Link to article: https://apnews.com/article/blinken-turkey-gaza-israel-hamas-9ff3aae906aaae71613fb2a9afed2bdd
United States Secretary of State, Antony Blinken departed the middle east from his diplomatic tour assuming unhappy given what the middle east had to say in response. The United States representative met with israeli foreign minister, Hakan Fidan in the capital of Turkey, Ankara. The United States voiced their dissatisfaction with the civilian killings going on between both palestine and israel and in a public statement made by Secretary of State Blinken he says that the United States and israel “don’t obviously agree on everything”. Since the beginning of israel’s retaliation against Hamas there have been over 10,000 palestinian deaths with just 1,400 israeli deaths.
I think that the United States absolutely needs to stay in the good graces with Saudi Arabia and all of our allies in the middle east. Our economy is already hurting as well as our debt, the last thing we need is oil to be restricted to us because we support the wrong country. I think the United States needs to accept that there is going to be a very high number of civilian deaths in this war, especially since the basis for this war is religious and religious wars tend to be more personal and therefore more violent. The United States needs to tread very carefully so as to not destroy our influence in the middle east, our economy, or make our national debt more severe than it already is.
In class we talk about how much diplomatic relations can change the outcome of a war. For example, had Putin been willing to negotiate with Ukraine in the beginning of the war we could have avoided the death of thousands and the United States could have avoided spending billions of dollars in equipment and sending it all to Ukraine, it would have been beneficial to everybody. In class we talk about how important diplomacy is, it serves as a passive resolution before innocent people start dying. You can very clearly see both israel and the United States willing to have diplomatic relations which is a positive sign in the future of the Israel-Palestine war.