INDEED: The World Doesn’t Care About Your Partisan Politics.

American foreign policy is always something of a hostage to the domestic politics of the moment. While this might be the unavoidable byproduct of democracy, it can greatly distort our understanding of the world and the coherence of strategic planning.

The Israel-Iran-Ukraine-Russia linedance provides a steady stream of examples, but never has it brought as much clarity to the mismatch between U.S. partisan politics and American grand strategy as it has in recent days. Republicans tend to favor Israel but not Ukraine, and Democrats, the reverse. Our enemies, of course, see it very differently.

Just before the weekend, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Russia has supplied the Houthis—the Iranian proxy in Yemen that has been shooting missiles at commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea—with “targeting data” to help sink ships, kill civilians, and sabotage the supply chain. “The data,” the Journal explains, “was passed through members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who were embedded with the Houthis in Yemen.”

That sentence is a handy organizational chart. The Houthis aren’t merely supported by Iran, the Houthis are Iran. And the Russia-Iran alliance has become so tight that Vladimir Putin is helping the Iranians retaliate against the U.S. and Israel for having the temerity to counter Hamas’s invasion of Israel, and, more specifically, for America’s modest support for Ukraine’s existence against Russia’s eliminationist war machine.

Russia wants to bleed Western resources in the Middle East because Moscow is bleeding resources in trying to destroy part of Europe. Russia is angry that it is bad at war, so it is making more war.

Read the whole thing.

Previously: Nobody can say they weren’t warned.