From very early in its history, Israel found itself aligned with the U.S. against the Soviet Union, which armed Syria and Egypt so long as they fought the Jewish state, cultivated the PLO, and unleashed the global anti-Zionist propaganda campaign that remains with us even after the USSR is long gone. Jerusalem and Moscow now have good relations on the surface, but the Kremlin protects Iran and fights alongside it in Syria. More importantly, perhaps—as Leon Aron explains—the modern-day Russian regime is anti-American to its core:

Contrary to the prevailing view, Vladimir Putin’s domestic regime is not merely a corrupt autocracy founded on propaganda, political manipulation, and repression. . . . Over the past two decades he has ceaselessly and systematically reshaped Russia’s national identity: the ways in which Russians see themselves, their country, and their history. He has rewritten, updated, or reawakened the elements of his country’s legitimizing myths—what he calls “spiritual bonds” (dukhovnye skrepy)—and deployed them in ways that proved deeply satisfying to tens of millions of followers.

Along the way, Putin has recovered the defining elements of the cold war and made them part of the national credo: the conflict between Putin’s Russia and the West is not about normal competition among large states and occasional frictions about specific issues. It is about an incompatibility of values. Just as the Soviet leadership did, the Kremlin today perceives the struggle with the U.S.-led “West” as ubiquitous and global, whether in Georgia, Syria, or Ukraine. This contest is permanent, and the West’s effort to undermine Russia, [according to Moscow propaganda], is relentless.

Exceeding Soviet propaganda in stridency is a sign of a disturbing difference between the two cold-war regimes. . . . [T]he Politburo elders had little to prove and could rest on their laurels. Having known firsthand the horrors of [World War II], they were wary of provoking a direct confrontation with the West. . . . By contrast, since 2014, when Putin recast himself as a wartime president, war or threat of war has been the key to his regime’s legitimacy. What my Russian colleagues called “militarized patriotism in peacetime” became the leitmotif of the Kremlin propaganda orchestra.

As we mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, Israeli special forces carried out a daring boots-on-the-ground raid on September 8 targeting the Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC) in northwestern Syria. The site was used for producing and storing missiles which are then transferred to Hizballah in Lebanon. Jonathan Spyer notes that the raid was accompanied by extensive airstrikes in Syira,and followed a few days later by extensive attacks on Hizballah in Lebanon, one of which killed Mohammad Qassem al-Shaer, a senior officer in the terrorist group’s Radwan force, an elite infantry group. And yesterday, the IDF destroyed a weapons depot, an observation post, and other Hizballah positions. Spyer puts these attacks in context:

The direct purpose of the raid, of course, was the destruction of the facilities and materials targeted. But Israel also appeared to be delivering a message to the Syrian regime that it should not imagine itself to be immune should it choose to continue its involvement with the Iran-led axis’s current campaign against Israel.

Similarly, the killing of al-Shaer indicated that Israel is no longer limiting its response to Hizballah attacks to the border area. Rather, Hizballah operatives in Israel’s crosshairs are now considered fair game wherever they may be located in Lebanon.

The SSRC raid and the killing of al-Shaer are unlikely to have been one-off events. Rather, they represent the systematic broadening of the parameters of the conflict in the north. Hizballah commenced the current round of fighting on October 8, in support of Hamas in Gaza. It has vowed to stop firing only when a ceasefire is reached in the south—a prospect which currently seems distant.