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The amazing part to me is just the perceived invincibility this small circle within the US administration has. You can find dozens of articles with a search limited to Feb 1~Feb 27, plenty of analysis warning of the risks that have now become reality, everything - the strait, no revolution, further radicalization, critically low US stockpiles, abandoning other US partners, gulf destabilization, etc.
In the fantasy imagination of some people, they really think you can take out some military targets of another country and then the oppressed masses will magically revolt, as they completely ignore the failed revolution just a month prior. Surround yourself with enough of these people while excluding and firing those who don't and this is what you get.
It's not just this administration. Everything with the US military has been going clearly downhill since the Millennium Challenge 2002. [1] It was, appropriately enough, a wargame simulating an invasion of Iran. It was a major event involving preparation in years and thousands of individual operators. When it was carried out the invading force was defeated by unexpected resources and resourcefulness from the Iranian side, not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion.
Normally this would have been the end of it, lessons would be learned, and strategic directions adjusted. Instead the game was reset and the Iranian side was handicapped to prevent them from doing various things, effectively imposing a scripted result. This led to the US winning by an overwhelming margin and somehow the results of this rigged game were used to align strategic initiatives moving forward.
In modern times we increasingly seem to have entered into an era where people are willing to believe what they want to believe, rather than what they know to be true. And while it's easy to mock politicians and the military for this, this is also a mainstay of contemporary political discourse among regular people, including those who fancy themselves as well educated, on a variety of controversial issues.
I don't know what started this trend, but it should die. At least in terms of war it's self correcting. The US can't handle many more botched invasions or interventions, and I suspect we're already beyond the point of no return in terms of consequences of these errors.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
> When it was carried out the invading force was defeated by unexpected resources and resourcefulness from the Iranian side, not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion.
> Normally this would have been the end of it, lessons would be learned, and strategic directions adjusted. Instead the game was reset and the Iranian side was handicapped to prevent them from doing various things, effectively imposing a scripted result. This led to the US winning by an overwhelming margin and somehow the results of this rigged game were used to align strategic initiatives moving forward.
Wargames aren't like laser tag matches where one side wins and then it's over, the point of them is to be a training exercise. It's supposed to be closer to D&D than anything, where the person playing the opposing forces plays a similar role to the DM. If you look at interviews from other MC2002 participants, essentially what happened was that the Navy wanted to practice for an amphibious landing. Due to how they moved their ships, the computer running the simulation thought that the entire naval fleet had been instantly teleported right next to a massive armada of small boats that Van Riper had set up, without simulating what would have happened if the naval fleet had seen the enemy ships in the distance. Additionally, in real life Van Riper's fleet could not have held the missiles that he had told the computer they were carrying and now firing at point blank range at the Navy. The simulator that ran the US naval ships' defenses was also not functioning due to the engagement happening in an unexpected area, so it was turned off. Van Riper was able to sink the ships and defeat the navy within the bounds of the simulation, but not in a way that could have happened in real life.
This is basically like if I found an obscure sequence of chess moves that caused the Lichess server to crash and declare me the winner, then used it to beat a bunch of grandmasters, then went on a media tour saying that this proves that there's some massive flaw with how chess strategy is being taught.
Nothing he did was really 'glitching' the game. Yes there were unexpected circumstances, but that's exactly what happens in war as well. As the old saying goes - no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The weapons defenses were turned off because they were having difficulty distinguishing between civilian and hostile targets, which is a completely viable scenario in an asymmetric conflict.
The only big surprise was a rapidly closed engagement zone but even that absolutely could happen in real life, even if through different means. Ukraine's early success with suicide boats was precisely because they were unexpected, undetected, and able to get into range rapidly. If they had simultaneously deployed them at a much larger scale, the results would have essentially been a repeat of MC2002.
And more general, the discovery the 'Iranian' general in MC2002 made, some 24 years ago now, is that the future of warfare wasn't going to be giant behemoth vessels, but lots of really cheap asymmetric systems - another thing that the Ukraine war has demonstrated beyond any doubt. Had this lesson been learned it's entirely possible that the US could have ended up on the forefront of advances in war instead of finding itself in a scenario where the bleeding edge of a trillion dollar military budget is literally just cloning Iranian drone tech.
Some of what you're saying is fair. The simulation did have known issues, including glitches with point-defense systems and ships being placed unrealistically close to Red assets due to peacetime constraints on the exercise. The Wikipedia article on MC2002 acknowledges these shortfalls directly.
But you're presenting very specific technical claims (that the boats couldn't physically carry the missiles, that the fleet was "teleported" next to the armada, that the defense simulator was "turned off") as though they're established fact. None of that appears in any sourced material I can find. If you have sources for those claims beyond "interviews from other MC2002 participants," I'd genuinely like to see them.
More importantly, you're glossing over the part that actually matters: what happened after the restart. Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar so it could be destroyed. They were forbidden from shooting down approaching aircraft during an airborne assault. They were told to reveal the location of their own units. The JFCOM's own postmortem report stated that "the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted."
Even if you accept that the initial result was partly an artifact of simulation quirks, the response wasn't "let's fix the sim and rerun it fairly." It was "let's force a Blue victory and use that to validate the concepts we were supposed to be testing." Van Riper's complaint wasn't just that he won and they took it away. It was that a $250 million exercise was turned into a rubber stamp.
Your chess analogy would be more accurate if, after your opponent crashed the server, the tournament organizers restarted the game but told you which pieces you were allowed to move, then published the result as proof their strategy was sound.
MC2002 was not primarily a wargame to develop operational plans. You can do that much easier and cheaper with a bunch of generals around a map. MC2002 was a training exercise with an element of competitiveness to pressure people under unexpected situations. As a training exercise its prime goal was not to figure out what plans were best but to just exercise plans and get people to do the plan, period. Given that, events that stopped the training exercise, like missileing all the ships, were retcon'd in order to do what the exercise was supposed to do, train people
Wargames have repeatedly been used to align strategic initiatives because they are designed to as closely replicate an adversary's actions and resources as closely as possible. So for instance in better times there was Proud Prophet [1], another wargame, played out in 1983. Its goal was to simulate outcomes of various scenarios involving hot conflict with the USSR. Up to the point of that wargame, the US position towards the USSR had been this sort of 'peace through strength', 'escalate to deescalate' nonsense.
The problem is that the wargame demonstrated that it ended up with the extinction of the Northern Hemisphere every single time. We didn't then change the rules of the game to make it so we could still play nuclear games and come out okay, but instead took this as a major wakeup call. It directly led to a shift in US policy towards the USSR of coexistence, de-escalation, and some degree of reconciliation. Within 7 years the first McDonalds would open in the USSR, and the entire Soviet system would collapse in under a decade after the shift of the strategy driven entirely by this wargame result.
Yes, wargames can be used to evaluate strategic and operational plans. However, notice how many boots on the ground were involved in Proud Prophet. My point was that MC2002 was not primarily a wargame for evaluating plans, it was primarily a training exercise where lessons learned from executing the existing plans might be used to wargame out future changes
The Millennium Challenge 2002 is discredited because it had motorcycle couriers that moved at light speed handling all communications and 10' speed boats launching 19' missiles.
Implementation details aside, explosive speed boats have decimated Russia's black sea fleet.
After being restarted, the red (opposing) force general resigned due to the restarted game having what amounted to a scripted end, with little to no latitude for the red force to exercise creativity in strategy or tactics. Among the highlights, the red force were required to turn on and leave on their AA radars so that blue force HARMs could take them out, and the red force was prohibited from attempting to shoot down any of the 82nd airborne / marine air assault forces during the assault.
Gen. Van Riper's tactics were apparently discredited in 2002 because they were unfair, but Iran seems not to have received the memo since their moves bear more than a passing resemblance to his.
We have not gotten quite to the "VDV tries air assault, gets wiped out" stage of Iran war yet, as far as I know.
But the US seems to be committed on repeating the Russian experience.
Similar complaints from Trump the other day
“So, it’s it’s uh little unfair. You know, you win a war, but they have no right to be doing what they’re doing.”
In fighting games, this is exactly the way "scrubs" think. They lose and appeal to some vague notion of fairness to avoid confronting the reality - they lost!
Would be funny if it wasn't real.
I feel the comparison is too apples-to-oranges, games are designed things with goals like the enjoyment of participants and—on at least some level—a fair playing field.
It’s all the VAR referee’s fault.
Wow! He is saying: we said that we won, but they are winning... how are they allowed to be winning when we said that we won... so unfair...
And with him saying that, millions of his followers instantly started believing it with no second thought.
> The Millennium Challenge 2002 is discredited because it had motorcycle couriers that moved at light speed handling all communications and 10' speed boats launching 19' missiles.
This is not what Wikipedia's summary describes. Now, maybe Wikipedia has the wrong summary, but according to it the challenge wasn't "discredited". By that point the exercise was over, but 13 more days were budgeted for, so the analysts requested their forces to be resurrected so they could play out the rest of the days, with artificial restrictions so that the rest of the challenge was effectively scripted and left no room for the OPFOR to try novel tactics.
One of the generals (of the blue team) is quoted as saying: "You kill me in the first day and I sit there for the next 13 days doing nothing, or you put me back to life and you get 13 more days' worth of experiment out of me. Which is a better way to do it?"
Also:
> The postmortem JFCOM report on MC02 would say "As the exercise progressed, the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted. This scripting ensured a blue team operational victory and established conditions in the exercise for transition operations."
From Wikipedia:"Such defeat can be attributed to various shortfalls in simulation capabilities and design that significantly hindered Blue Force fighting and command capabilities. Examples include: a time lag in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance information being forwarded to the Blue Force by the simulation master, various glitches that limited Blue ships point-defense capabilities and error in the simulation which placed ships unrealistically close to Red assets."
It definitely seems like there were issues with RedFors achievments. But the response is still ridiculous. I would have also resigned in ReFor's shoes.
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Yes, and a lot right. If you think it's wrong in this particular case, please elaborate.
