• girlfreddy@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Reagan was seriously pro-Israel and started the whole US-supported Israeli military funding. source

    Jen Kirby - You mentioned that the United States had a big investment in the Iron Dome. Why is that — what’s the US’s stake in this?

    Jean-Loup Samaan - Well, first, historically, the US started cooperating with Israel on air defense in the 1980s. So when missile defense became a significant component of defense investment in the US, Israel was very quickly involved. There’s a history of close ties between both countries in that field. So it would seem, in a sense, natural that a consequence of that is to support something like Iron Dome.

    I think it was around the end of Obama’s first term, in 2012, that the US put a stronger emphasis on Iron Dome in terms of budgeting. I believe it was probably not just the politics behind it, but also the strategic assessment that the priority is to protect and to strengthen the defense of Israel vis-à-vis these types of rockets.

    • jasory@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Started? How geopolitically ignorant are you? A considerable portion of the IDF’s armaments (including over 100 fighter jets) during the Yom Kippur War were flown in from the US. This was seven years before Reagan. The entirety of Israel’s existence has just been the US and France dumping weapons. (Israel didn’t indigenously make it’s nuclear weapons, they came from France’s nuclear projects, just like how the Kfir wasn’t built using Israel’s non-existent aerospace industry).