American interests is almost impossible to overstate. The United Arab Emirates has become the most important American military hub in the Gulf. There’s the Al Dhafra Air Base, port access, and intelligence infrastructure. The Emiratis have made themselves indispensable to American military projection across the entire region. Every one of those relationships, and a dozen others like them, depends on those governments being able to tell their populations, with a straight face, that the United States does not actually support the territorial dismemberment of the Arab world. It requires them to believe that whatever Israel does unilaterally, America’s stated position is peace, stability, and the sovereignty of existing borders. That fiction has been strained before, badly, but it has held together because no senior American official has ever looked into a camera and said something as retarded as what Mike Huckabee just said. And Mike Huckabee just said the quiet part loud, to Tucker Carlson, on a podcast with millions of viewers. And those viewers are not the only ones who watched it. Every intelligence service from Cairo to Riyadh to Ankara has already clipped that footage, translated it, and presented it to a head of state who now has to decide what to do with it. Every Arab government that has spent years explaining to its population why cooperation with Washington is worth the domestic political cost just had that argument kicked out from under it by a Baptist minister from Arkansas who cannot help himself. Huckabee went on to argue, "No one from Israel wants that.” And I’m here to tell you that Huckabee is a liar, there are many in Israel who want that, and they’re taking over Israel one election at a time. The faction that holds this view is no longer fringe. It is no longer marginal. It is in the cabinet. It is writing the coalition agreements. It is administering the occupied territories. It is gaining seats in every election cycle. And Huckabee lies through his pork jowls when he says, "No one wants that." That's a lie. Here are a few: Bezalel Smotrich is the Israeli Finance Minister. He stood at a podium in Paris in 2023 behind a map of Greater Israel that included Jordan and told the audience that Jerusalem is destined to expand to Damascus. He wants Israel to govern itself as it did under King David and King Solomon. He is not speaking poetically. He means the borders. He means all of it. He is currently the de facto civilian administrator of the West Bank, which means he is not a man shouting about this from the political wilderness. He is a man with his hands on the levers right now, today. Itamar Ben Gvir leads a party called Jewish Power, which is the direct political descendant of a movement the United States government formally designated as a terrorist organization. He was convicted of incitement to racism and supporting terrorism before Israeli politics decided that was a perfectly acceptable background for a cabinet minister. He regularly leads marches of ultranationalist settlers onto the Al-Aqsa compound, the third holiest site in Islam, because provoking a civilizational religious confrontation is, for these people, not a risk to be managed but an outcome to be accelerated. Daniella Weiss, one of the most prominent settler leaders in Israel, said on camera in 2024, without a tremor of embarrassment: “We know from the Bible that the real borders of Greater Israel are the Euphrates and the Nile.” She meant it as a policy statement. And Mike Huckabee repeated that crap. And Netanyahu himself told Israeli television in August 2025 that he is “very” attached to the Greater Israel vision and considers himself on “a historic and spiritual mission of generations.” The coalition agreement currently governing Israel states that Jewish people have an “exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of the Land of Israel.” That is the signed governing document of a nuclear-armed state. There is only one item left on the to-do list: pick a fight large enough with the entire Middle East to justify taking their land, putting them all in camps, and Auschwitzing them like they did to Gaza. And believe me when I say that when Israel gets ready to write that check, they'll expect the United States to cash it. And from the looks of it, between AIPAC's lobby and the evangelical Dispensationalists, Israel will control enough of the U.S. government to make it happen." Read more at Insight to Incite. Link in bio. Audio version IS available at Spotify and Substack.

8:14 AM · Feb 22, 2026