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Well shit, we should have paid attention when Iran developed light speed motorcycles evidently.
The game being reset makes sense - time and resources have been spent to make it happen, and it's best to get as much value from those resources as possible.
Of course this means learning the lesson of how the first defeat happened. You reset so that you can learn more lessons. If they ignored the lesson of the first defeat, that's stupid. But the reset itself makes sense.
The reset isn't the problem, the entirely nerfing the Red team is the problem. The US took steps to fail to learn from the exercise before it had even finished.
what exactly does one learn from hypothetical light-speed motorcycles?
Does the enemy nation have internet? If so, there's your light-speed couriers.
motorcycles can navigate bombed terrain, your fiber optics cables will be torn...
Except the US military DID learn from that war game. In the war game the US's fleet was utterly destroyed. In our real life, so far, the US navy has lost exactly zero ship against Iran.
It's very interesting that you can look at the situation and say the war game where Iran destroyed the US navy is "not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion" though. I guess in the end different people perceive the reality differently.
I don’t think the air campaign against Iran and the campaign in the war game are similar at all.
War games aren't useful for guessing the real course of the war. 'Iraq' was able to prevent a US invasion in pre 2003 wargames.
I learnt something new - wow - we are truly led by idiots.
who rigs the results of a war game and believes the results - only an idiot drunk on power.
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This is an odd place to put a stake in the ground--there are a number of macro trends that have been going on for far longer (e.g. the military-industrial complex, the Cold War, Congress, American football), as well as a few others that have only really come to a head more recently (e.g. demographics, media spheres/tribalization). I would argue that our failure to learn lessons from the Millennium Challenge has a massive overlap with our failure to learn from Ukraine--not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam... The military is not monolithic--remember that the Millennium Challenge was more or less a sparring bout between two parts of the military with different philosophies--and it really takes something like an existential war for meritocracy and common sense to reassert themselves to a meaningful degree.
A smaller point: all military exercises are heavily scripted--it's more or less impossible for them to be otherwise, as you just can't simulate the details of war that matter without actually killing people, breaking things, and giving up your secret game plans. Usually the goal of this sort of thing is to make sure that everything (people, equipment, doctrine) works together more or less as intended, and people have the experience leading and operating in larger units than they do on a routine basis. The PR people then spin it into an unqualified and historic success, validation of our technology and tactics against the forces of evil, blah blah blah. It is still very difficult to draw the right lessons from these sorts of things--even more so when the civilian leadership of the military has 99 things to consider besides a certain kind of pure military effectiveness (and although I have strong feelings here, we're still doing quite well on the tactical and operational levels in spite of everything).
Fun fact: the Millennium Challenge is still taught as a case study in basic officer training, at least in the Marine Corps (well, probably--it definitely was a little over a decade ago).
> When it was carried out the invading force was defeated by unexpected resources and resourcefulness from the Iranian side, not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion.
Are you saying that Iran is capably fighting and killing US personnel, aircraft, and invading infantry?
I am a little confused about the universe you live in. The IRGC and Basij effectively do not have a chain of command and are effectively moving and acting by momentum, essentially no different than a dead man walking.
Do you know the names of any alive people in the IRGC chain of command? Have you seen videos or evidence of IRGC doing anything to harm US forces other than lob some stuff and hope it hits? Where are the Islamic Iranian armies and navies you imply to exist?
> The IRGC and Basij effectively do not have a chain of command and are effectively moving and acting by momentum
This was by design via the mosaic defense tactic.
They know the US prides itself on decapitation strikes, "taking out the leader of x" was a monthly headline during our time in Iraq, Afghanistan, and during the events of ISIS/syrian civil war. It's how the special forces operated, taking out a "leader", collecting all the names they could find in their possession, and taking those guys out. In the later days of Afghanistan, they stopped even trying to find out who the names were. If you were some mid-level Taliban member's dentist, you'd be fair game.
So Iran built a defense for that, a military that does not need a central command to continue fighting. They have their orders and they'll continue to carry them out. Completely bypass the benefits of highly accurate munitions, cyber intelligence, etc.
That's the same reason the first round of the Millennium challenge won outright. The red-team leadership knew to not expect last year's war today, and used their brains to exploit the weaknesses of a highly mechanized and sophisticated military.
What would such predelegated instructions look like, how large is the state space in that flowchart? How effective is control theory with a tiny state space? This doesn't sound like a survival plan, but a self-splintering plan: some military units will capitulate or defect while others fight on, when pushed till the edge, or is there some kind of direct-democracy-within-the-IRGC? that doesn't sound plausible...
Basically sounds like the military from Imperial Japan during the end of WW2, with scattered units continuing to fight, surrender not believed an option, not aware, or in disbelief that Japan has surrendered...
Let's hope it doesn't have to lead to the same conclusion?
The Swedish military famously works the same way (or at least used to) - they're trained to uphold the Swedish constitution themselves regardless of what their leadership says, with the result that they saved many lives in former Yugoslavia despite orders not to intervene: https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2017/09/20/trigger... .
This isn't a complicated war. The US can't and won't do occupations, so the only thing you need to do is cause problems till they leave.
Iran doesn't have to conventionally defeat the US military and can't: so they're just not doing that, and instead going after valuable economic targets which are politically sensitive to Americans and impossible to defend since they're risk sensitive.
> The IRGC and Basij effectively do not have a chain of command
There is no reason to believe that
They have been training for decades for exactly this sort of war, and have experienced veterans at all levels
If anything islamic countries never lack, its hierarchy. Endless, suffocating hierarchy, with all levels frozen in fear of the higher echelons. Then there is the clan-element. Certain families, have certain generals, whos underlings are of the same family, all the way down.
One has to abandon the view that what represents to the media as a modern state, with modern institution is actually a state. What you have is several, small states, city-kingdoms basically, ruled by one clan. Connected to one another in a tangle of agreements and contracts. Once you come to this point, you start to understand the structure of the thing and also why it is hard to decapitate.
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You elect clowns, you get a circus.
The US has turned into a Wall-e society just getting off on entertainment and bored with civilized, thoughtful politicians. This is the end result of TOO MUCH prosperity for the average American.
They haven't experienced true hardship in generations and we (the rest of the world) is paying the price of their hubris.
“Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders." George Carlin
Watching helplessly from the inside is painful. What makes it worse is I know people who are intelligent and appear to not be hateful SOBs that voted for the clowns, and would do so again. It breaks my brain, and my heart.
IMO those people you're describing are the worst of them all. I can forgive someone too (legitimately) stupid to know better. But many people are not that.
https://www.onthewing.org/user/Bonhoeffer%20-%20Theory%20of%...
Perhaps they are not as intelligent as you think they are.
I believe that highly intelligent people can do incredibly stupid things -- I've seen it first hand.
The correlating factor for those two acquaintances is that they are both devout Christians. I find that to be beyond ironic but also makes sense, as that devotion parallels the appeal to authority and many churches are run by leaders who believe in Supply Side Jesus.
I don't mean this to be inflammatory as it's only an observation, but organized religion is not compatible with modern society,
You’re not the first to make such observations. To quote Barry Goldwater (Republican party nominee for US President in 1964):
> Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.
Was he describing America or Iran? Hard to figure out as we seemed to be in War due to similar people in control of another (not)important country :)
It was about America. I think the only overlap between "conservative" Republicans and religious fundamentalists is the "social conservatism", e.g., "family values", "law and order", etc. The quotes are because there's debate about what those terms really mean.
The key difference is that religious fundamentalists pledge their allegiance to the Church, not the country; not "God" either (although they might claim it to be so). They are tribal to their core and anybody outside their church is an "other" and is not worthy of being considered a fellow citizen.
> correlating factor
There's a free ebook from 2006 that tries to dive into it as a personality spectrum:
https://theauthoritarians.org/
It has some interesting assertions/observations about issues like double-standards and fear as a motive.
Ironically Jesus always had beef with the religious conservatives of His time: the Pharisees.
>know people who are intelligent and appear to not be hateful SOBs that voted for the clowns, and would do so again.
They are not intelligent.
People seem to think that intelligence can be isolated. Its not. People can fake intelligence through memorizing a bunch of facts, but that's not intelligence. Every part in a persons mind influences every other part.
And its easy to test as well. Nobody who is hard conservative can answer this simple question - "What concrete, hard evidence would you need to see for you to realize you have been wrong and change your stance on which party you support?"
Its along the same lines that any stupid person doesn't realize they are stupid - if they did, they would know the differentiator between smart and stupid and thus can become smart.
From the article:
>Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time.
>It should go without saying that creating the conditions where the sometimes unpredictable junior partner in a security relationship can unilaterally bring the senior partner into a major conflict is an enormous strategic error, precisely because it means you end up in a war when it is in the junior partner’s interests to do so even if it is not in the senior partner’s interests to do so.
This situation is not just because we elected a clown, these people donated hundreds of millions to Trump's campaign (Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Elison, etc). The same lobby (the Israel lobby) has contributed hundreds of millions more to almost every US senator, to the point that both political parties are pretty much aligned when it comes to serving Israel. There are plenty of politicians in the Democrat party who are quietly supporting this war because at the end of the day they've been bought by the same lobby.
Kamala (the alternative candidate in the 2024 election) has her own ties to Israel, and publicly said "all options are on the table" to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Which means had she won the election she likely would have also invaded Iran.
It goes beyond just who we elected, it's huge sums of money flowing through our political system and effectively buying our politicians.
>publicly said "all options are on the table" to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Which means had she won the election she likely would have also invaded Iran.
Your second sentence doesn't necessarily follow from the first. Obama had similar words to say about Iran during his administration and never invaded.
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> it's huge sums of money flowing through our political system and effectively buying our politicians
I disagree strongly with this assertion. But for sake of argument, let's assume it's true: American politics is permanently captured to Israel's interests.
