Boots on the Ground
Assisting Israel: The United States is becoming further entangled in Israel’s fights. News broke over the weekend that our military is sending Israel an advanced missile system called the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD—along with 100 American troops to help operate it.
Israel is still weighing possible responses to Iran’s barrage of ballistic missiles two weeks ago, which Iran says was retribution for Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (in September) and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh (in July). Iran also attacked Israel in April; both then and in the more recent attacks, the Iron Dome and U.S. naval destroyers were able to shoot down the vast majority of the missiles. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly been mulling retaliatory strikes on Iranian nuclear and oil sites.
The THAAD system is “a ground-based interceptor designed to shoot down ballistic missiles,” per The Wall Street Journal. The U.S. supplied it to Saudi Arabia back in 2019 to help it fend off attacks from the Houthis, “marking the system’s first known use in a military operation,” according to Defense News.
Israel, of course, has been at war with Hamas since it conducted a massacre inside Israeli territory on October 7, 2023, and Israel has been fighting Hezbollah since roughly then as well, but it only recently sent troops into Lebanon. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are Iranian allies, as are the Yemeni Houthis, who have been both terrorizing container ships in the Red Sea and attempting to strike Israeli cities.
It’s not especially surprising that the United States is coming to Netanyahu’s aid, but this deployment is still an aggressive and highly visible show of support with consequential timing: We’re less than a month out from a presidential election, and whatever happens in the Middle East is sure to affect domestic politics here, especially if we’re putting boots on the ground.
2024 race: Data from Democratic and Republican Party performance over the last two decades have shown increased polarization among educational attainment lines: The Democrats have been becoming the party of college-educated voters, and the Republicans doing increasingly well with the working class. “The increasing educational divide is coming into tension with the most longstanding feature of American politics: racial polarization,” writes Nate Silver on Substack.
Black voters have long been foundational to Democratic Party support; Hispanic and Asian voters have been mostly Democrat-leaning, though a bit less steadfast. But as Silver notes, “Black and Hispanic voters are more working class—less likely to have completed college degrees—than white ones. So in principle, a continued increase in educational polarization would lead to erosion in Democratic support among these groups, but gains with white ones. From an Electoral College standpoint, this would actually be a g
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