That still doesn't explain this war. "I think most folks understand that this war was a misfire for the United States, but I suspect it may end up being a terrible misfire for Israel as well. Israeli security and economic prosperity both depend to a significant degree on the US-Israeli security partnership and this war seems to be one more step in a process that very evidently imperils that partnership. Suspicion of Israel – which, let us be honest, often descends into rank, bigoted antisemitism, but it is also possible to critique Israel, a country with policies, without being antisemitic – is now openly discussed in both parties. More concerning is polling suggesting that not only is Israel underwater with the American public, but more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time in American history."
If, on the other hand, we acknowledge "Netanyahu...is playing an extremely short game because it benefits him politically and personally to do so," we can allow for similar levels of narcicism and stupidity in the U.S.
Israel is currently busy annexing southern Lebanon, and I don't think it's at all decided how the "hearts and minds battle" in the US will eventually end. (Or how important the popular support even is)
So right now, the state of the war is a win for Israel.
> how important the popular support even is
To see the effect of losing popularity, see how AIPAC's power in the Democratic party has begun to wane following their defeat in New Jersey.
A common mistake those deploying money in politics make is forgetting that the endgame is votes. The money helps buy votes. But if you're losing votes, you're losing votes.
> right now, the state of the war is a win for Israel
If hostilities end right now, yes. There is zero indication that endpoint is proximate.
Israel isn't "annexing southern Lebanon". Israel already controlled southern Lebanon and withdrew. Even recently Israel was deeper in southern Lebanon and withdrew - and is now paying the price for that. Israel was already in Beirut .. and not so long ago ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Beirut )
Israel is pushing back Hezbollah that's attacking Israel's north. Hezbollah decided to join the war and it's firing at Israeli civilians and towns with statistical weapons (rockets).
It does seem like it's at least some sort of short term win for Israel but it remains to be seen what the long term game looks like.
And incidentally destroying all villages and emptying the area of all residents while they at it, then destroying the bridges that connect the region to the rest of the country.
Katz is indeed still talking about a "buffer zone", while Smotrich demands a "permanent change of borders". The settler movement has already drawn maps.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-security/2026-03-...
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-politics/2026-03-...
> Israel already controlled southern Lebanon and withdrew.
I don't get what you want to say with that statement. It was already theirs to begin with?
> If, on the other hand, we acknowledge "Netanyahu...is playing an extremely short game because it benefits him politically and personally to do so," we can allow for similar levels of narcicism and stupidity in the U.S.
Sure. I don't doubt that many US politicians would start a costly war if it benefitted them. But who are the US politicians it has benefitted?
Trump hasn't gained anything from this war. Nor has Rubio or anyone else in his administration. Netanyahu, however, has benefitted politically and personally, even if only in the short term. Any effort to understand or explain the war should incorporate that.
We had Israel friendly politicians for at least 50 years, all of which who eagerly wanted to fuck up Iran ("Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" anyone?) and we didn't because they were at least sober enough to understand that it was moronic and would obviously be some sort of strategic defeat or decades long boondoggle.
No president has ever been this fucking stupid.
Look, if the goal over the last year has been to destroy America, it’s economy, it’s reputation… you basically couldn’t pick a better set of actions.
It seems pretty obvious that they’re trying to turn America into Russia. Crash everything, and let the oligarchs swoop in and buy up the shattered pieces. Then keep the people divided and depressed using media and drugs.
> Which means had she won the election she likely would have also invaded Iran.
Wow, what an insult, to call her as stupid/cheaply buyable as Trump.
I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have had an alcoholic wife-beating former Fox teleprompter-reader who would not have been able to tell her why it'd be a catastrophe to start bombing Iran... As weak Biden was/appeared to be, at least he had a competent team (ok, it wasn't competent enough to pushback against Adolf Netanyahu).
Probably Harris would've tried to restore the Obama-Iran deal like Biden did (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93United_States_rel...), a job that Biden failed because a particular fuckwit fucked it up before him...
For me that was the best insight in the whole article. Here are a few extra sentences for context:
> So Iran would now have to assume that an Israeli air attack was also likely an American air attack. It was hardly an insane assumption – evidently according to the Secretary of State, American intelligence made the exact same assessment. But the result was that by bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities in June of 2025, the Trump administration created a situation where merely by launching a renewed air campaign on Iran, Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time.
Nonsense. Of course Democrats are also on Israel's side. The US will always take Israel's side in any Middle East dispute. But it's only this infantile man and his clown cart that is stupid enough to go along with any and every hare brained idea that Israel puts forth.
2 things.
First, this "both sides bad" take isn't fooling anyone. Everyone sees through your bullshit that you are pro Trump. Like its easy to tell from just this comment, but if anyone thinks Im being super presumptions, feel free to looks at your comment history and you will see Im right.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46890675#46891294
Secondly, the shitty thing for you is that the conservatives in charge have shown themselves to be just very inept. They could have honesty just rode the rest of Trumps term in silence, and Trump would still have been very popular despite the tarrifs, but they had to fuck it up in the most grandeur way possible of starting a new war.
Which means that Republicans are going to lose the support of the average person who is clueless about politics, and can vote one way or another based on vibes, and
Which means Dems are likely going to take a lot of the power back. At which point, it will become socially acceptable to "punish" conservatives and pro Trump people. There is already work going on to process internet comments and extract patterns of speech to cross correlate them across varying accounts on social media to id certain people, and if id'ed you better believe your work, your family, your friends, and whomever else you are going to be connected to are going to get spammed and your life ruined as much as possible.
So Imma be the nice guy and tell you to tighten up you OPSEC because you are doing an extremely poor job at it.
Israel is entirely dependent on USA. If USA says they cant attack, they wont.
Are you sure you haven't got that the wrong way around? As an outsider it looks to me as if Israel shouts 'jump' and the USA says 'how high?'. Which is bizarre when you look at how much support the US gives Israel.
Not bizarre - Israel shouts "money" and the USA says "how much?"
Those bribes to all the senators and reps really pays off, doesn't it? Sadly it's our tax dollars that it is paying off with.
No, I do not have it other way round. Israel defense and economy both depend on USA. Which is why it took mentally challenged president to start an expensive war that only Israel and Russia benefit. Previous presidents including Trump himself did told NO to Israel in the past.
Israel wanted this war, it is not like they would be victims here. But USA is NOT a victim either. Hegseth, Trump and co love the violence, love the bombing and love to cosplay as masculine men. They do not get play the "they made me do it" card.
Third, for christ sake, they sent Witkoff and Kushner to negotiate. Lets not pretend there was any honest attempt at negotiations or war avoidance.
But most US politicians are dependent on Israel-aligned donors, so the US isn't going to say they can't attack. They'll do what they need to in order to keep the money flowing in so they can get re-elected.
> the US isn't going to say they can't attack
America has told Israel not to attack multiple times. Hell, Trump has held Netanyahu back before.
> an find dozens of articles with a search limited to Feb 1~Feb 27, plenty of analysis warning of the risks that have now become reality, everything - the strait, no revolution, further radicalization, critically low US stockpiles, abandoning other US partners, gulf destabilization, etc.
To be fair, one can find plenty of analysis positing everything for the Middle East. The pointed criticisim is, in Devereux's words: "Iran would thus need a ‘lever’ closer to home which could inflict costs on the United States. For – and I must stress this – for forty years everyone has known this was the strait. This is not a new discovery, we did this before in the 1980s."
This is nothing new, history repeats. Prior to the invasions of Afghanistan & Iraq there were numerous regional experts warning that the result would be chaos, failed states, a rise in extremism and long term instability in the region and indirectly the rest of the world. Millions of us marched through the streets, asking our governments not to make what was obviously a massive mistake.
The US & UK governments were convinced that they would recreate the liberation of Europe, with cheering crowds, flowers in their hair, Mission Accomplished banners and then simply totally dismantle a government & civil service and recreate a new one to their favour. Groupthink is a powerful thing.
At one point you have to consider the possibility that destabilisation is the objective and the apparent stupidity just an excuse.
In the case of Israel, destabilisation and creation of a region of neighbouring failed states is absolutely it's aim as that is an exploitable situation. Iran was the only real opposition to Israel's long term colonial expansion and ethnic cleansing and more recent outright genocide. It was also opposed to Israel's existence and funded terrorism, etc... (whatever caveat the reader needs to understand I'm not a cheerleader of Iran) but historically it is not alone in this and is not the only country ever to be hostile to another. The majority of such situations resolve over time through diplomacy and reason, and yes, significant amounts of violence but it is rare to resolve such an international dispute purely through war. Israel, its government and military have long been clear that they don't seek a status quo, but a chaotic forever war they use to justify their literal bulldozing of surrounding nations.
Its what happens when you surround yourself with incompetent yes men.
It's not all. I tried as much as I could not commenting on it, but the delusions of _a lot_ of hn users on the subject, even a few whose opinion I respect, were unreal. People who are not MAGA btw.
And I'm not sure most of those realise how delusional they were, even now. They will probably rewire their memory to forget what they believed 3 weeks ago, compress the time they were wrong.
I initially thought the 'manufacturing consent' part of the war was botched, unlike Irak, but now to me it seems that people are much more susceptible to propaganda disguised as 'almost true' information on social media, and I am afraid I might be in the same boat.
It was certainly notable that so many HNers seemed absolutely certain that the Kurds would come to the USA's aid, ignoring the fact that America had facilitated the one-sided ceasefire imposed on Rojava just weeks before.
A few more sceptical voices brought this up, and were told repeatedly that it didn't matter because the Kurds in Syria and Turkey are very different from those in Iraq & Iran.
And there's certainly something in that - but it ignored the clunkingly obvious point that, if America had been thinking at all strategically, a bit more support of Rojava and would have demonstrated to all Kurds that "looking west" would be rewarded.
It has to be hard for Americans to realise that their government has pissed so much of the world off so badly. I suspect we'll see further such errors in analysis and response before the new reality fully sinks in.
Not forgetting Trump personally ordering the withdrawal of all US forces in Northern Syria in his first term, on a weekend so none of the generals were around to talk him out of it.
This resulted in the Turks moving in, massacring all the Kurds they could find, and a few thousand ISIS prisoners (including 60 'high value targets') escaping as the Kurds guarding them fled for their lives.
However Trump said this didn't pose any threat to the US because "They’re going to be escaping to Europe.”
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/trumps-syria-withdrawal-i...
Turkey- a key US ally- will never allow the formation of an independent Kurdish nation near their borders.
Maybe it's time for us to decide who our allies are more carefully.
I will never forgive Saudi Arabia for the content of the 28 pages. Those who did 9/11 on us remain unpunished because geopolitics demands that we keep good relations with their "royal family".
I'd be happy to abandon whatever "alliance" we have with Turkey/Hungry, and a few other states that have shown evidence that they don't like democracy and are hostile to it.
Sure, and the question really came down to how much autonomy they'd end up getting within an integrated Syria. The answer turns out to be "not much".
And to make matters worse, Trump didn't even make an attempt to let them down gently - saying "the Kurds were paid tremendous amounts of money, were given oil and other things. So they were doing it for themselves more so than they were doing it for us"...
...and then, 4 weeks later, expected their Iraqi and Iranian cousins to ride to the USA's aid!
Possibly they think they can make up what they lost in good will and cooperation with blackmail and pressure. It is doubtful it will work as reliably as in the past, though (second order effects even left aside).
> so many HNers seemed absolutely certain that the Kurds would come to the USA's aid
I must have missed those, but I would expect HN to be able to count. There really are not a lot of Kurds.
Also the Kurds are very much aware how quickly the US abandoned them in Syria where they joined the fight on ISIS and now are left as a gift to new Syrian regime.
I had a gut feeling the US wasn't serious about the Kurd uprising in Iran when they failed to take PJAK off the terrorist list (Treasury one, not the DoS one), which is necessary to fund them.
> It has to be hard for Americans to realise that their government has pissed so much of the world off so badly.
It is not hard, at all, for roughly 1/3 of Americans to understand this. Another 1/3 don't think it, or anything past their TikTok feed, matters. The last 1/3 thought Team America was a documentary.
> It is not hard, at all, for roughly 1/3 of Americans to understand this.
Sorry, but I don't think they do understand.
America has managed to piss off Canada FFS. And lets be honest, you've got to work really hard to piss off the Canadians.
Frankly, Americans (former) allies have seen the American people VOTE for Trump. Twice. Even if Trump goes tomorrow, the (former) allies know what a significant proportion of the US people want in a leader, and so may be in store at the next election.
I can't speak for anyone else, but the depth of our self-disgrace is pretty damned obvious. (What I can or should do personally is less obvious.)
Having elected Donald Trump twice - atop all our other failings - is a giant screaming proclamation that the United States is unfit for, and undeserving of, continued existence as a state or government. The responsible thing to do is to hold a Constitutional Convention and dissolve the damned thing, and then the individual states can figure out how they ought to go forward from there. (I don't think current U.S. States are anything like perfect but they're what we have left once the United States government is gone.)
> Sorry, but I don't think they do understand.
Sorry, but 1/3 of the country is deeply, keenly aware of what an absolute fucking disgrace the last year and two months have been for us on an international stage. There's no delusion, here, that Canadians are excited about being threatened with an invasion, in spite of your silly black/white post.
You're not. Really you don't understand the impact Trump has had.
Since 1945 America was a solid partner that could be mutually trusted by us all. That trust has been lost for good. There is simply no coming back from that.
_That_ is what you do not understand.
> _That_ is what you do not understand.
My man, you are arguing with someone who fucking understands that. I get you think America is entirely dudes coal-rolling their pickup trucks in Bumfuck Texas because you're angry and you want to call us stupid. And sure, some of us are. But repeatedly telling someone "YOU DON'T GET IT" when they repeatedly demonstrate getting it is supremely childish.
A fair number of people, especially on this site, have like, traveled. Talk to people in other countries. Read the news. Etc. I get your angry and you're lashing out, but good god.
> because you're angry and you want to call us stupid
Please keep the tone civil. I said nor implied no such thing.
Rather, a significant number of posts on HN believe there will be change back to 'normality' when Trump is no longer president. Yet the world has now changed and what is normal has shifted. Maybe you understand that, but many very clearly do not comprehend the gravitas.
I mean, I assumed that any group of people stupid enough to be betrayed by the department of state twice would be first in line to get betrayed a third and fourth time.
It hardly seemed an unreasonable assumption.
The facts are that this administration removed most of the top generals in the pentagon a year ago[0]. Notice the pattern in other areas of the administration when the opportunity for new appointments is created: Loyalty over competence and experience in almost every case. There are a few exceptions, but most were from His first term (Jpowell).
[0]https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/21/cq-brown-trump-fire...
Their key insight is that you don't have to manufacture consent when so many voters just love the guy in the White House and will stand by him no matter what.
Why waste time convincing anybody of anything, when support for the war will just converge on the president's approval rating anyway?
It certainly appears to be a cult of personality. If he had a massive stroke tomorrow, or one of his secret service detail took him out, could anyone around him pick up the baton and get that same level of support?
Its what happens when your nation state has been raised on an unhealthy diet of warrior narcissism.
It is a ring of incompetent yes men, but behind those yes men is a nefarious foreign influence operation. These guys didn't arrive at their bad decisions by accident.
.. and a substantial domestic influence organization. Lots of US donors with US passports handing over good old US dollars. Lots of pro-regime news stations. More since the CBS takeover.
When you listen to the director of counterterrorism explain what happened in the run up to him resigning it fits pretty well the theory that Trump is compromised (possibly with kompromat) by a certain Middle Eastern country.
That used to be plausible. But what new revelation about Trump could hurt him? Misuse of office for personal gain? Trump Tower Moscow? Inciting an insurrection? Harassing young women? Adultery? Rape? Hanging out with a pedophile? Blowjob from a 13 year old girl? [1] Those are all on the record.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct...
That last one isn’t in the article you linked, at least not that I can find.
The Epstein videotapes, perhaps
do you have a link?
Look for the Tucker Carlson interview with Joe Kent.
(Tucker Carlson is weirdly intelligent and thoughtful in that interview in a way i did not expect, but Joe said the most eye opening stuff... I have a lot of respect for him)
There is this interesting split on the right on Israel, Tucker Carlson is one of the few large platforms talking on zionism. He also interviewed the US embassador to Israel Mike Huckabee who said they have a "biblical right to land from ‘wadi of Egypt to the great river’" (Greater Israel), he also reported on how Israeli is seeing Turkey as the next threat to eliminate after Iran.
The left, not liberals but actual antiwar/antizionist left has been warning about Zionism and the Iran war for decades, nothing Tucker is saying is new, it's just nobody ever listens to those voices they have no platform are completely ignored in liberal media which is exclusively Zionist and pro-war. So when Tucker talks about it it's the first time most people ever hear this stuff, that's what makes Tucker so dangerous he is a white supremacists with a large platform who reads the room and recognizes the historic unpopularity of Israel, who has built a viable independent media platform for himself. Tucker is what an intelligent fascist Trump 2.0 would look like make no mistake.
> he also reported on how Israeli is seeing Turkey as the next threat to eliminate after Iran.
Good thing that that's not at all true. What you are referring to was an (intentional) mistranslation of a public comment by an Israeli minister, who said that Turkey was their greatest threat after Iran.
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Turkey is a NATO member....
You think that matters to Israel or the US?
>he is a white supremacists
He says constantly that he is against blood guilt, the killing of innocents no matter their heritage, and even went so far as to say that he doesn't even necessarily think the large scale replacement of white people in their home countries is a bad thing. I don't know how you could consider that to be white supremacy.
Yeah, I mean, if you ignore maybe half of the things he says about Black Americans or immigrants, you could maybe not see him as a white supremacist. Tucker Carlson is a good political communicator, and he is clever. But he's still a bad person.
> But he's still a bad person.
But that doesn't make him a supremacist. Tucker knows his audience and gives them what they want. He's done content in support of both major parties in the US; he's a true capitalist not a supremacist.
Fine, he's a bad person and a racist. He feeds his audience racism because his audience is also made up of racists.
He said immigrants make the country “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.", he credited “white men” for “creating civilization.”, he was pro-iraq war he said he felt “no sympathy” for Iraqis, calling them “semiliterate primitive monkeys.”, he believes in the great replacement theory he said the Biden administration’s immigration policy is like “eugenics” against white people, he said black people killed by police that sparked the BLM protests deserved to have been killed, it's fucking endless like a week ago he called pro-hitler Oswald Mosley one of Britain's 'great war heroes'.
That's why the parent comment said "the large scale replacement of white people in their home countries" as a statement of fact, all you dog whistling nazi fucks
> he doesn't even necessarily think the large scale replacement of white people in their home countries is a bad thing
Tell us more about this white replacement theory, do you agree with Tucker?
I mean, Joe Kent resigning in protest over the war with Iran is admirable, but Joe Kent is also a vocal anti-Semite who was upset that US policy was being directed by Israel. And I don't mean that Joe Kent dislikes the Israeli government or its actions specifically, I mean he engages in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and associates with anti-Semites like Nick Fuentes.
These days conflating criticism of israel with anti semitism is a very clear, very obvious and very reliable racist calling card.
Mitch McConnell (adherent of the great replacement theory) accusing Joe Kent of anti semitism gave the accusation the same gravitas it would have if Strom Thurmond or the Grand wizard of the KKK did it.
i.e. it only serves to underscore the accuser's racism.
> These days conflating criticism of israel with anti semitism is a very clear, very obvious and very reliable racist calling card
No it isn't. There are lots of anti-Semites who just don't like Jews irrespective of Israel's foreign policy. There are also a lot of people criticising Israel who are idiots, alongside the–I believe–majority who have thought deeply about the issue and concluded dispassionately.
Yes, anti semites exist but trumped up accusations of anti semitism against israel critics is still one of the most reliable indicators of a vehement islamophobe.
And, they hate anti-racists almost as much as they hate muslims.
Those days people that hate Jews claiming they're "only anti-Zionists" are being white washed while synagogues are shot at and people displaying anything Jewish are attacked on the streets in western countries.
Antisemitism is at all times high. And not the "critical of Israel" type of antisemitism. The "jews control the weather", "space lasers from mars" and "let's kill all of them" type of antisemitism is rampant.
Comments like yours are the racist ones. Maybe you don't understand that but that's a whole problem on its own. People are completely uneducated on what antisemitism is, the traditional blood libels against the Jewish people, the history of the Jewish people, and how all that relates to what's going on today.
> Antisemitism is at all times high.
It's always high, or did you mean at an all time high? How does antisemitism in America today compare to Russia in the 1800s?
Yes and why do you think that is. Constant crying wolf means moderate persons are slowly feeling the word antisemite lose all meaning and therefore the real antisemites are gaining room to legitimise themselves.
>Those days people that hate Jews claiming they're "only anti-Zionists"
That's mainly what the more racist zionists claim.
Most genuine anti semites are up front about their distaste for Jews and they tend to be on the far, far right.
There's a simple test to distinguish the genuine anti racists and the disguised racists, too:
* I condemn the holocaust unreservedly. It was commited by a regime of absolute evil against innocent people.
* I condemn the Gazan genocide unreservedly. It was commited by a regime of absolute evil against innocent people.
If you're completely happy repeating both of these sentences like I am then you're not one of them.
If you engage in deflection or denial of one of these two UN recognized genocides, well, you're either an anti semite or it's equal and opposite.
>Comments like yours are the racist ones
Im gonna go ahead and assume you will either ignore me or fail the antiracist test.
Did I cite Mitch McConnell? No, I did not. I tried to be clear that I am not accusing Joe Kent of anti-Semitism because he is criticizing Israel, and Mitch engaging in that kind of rhetoric is only serving to make it harder for me to make my point. I am accusing Kent of anti-Semitism because he has a history of engaging in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and consorting with neo-Nazis. My point is simple: we should not respect Joe Kent. His resignation is correct; his reasoning is flawed.
"The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Joe Kent to a top counterterrorism role, overcoming opposition from Democrats who described the retired Army Green Beret as a conspiracy theorist who has associated with White nationalists and other far-right extremists. "
- https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/31/politics/senate-confirmation-...
Obviously a hero to the some on the far left today.
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>Did I cite Mitch McConnell? No, I did not
You didnt cite anything so i googled to see whom or what you might be talking about and thats all that popped up.
It turns your vague accusation only matched the equally vague accusations of a rather nasty white supremacist zionist.
I think that says that Joe Kent is being slandered mainly by some rather extreme genocide denying racists.
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I don't think that is the whole picture.
I suggest a significant cause is Trump's arrogance and only listening to the advice he wants to hear.
I have been thinking about this scene a lot recently: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hj_4KIKHRFY&t=60s
America is isolating itself in so many ways. You could rewrite that scene and reach the same conclusion.
What specifically about that scene? Video won't load for many HN readers.
Apparently it's "The Wind Rises: The Looming War", a Japanese anime film.
Ah, it's a scene set in the late 1930s where a German stays at a mountain retreat in Japan, and bonds with the Japanese protagonist who also visited Germany (to learn how to make warplanes). It becomes clear that the German man is fleeing the Nazi government.
https://www.cornel1801.com/animated/Wind-Rises-2013/video-qu...
- It is a nice night. Hier ist Der Zauberberg.
- "The Magic Mountain" Thomas Mann.
- Yes. A good place for forgetting. Make a war in China. Forget it. Make a puppet state in Manchuria. Forget it. Quit the League of Nations. Forget it. Make the world your enemy. Forget it. Japan will blow up. Germany will blow up too.
This recklessness is a theme I keep seeing when reading about preludes to major war. There is always a side who wants diplomacy to fail and war to break out. It seems to me like the American administration is champing at the bit for a war of aggression.
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Honestly, the way this administration has behaved makes me think someone there is obsessed with playing Total War and thinks that’s how the real world works. It’s all about winning battles and painting the map red, white and blue (Greenland, Venezuela, now Iran) with no thought to what they want to achieve beyond that.
I think that criticism legitimately undersells Total War players (and thereby oversells the administrations competence).
Total War involves an understanding and exploitation of high ground, rivers, and choke points. Like just about any war gamer, with a glance at the map of Iran one arrives at The Pentagons stated wisdom on the matter for decades. Geography says you invade all of it, or cede the straight.
We have this issue many paces in the world and people just don’t get it. North Korean nukes are a threat, but the unstoppable artillery barrage that would kill tens of millions in the first minutes of the war is The Issue. You can’t have snipers on a mountain ridge over your house and feel safe.
Dick Cheney and the Bush family spelled it out over and over. They like money and oil.
I never said they were good Total War players ;-)
Don't forget prior saber rattling about Panama. Cuba is still actively on deck.
And here I thought that they acted more like Tropico players.
Hegseth?
They're obsessed with what real white men did the in past centuries, ie old style imperialism, not the current US state of imperialism.
The failed revolution a month prior may have been the US too.
It's after the ramp up in production of weapons used in the shooting war started.
> The failed revolution a month prior may have been the US too
Probably not. History has practically zero examples of foreign-caused popular revolts. When you want your person in power, you do a military coup.
What history is littered with is adversaries (a) constantly fomenting dissent in each other and (b) levelling up convenient revolutions. America has been doing the former in Iran since basically 1979. But to say the recent protests "may have been the US" is ascribing way too much influence to Washington.
"History has practically zero examples of foreign-caused popular revolts"
You should go take a look at what Lenin and many other communists was doing and where he was physically right before the October revolution...
Also, Haiti slave revolt was heavily influenced by the French revolution.
Also, uhh the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom?
> You should go take a look at what Lenin and many other communists was doing and where he was physically right before the October revolution
To what effect? The only other successful Communist revolution prior to the conclusion of the October revolution was the one in Mongolia [1]. It built on decade-old revolutionary ground [2]. (Finland, meanwhile, was seceding from White Russia.)
Trying to cause a revolution from abroad just doesn't work. Exhibit A: right now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_revolution#Successfu...
Re: Trying to cause a revolution from abroad just doesn't work.
Are you just blindly ignoring all 'regime changes' supported/caused by US (i.e. from abroad) since WW2?
Some of them do not work (this one is especially botched). Many, many have succeeded (the initial change), with typically less successful outcomes over longer time frames.
And you are totally missing the point of the remark about Lenin and Germany's part (essentially sending him to destabilize Russia in order to help their WW1 efforts - succeeded wildly beyond expectations, to disastrous long term consequences)
> Are you just blindly ignoring all 'regime changes' supported/caused by US (i.e. from abroad) since WW2?
It is not like the successful ones were popular revolts. They were, simply, a coups. And in Iran specifically, ended up with population hating on USA.
And with Americans being totally Pikachu face shocked about "how come they hate us as much as monarchy we installed there" as even opposition to the theocracy hated on them.
> Are you just blindly ignoring all 'regime changes' supported/caused by US (i.e. from abroad) since WW2?
What fraction was popular revolt versus military coup? Engineered from afar?
> totally missing the point of the remark about Lenin and Germany's part (essentially sending him to destabilize Russia
Oh fair, I did miss this. I would argue this is leveling up an existing revolution. But sure, this is the closest N = 1 modern history offers.
What fraction was engineered 'popular revolt'? Read up a bit on the color revolutions... e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa
No, the protests were mostly genuine. That's what happens when your country is so up it's own ass with religious totalitarianism that you set yourself up to not have water at all in the next few decades. Average citizens generally get really pissy when you take away the "At least I'm not literally dying" excuse.
The US could not participate in that because we had moved assets to south america to fuck with Venezuela. The war in Iran wasn't started until the USS Ford had been re-positioned back to the middle east.
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> Seriously did you buy this?
Uh yes, water shortages and inflation have a habit of pissing people off.
The CIA, as its tradition demands, never meddles when the conditions are ripe to promote American interests. They just let nature take its course from afar.
> CIA, as its tradition demands, never meddles when the conditions are ripe to promote American interests
Straw man. Nobody argued American interests were unrepresented on the ground.
If you're claiming they've been duped, at least provide an argument to say why they're wrong. Preferably with links to credible research (sigh, what's "credible" anyway?)
>In the fantasy imagination of some people
Could it be fantasy reinforced by some LLM "advisors"? I have a strong feeling that the people in US administration are talking to LLMs which constantly reassure them that their imagination is the best
Famously, the 'Trump Tariffs' were almost certainly determined by LLM, hence tariffs being applied on uninhabited islands.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=trump+tariffs+decided+by+a
I see a lot of people throw this "no revolution" perspective around when everyone involved has been very clear to the Iranian people: that this is the time to stay safe and inside. People rising up will take time, and will be highly unpredictable. No one said otherwise. You imply "analysts already had this all identified" yet you are putting forward a supposition here that's just wildly unrealistic.
Donald trump addressed the Iranian people in a video message and told them to rise up when the war began.
That was in January
No actually it was feb 28th
I think you're conflating the details with what he explicitly was saying on January 13th
Did you even listen to the link you just posted? He makes very clear in his instructions to the Iranian people that they should stay sheltered as bombs will be dropping.
Do go on - what were his instructions on what they ought to do after the bombing stopped?
Overthrow the regime. Has the bombing stopped?
Link?
Seriously, all these armchair "experts" are missing very obvious truths -
1) Every authority figure is telling the Iranian people to stay inside and wait.
2) Revolutions don't happen overnight, the same way that businesses don't succeed overnight, even though from far away it might seem that way.
3) Official Israeli statements estimate it could take up to a year after the war is over for a successful overthrow, even if everything is going according to plan.
The truth is there's a lot of people who want this war to fail, because it will align with their political convictions and hopes.
> 1) Every authority figure is telling the Iranian people to stay inside and wait.
Last week: "Our aircraft are striking terrorist operatives on the ground, on roads and in public squares. This is meant to allow the brave Iranian people to celebrate the Festival of Fire. So go out and celebrate...we are watching from above," Netanyahu said, speaking from air force headquarters.
I will predict right now that no revolution will happen. Revolutions happen because of fragmentation within the regime. If there is one thing that puts all grievances aside then that would be an existential war. Just like during the Iran-Iraq war.
Israel does not want functional moderate goverment in Iran. It would bomb and kill anyone who tries that. Israels plan is to periodically bomb and keep Iran failed state.
It is working on making itself larger cleansing whole areas around it and settling it.
> Israel does not want functional moderate goverment in Iran
Israel would probably be fine with a moderate government in Iran. A moderate Tehran doesn't encourage Hamas and Hezbollah to randomly lob rockets into Israel.
Even if Israel disagreed, a moderate Iran balances Israel in the region. An Iran that has beef with literally every single one of its neighbors other than Turkmenistan cannot provide that balance.
Your facts are a bit out of whack.
Pre-war, Iran had good relations with Qatar and Oman. Also with Pakistan. And Armenia. Their current relations with Iraq are also OK.
They have problems with Saudis, Bahrain, UAE - exactly the countries with extensive US military bases. No surprise there.
And Iran has not (prior to being attacked) attacked any of their neighbours.
The only two neighbouring countries Israel does not have problems with are heavily-bought Jordan and Egypt (Israel still attacked them prior to Camp David accords).
To any non-ideologically blind person it is obvious who is the one stirring the instability in the middle east.
You
> Israel would probably be fine with a moderate government in Iran.
Maybe, but I think they are genuinely aiming for a failed state.
Israel is a state with a political apparatus that is predicated on providing security. That apparatus needs a persistent (but non-serious) threat to remain in power. I think best case for that power is to have a number of failed, weak states in the Middle East that occasionally launch relatively impotent attacks against Israel. This would also have the side effect of giving hard-line elements in Israel the enough justification to expand their borders and continue ethnic cleansing (e.g. what is happening in Lebanon right now).
I think Israeli position is what a security researcher states in this FT article: https://www.ft.com/content/dd070ee7-7021-4f90-86ec-690fe6aa3...
> Summarising the Israeli government’s position, Citrinowicz said: “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future . . . [or] the stability of Iran. > > “That is a point of difference between us and the US. I think [Washington is] more concerned about nation-building and threats to their regional partners,” he added.
>Israel would probably be fine with a moderate government in Iran. A moderate Tehran doesn't encourage Hamas and Hezbollah to randomly lob rockets into Israel.
I don't think they would be happy having a moderate government that could still evolve Iran into a regional leader.
> An Iran that has beef with literally every single one of its neighbors other than Turkmenistan cannot provide that balance.
Well, is that better than Israel and its relationships with its neighbors?
> is that better than Israel and its relationships with its neighbors?
Yes. Tel Aviv retains solid security relationships with Jordan and Egypt. And it trades with its region [1]. On a ranking of hegemonic pests, Iran is way ahead.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade_agreements_of_Israe...
But how would they have an excuse to conduct a genocide then?
Israel doesn't want delusional theocrats running Iran.
It may not be in Israel's national interest having an aggressive Islamist government in Iran, but political incentives and national interest aren't always aligned.
I mean, they kinda do.
There are too many people, enriched by the status quo, who won't move until their personal discomfort erodes, even while they're watching it get closer and closer (in denial). People who are going to be jobless in 6 months carrying water for the admin because they're afraid of losing their jobs now. This isn't a hypothetical, because it has been happening continuously for the past year-and-a-half. Yours truly is not exempt, but it's certainly frustrating watching people hem and haw from the other side of the line.
I get that people like me have no pull because we're already designated losers, but it would be nice if y'all would just take our word for it.
Read on the martingale strategy. This is Donald Trump signature strategy. Basically, when something doesn't work, you double down; and it pays off. This strategy keeps working until it doesn't and completely bankrupt the player. Because the strategy has been always paying off for the them (djt & co), they thought they have some kind of a special skill/power that others don't; not realizing that they are just bad at math, geopolitics and strategy.
Trump doesn't care about the results in Iran. He's getting richer through graft while making himself look big. He's pathetic and we're all paying the price in one way or another.
I suspect Trump may not care about money much, but at the end of the life he wants to be some historical figure. Similar motive was for Putin to invade Ukraine.
Except for the little detail that Ukraine doesn't have a history of launching rockets into allied nations, invading embassies and holding staff hostage, unprovoked attacks against allied interests and ships in international waters and massacring it's own people for the crime of speaking out agains their government.
I think it's perfectly encapsulated by Hegseth's comment about not fighting "with stupid rules of engagement."
The implication is that, the US's military failures in the past have been caused by lefty bedwetters wringing their hands about casualties and restricting the military. More generally, caused by "woke" policies that are about political correctness instead of about military success.
I would bet at least $10 that the top people in the administration are baffled that they haven't won the war yet. They're saying, we did everything right. We got rid of the trans people in the military. We fired the worst women and black people in leadership roles. We put a real tough guy in charge of the military. We told our troops to stop worrying about rules of war and let them off their leash. So why is Iran still able to fight?
That's one of the problems with bigotry and toxic masculinity and that sort of thing. Not only does it lead you to harm people, but it also hurts your ability to actually get things done. Thinking that gay people are destroying society is bad if you're in a position to hurt gay people, but it's also bad if your job involves preventing the destruction of society, because it means that you're going to look at idiotic "solutions" to the problem. And because it's not coming from a place of rationality in the first place, you're not going to eventually say, wait a minute, this isn't working, maybe gay people aren't the problem. You're just going to keep pushing at it harder because you know it's right, and if it's not working then it's just because you haven't done it enough.
> They're saying, we did everything right. We got rid of the trans people in the military. We fired the worst women and black people in leadership roles. We put a real tough guy in charge of the military. We told our troops to stop worrying about rules of war and let them off their leash. So why is Iran still able to fight?
Who exactly is saying this? Your comment is worthless conjecture.
Well duh. That's why that paragraph starts with "I would bet...."
"further radicalization,"
If by that you mean Iranians in Iran chanting "better our a-hole than yours", I'm not so sure that's radicalization.
No it means people driving cars into synagogues and shooting up bars.
Perceived? US politicians are all mutli millionaires no matter what happens they will be golfing in Hawaii.
At least Roman emperors got assassinated by their own bodyguards.
West is living in its own bubble of misinformation. Including the government.
On many occasions I've read self-soothing wishful thinking messages about my country. In 2022 it was that Russian army is fleeing, all Russian tanks were burned down, and Russian soldiers are deserting from a front lines with a speed of 100,000 persons a day. Here on HN. Written by the people who had no clue how to distinguish Russian tank from Ukrainian tank.
Or in 2022-2023 EU leaders said that Russian soldiers are fighting with shovels and stealing microwaves and washing machines to extract microchips from them.
Or just recently someone wrote to me that we are living in the stone age, whatever that means.
On the other hand, I'm happy that West prefers to live in a bubble with no access to real information. And if you try to convey real information, they'll call you "Kremlin bot" or "North Korean bot" or "Chinese bot". It means that less countries will fall prey to neocolonial practices and wars because you cannot wage wars and govern colonies based entirely on misinformation from propaganda your own media creates out of thin air.
> Or in 2022-2023 EU leaders said that Russian soldiers are fighting with shovels and stealing microwaves and washing machines to extract microchips from them.
And this WAS true. At one point, Ukraine broke through Russian lines and was pushing Russia back as fast as they could get logistics organized.
In response, Russia mobilized about 300000 people and forced them to fight or die. Usually both. Then started offering jailed inmates a chance of freedom by fighting on the front lines for 6 months. It invited freaking North Koreans to fight on the Ukrainian front!
> Written by the people who had no clue how to distinguish Russian tank from Ukrainian tank.
The thing is, in a large war such as the Ukrainian war (or the Iranian war now) you can have multiple total routs of the opposing military. And still not gain anything. The opposing military can be armed with shovels and they might be formed out of the dregs of society, but as long as they hold the line, they can still stop your advance.
Russia _recruited_, not mobilized as usually in popular conception that would equate with conscripted.
Conscription is enforced with martial law only in ukranian territories, by both the official ukrianian government, and by the russia's occuption forces in donbas.
> Russia _recruited_, not mobilized as usually in popular conception that would equate with conscripted.
No. Russia _mobilized_ 300000 people. As in "sent mobilization notices and then grabbed whoever came". It almost resulted in uprisings, so it was quickly abandoned in favor of using prison inmates and later offering $50000 signup bonuses.
It was then memory-holed by the Russian propaganda as if it had never happened.
How can you convince me that your real information is more real than my real information?
Just observe the consequences and use brains (try to ignore ideological blinders).
The Russian economy has not collapsed.
The Russian military has not collapsed.
The Iranian regime has not collapsed.
The Ukrainian regime/state/military has not collapsed. Nor has it reconquered the territory it has lost.
Wait a bit and see if Trump's regime/presidency collapses or not. The same for Iran/Russia/Ukraine/Israel.
The strains (societal/economical/geopolitical) are great and rising, something will give out... (no sanity in sight)
I think it's pretty clear that this war was initiated by Israel, who asked/hoped that the US would go along with it.
While I can easily imagine the Trump crew is a bit impulsive and unprepared, I am VERY sure Israel went in to this with their usual competency, including very clear plans and targets.
If this eventually results in a half decent Iranian government, that would be the best thing that happened to the world this century! A period of war and high oil prices is a cheap price to pay, IF that actually happens.
> plenty of analysis warning of the risks that have now become reality
You can also easily find analysis warning of the opposite: the risks of not invading Iran. See Nazi Germany and WW2 for an example what happens when you fail to contain a belligerently rogue country.
Israel is the country engaged in Lebensraum, so if you want to make a WW2 analogy, Israel is nazi germany here.
Wow, ok...
Iran invaded the US embassy holding 52 civilians hostage, has conducted unprovoked attacks against US, Israeli and other interests for more than 40 years, regularly launches missiles into Israeli airspace, indiscriminately attacks merchant vessels in international waters, massacres and tortures tens of thousands of their own people for the crime of speaking out against their government, sponsors terrorist groups like Hamas that massacred over a thousand people including children, raped women, etc.
As for your comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany, did the countries that Germany invaded have a history of launching rockets and terrorist attacks at Germany? Has Israel rounded up Palestinians in concentration camps and executed millions of them in gas chambers?
But you're saying it's Israel that needs to be contained and they are Nazi Germany. Ok...
> massacred over a thousand people including children,
That's a classic IDF specialty, Israeli military are masters at shooting and killing children. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqwv9vvzx9o
> Has Israel rounded up Palestinians in concentration camps and executed millions of them in gas chambers?
Yes, jailed for years young boys and even teens without any reason. Why would they need gas chambers when traditional bombing of schools and hospitals is working beautifully and wonderfully to cull the palestinians?
I looked up the claim of seizing tankers and it seems it has only ever happened during context of other wars like with Iraq.
Israel openly celebrates rapists such as when the rapist soldier was released from trial. https://www.timesofisrael.com/5-idf-reservists-indicted-for-...
And you don't need to ask me, just listen to the direct words of Bibi, Bezalel Smotrich and other Israeli government representatives how they want "Greater Israel" and wish for expansionism.
> That's a classic IDF specialty, Israeli military are masters at shooting and killing children. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqwv9vvzx9o
You cite one example of a bad Israeli soldier and extrapolate to all of the IDF. This belies your faulty reasoning and desire to project a perspective based not on facts, but your own biases.
Again, there is no comparison between Nazi Germany and Israel. The countries Germany invaded exhibited zero aggression against Germany. In contrast, Palestinian terrorist groups launch routinely launched rockets into Israel, send terrorists in to blow up civilians, and conducted wholesale massacre and rape in the name of Allah.
Interesting that you ignore than Iran are hostage takers and murderers of their own people. After the first bombings of this war, Iranians in Iran were dancing in the streets.
> I looked up the claim of seizing tankers
I said "attacks" not just seizing. But there was seizing too.
May 2022: two Greek Tankers seized by IRGC commandos 2023: Tankers Advnatage Sweet and Niovi seized by IRGC commandos Jan 2024: St. Nikolas seized by Iranian Navy Apr 2024: MSC Aries seized by IRGC commandos During the Tanker War 1981 - 1988: Iran was responsible for approximately 168 attacks on merchant ships
July 1987: Kuwait tanker MV Bridgeton struck by Iranian mine April 1988: USS SAmuel B. Roberts nearly sunk by Iranian mine. 2019 Limpet Mine Attacks July 2021: Iranian drone strike on MT Mercer Street Nov 2022: Pacific Zircon struck by Iranian drone
Do you think I just gave isolated examples? I gave actual news articles because you would make up stuff and say its not real. These are part of a large trend. Its funny how providing actual hard facts, reported in Israeli media itself, gets me accused of being biased.
Palestine is a fun example. Why limit your looking back to such a short period. Let us rewind a few more decades. Israel itself is the product of violent terrorism and displacement. Israeli's are such nice people they bombed a hotel with innocent British and Arab people and then a future prime minister was from the very terrorist organization. Israel has been belligerent and violent from the very start.
Now list all the aggressive acts of Israel in the last whatever years. And think about it.
I'll let you support your own points that you make.
Iran was "contained" under Obama's deal with them....that Trump tore up....and when he was in the middle of negotiating a new one he attacked Iran who were in good faith negotiations.
The rogue nation here is the US.
> Iran was "contained" under Obama's deal with them
Oh, you mean the JCPOA that Iran violated (before it was rejected by Trump) by failing to disclose storage of undeclared nuclear material at secret sites in Turquzabad between 2009 and 2018 and at Lavisan-Shian, Varamin and Marivan starting in 2003 to early 2000s?
UN watchdog declares Iran in breach of nuclear non-proliferation duties: https://www.iranintl.com/en/202506123029
The JCPOA, had weak stipulations on nuclear constraints that sunsetted after 15 years. The deal did not address Iran's missile program, human rights record or support for proxy terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas.
> Iran was in good faith negotiation
Iran has historically made promises, broken them and lied about it.
"The best time for Iran to have given up the weapons pursuit was after the 2003 embarrassment of being caught clearly lying about its nuclear program, but it did not. Over the years, the IAEA Board of Governors issued several warnings to the UN Security Council about the “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program"
https://thebulletin.org/2025/07/time-for-iran-to-make-a-no-e...
Iran treats it's people like shit and chooses terrorism over the welfare of it's own people
https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/the-islamic-republics-brok...
Well, there's more than just perceived invincibility.
The alternative is recognizing that you can effectively cow large populations of people into submission, no matter how much it sucks, and that the people who do this (in this case, the Islamic theocrats of Iran) can and will forever be a part of the geopolitical landscape with thrall over tens of millions of lives, and seek to influence even more. That there will always - ALWAYS - be a segment of humanity that has no real chance to think differently, to improve their lot, and to peacefully see the changes they want made to their society.
The hope in the immediate post-Soviet era of the early 1990s is that liberalized representative government would spread around the world, and that rules-based order would allow for peaceful resolution of problems through democratic processes and markets. And for a while, this seemed to be the route. Then it became apparent by the late 90s that there were still parties who didn't like the general direction that this was taking, particularly Russia, China, and at least some of the Middle East.
Now that China and the Middle East have become engines of global economic growth, there seems to be a tacit agreement, at least among the people who matter, than authoritarianism is fine so long as the right people get paid and that line continue to go up. In fact, it's more than fine; it's perceived by these people as more efficient at creating economic growth than that messy back-and-forth of representative government. And God forbid you have to set up that representative government after getting rid of an authoritarian one like in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Is it a harbinger of dystopia? Absolutely. But that's the reality that we inhabit.
Everyone knew the Iranians would close the strait and that it would take time to re-open it. That was the price the administration was willing to pay. Put differently, the regime's traditional deterrence did not work against this administration. You seem to think the administration would not have done this thing with what we know now. What makes you think that?
Trump is quoted saying that Iran would surrender or be pverthrown way before they would close the strait.
This operation was cobbled together between Trump, Hegseth, Rubio and Vance without consulting anyone outside that circle. The way they have been selling it, espwcially the strait stuff, smells of unplanned developements all around.
yeah I did expect US to know all those things...
but what I did NOT expect, is how Iran regime would choose strategically suicidal options just to "feel good"
missile-rambo even on non-combatant countries? that'll trigger self-defense attacks...
$2M per voyage? woah... the stait-users don't have a choice, but "make an example out of" iran...
I mean, iran should have just shot israel with all its missiles (select and focus), and bring that "missle interception rate" down to 40%.
Now what did iran gain from shooting everyone? making more enemies, and showing your weaknesses (96% missile interception rate, even from UAE? wtf...)
don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying Trump was right on starting the war. I actually think what the fk was he thinking back then...
I'm just saying even if you're angry and desperate, there are wise choices and dumb choices
I disagree. Even though I think the Iranian regime has been extremely incompetent overall their war strategy has been surprisingly lucid. They aren't actually risking much more by attacking neighboring countries that are already cooperating with the US. How much is Qatar's military involvement going to move the needle when you're already facing a full-on war with the US and Israel?
Raising the overall costs to the US and its allies is a pretty coherent theory of victory for Iran. Obviously they aren't going to win a conventional fight, but they might be able to inflict enough havoc on energy and commodity markets to the point that it really hurts the US and its allies economically; perhaps enough that they bail out of the war in order to stabilize the global economy.
Trump clearly wanted a quick easy win here and does not want to see massive inflation at home. Sure he personally doesn't give a shit about Americans but the rest of the politicians who enable him do and he's at risk of absolutely torching his own party for years if the war drags on and costs really get out of hand.
All the Iranian regime has to do to win is not lose for enough weeks. If the regime holds out Trump will have to either give up and try to pretend this disaster was a Great Victory, or he'll launch a ground invasion that will almost certainly turn into a quagmire. Bombing civilians makes a popular uprising much less likely, so the US is doing them quite a favor on that front.
Yup, Iran is threatening regime change by targeting the financial stability of American voters.
It's their only play, really.
well... I actually think even when trump is impeached, the democrats will continue -- even more so, to call mr trump "a weak president"
I mean, can US and its allies exactly stop at status quo?
Iran just learnt it can missile nearby neighbors and demand $2M toll fee on the strait users...
even if US just backs down from "epic wut", will iran become "the good guy" and never missile neighbors and stop demanding that $2M toll?
nope: rather, that would mean US and allies will lose its deterrence against Iran completely
iran'll start bullying more on those neighbors, and the toll fee will go up: $2M to $5M to $10M to... even $100M -- I mean, what's stopping iran from doing so?
anyway, I'm just surprised everyone in this forum is trying their best only to say "trump is such an idiot to start the war (well duh?)", and not to look at what choices each nations had/have after trump's dickhead move
Stop projecting on Iran what USA would do in their place (bullying everybody).
Iran was NOT bombing its neighbours and demanding Hormuz toll before the war. Not even after it was bombed last June.
If they had not responded strongly, USA/Israel would keep periodically 'mowing the lawn', not acceptable to any country, especially not for a big and proud nation like Iran.
Btw, the US military bases in Gulf countries are legitimate military targets, and have born the brunt of Iran's attacks. It is just that in our western media the focus is on any civilian damages, and almost all damages to military is hushed up.
Iran has no good way to prevent future attacks (nobody sane would believe any agreement signed by USA), their only way is to make sure beyond any doubt that attacking them again will hurt VERY, VERY much. As a side note, getting rid of USA military bases in the Gulf would be beneficial to them in making any future attacks on them more difficult. Hence the (very true!) messaging 'the USA military bases are not there to protect you, but to help them project power over us (and you!), and are only making you a target, reducing your security, not increasing it'.
>Iran was NOT bombing its neighbours and demanding Hormuz toll before the war. Not even after it was bombed last June.
They were funding and arming proxies that were bombing and destabilizing neighborhoods. Nobody in the region likes Iran, that is precisely why the Gulf States want US bases and a Israeli military pact.
And this is not a reactive policy as it is an explicit proactive policy of exporting the Islamic Revolution and gaining regional hegemony. Which no one wants.
Under a sane president there would be a pretty clear off ramp available in the form of a negotiated settlement. Iran stops attacking neighbors and the strait in exchange for a US promise to not start another unprovoked war, along with another JCPOA type agreement lifting sanctions and limiting their nuclear development. The problem here is that absolutely nobody trusts trump to actually stick to a deal, especially after he was the one who broke the previous deal and then attacked them twice in the middle of negotiations. Trump's stupidity compounds the mess in ways that no other president would.
Without a negotiating partner Iran basically has to settle the issue with force. They are going to try to do as much economic damage as possible in order to deter current and future attacks, or die trying. Without a ground invasion the attacks on both sides will wind down at some point but it's hard to see how we get to a clean cease fire, it's likely to be a messy uneven one that could flare back up at any point.
The Gulf states are not any more willing than the USA at invading Iran with ground troops. The only thing that changes by making them angry is that slightly more missiles fly into Iran. Which is already accounted for and won't magically reopen the strait.
Actually, Saudi Arabia might get involved.
I doubt US wants them involved.
The coordination will be difficult (I doubt the Saudis are properly, NATO - style, trained for joint actions with USA).
Their involvement would also severely raise the risk of friendly fire (see the F15's over Kuwait).
they couldn't defeat much smaller and weaker Yemen.
Did that involve boot on the grounds or just shelling via cruise missiles or from air? Also, Yemen is poorer, but has more or less the same population as Saudi Arabia.
That doesn't mean they can't be useful, and they do already have a chip on their shoulder wrt Iran because of Iran's support for the Houthis.
Yemen situation is just good indication of how useful they could be, and answer is not much. They don't have good functioning military.
Their military is a paper tiger like Saddam’s was during the Iraq invasion. Modern gear but without the doctrine or officer corps to effectively use it.
My experience while working there years ago was that their armed forces were a weird mix of coup proofing and a nepotistic dumping ground for family members who couldn’t be trusted to help run the family business.
well with all the oil money, saudis and UAE don't even have to send their own citizens:
they can just pay gurkha mercenaries for the job
> Iran should have just shot israel with all its missiles (select and focus)
Iran has deliberately escalated the war horizontally to create a bigger mess and to make the military adventure more expensive for America and the world.
Iran is saying, "If you attack us, these are the costs."
As an invading military, you're either willing to pay those costs or you're not.
Iran did not made more ennemies. It attacked countries that did not liked Iran and hosted American assets.
They are easier to hit and harder to defend then Israel. That is depleting defense forces more.
Comment was deleted :(
I think this analysis is missing the big picture.
(1) reducing oil shipments to China is good posturing for the US; hence Venezuela and Iran ahead of 2028. These are shaping operations. China suffers more from these conflicts than the US.
(2) Iran isn't the only one who can control passage throught the strait. All gulf countries can do so. If Iran can cheaply cut off passage, so can Saudi Arabia and UAE and everyone else there. They all have a long term mutual need in keeping this strait open.
All these recent analysis of conflicts in isolation, which always assume a lot of self-interest in disliked politicians, seem to make the analysts and authors blind to a much more probable and sensible grand strategy. Russia invading Ukraine and failing, has been the greatest strategic gift Russia could give to the US against China in setting the stage for shaping a defence of, and deterring an offensive on, Taiwan. Russia lost the ability to defend its proxies at a cost asymetrically small to the US. Hamas broke rank and allowed Israel to eventually decapitate Iran's proxies and air-defense step by step instead of all at once, setting the stage for the opportunity of the current war. And Russia being distracted also gave the US carte-blanche in Venezuela, not only via distraction but by proving that Russian air-defense isn't the thread it was thought to be.
The remaining strategic tension, in my humble opinion, is whether the US depletes its stockpiles too much without a caught up manufacturing capability, so that a Taiwan conflict becomes easy to win by default for China (via a blockade which would essentially be a cold war with few deaths and minimal damage) or if the weakened China (due to oil constraints) would be simply unable to attack in 2028, the strategic window when it can do so.
The situation, in my eyes, is evolving in a state where only two modes become dominant and both are slightly better for Taiwan.
> China suffers more from these conflicts than the US.
You are missing the even bigger picture. Look back a few decades. The 1973 oil crisis was not just a temporary inflationary event, but the starting point of various technological and political investments that sought reduction in reliance on oil — engine efficiency regulations, nuclear power in France, early research into solar energy. The current war will likely have a similar effect. Suddenly you can't rely on imported fuel any more. And if you look around for alternative energy sources, Chinese solar and batteries and EVs suddenly look a lot more attractive than two months ago. And this is before you factor in the rest of the world reassessing their relation to the US and their confidence in the competence of US military and diplomacy.
(1) Why do you think this is worse for the Chinese government than the US? Also, this view of the strategic goals of the war seems fundamentally incompatible with both how it began and the ongoing US government narratives about it.
(2) I think we all (the author included) agree with you that it's easier to break things than to build them--both hardware and relationships--so it's obvious that maintaining trade through these kinds of choke points requires some degree of cooperation on all fronts. Iran does have a geographic advantage over other players, though (partial exceptions to Oman and the UAE), as well as a clear acute interest in constricting traffic through the strait. Sure, it may be bleeding them, but it seems to be one of the few ways they can meaningfully attack their enemies. It'll be interesting to see if anyone has the will to force the strait open against Iran's efforts.
Generally agree on Ukraine/Taiwan and the bigger geopolitical picture though.
(1) China is more sensitive to shipping and oil shipments (and derivatives) than the US. It hurts both but China much more. The US is hurt in so far as high gas price are bad for elections, a small price to pay for strategic advantage.
(2) Iran has a temporary but unsustainable interest in constricting traffic, and it's not the only country who could impose a filter there. The mere credible threat of a strike on shipping is enough to stop it, so other countries basically have an equivalent capability to restrict traffic. And all countries, including Iran, are unable to sustain a prolonged closure. The current situation is an unstable, non-equilibrium situation for Iran and it's neighbors.
Overall, all of it doesn't really matter to the US because simply taking Iran off the supply chain of China is good for them. They spin the narrative about starting the war for a variety of other reasons so that they can justify the pain it inflicts on their allies (Korea, Japan - very dependent on those hydrocarbons too, and EU) and choke China's oil supplies without looking intentional. Last time the US overtly blockaded an asian nation's oil supplies, Pearl Harbour happened.
Which is another reason why China had such a structural incentive to move toward solar power, battery storage and renewables in general while also powering most of their early growth with dirty power plants.
I think Trump wants to be remembered for having neutered the China threat and having restored American supremacy and dynamism, and doesn't care too much about what it will cost at the next federal elections. I think he cares more about his legacy and wanting to be remembered as a historical figure on the strategic level. He's portrayed as being merely a fool with self interested dictatorial tendencies but I think attributing such simple intentions to him is self deception and leads to poor analysis. It doesn't pay to trivialize figures for disliking them or their actions.
Without taking camp here, I'll say that taking Trump for a fool is shortsighted, in my opinion.
(1) Sure, I'm not arguing that the Chinese economy is less vulnerable to a SOH closure than the US. I do think the US government is much more vulnerable to economic pressure than the Chinese government is (especially in an election year that even before the war was shaping up poorly for the ruling party), and any calculus the government makes needs to include this. If this was the goal of the war, I think we would also see significantly different targeting and messaging than we do now. If there was a ceasefire tomorrow, it's unclear that China would be the outsize loser here.
(2) Again, sure, but Iran can clearly sustain it longer. They've read their Clausewitz and properly understand this as a contest of political will, which they have much deeper reserves of than capital or munitions. Anyone with any power in the Iranian regime knows they have no offramp.
Absolutely agree that Trump cares strongly for his legacy, maybe more than anything except for his self-image, but the most important part of that legacy is being recognized as both popular and a winner--I would argue that these are far more important to him personally than US power and influence on the world stage (shutting down USAID, for example, was a massive blow to US soft power, and the NATO infighting that he initiated is still probably a net negative for US hard power, even if it has had a positive impact on European defense spending and self-sufficiency). He also clearly wants to see that legacy established in his lifetime (hence the obsession with having things named after him). It's hard to imagine this being a particularly effective way to increase long-term US power and influence relative to China, particularly in a way that will generate positive sentiment within the US--especially among the majority voters who favored his populist-isolationist political platform.
It's also fair to play with the idea that the whole US political establishment understood this, and agree with the plan, thus why the Dems have stayed so silent on those matters.
Great analysis. Thank you.
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This is an interesting angle, and I could see how the prospect of reducing the flow of oil to China, and also to teetering democracies in Europe, might have occurred to the US decision makers as beneficial. However, the question is, how much reduction for how long, and how critical this would be for China.
And the point remains that this operation has been started in a way that leaves the US in a weaker strategic position, not just in the Gulf, but also, crucially, in the far east. It has now become harder to contain China, both in the medium term by the reduction of US military capabilities both globally and in-theater by pulling out strategic defensive assets from South Korea and Japan; but also long-term, by putting themselves into a situation where they have to do that, retroactively, after painting themselves into a corner elsewhere, therefore undermining their posture as a credible, rational actor that can be relied on to oppose China's ambition in the region.
The continued stalemate will likely continue in my opinion. Continued daily strikes by the US and Iran squeezing the strait. China is severely squeezed by loss of oil. Russia benefits from rising oil prices. Everyone else will get to relive the 1970s. Stagflation here we come.
I don't think Iran can take a sustained air campaign for that long. They talk like they can but they can't. The only thing they have right now is their remaining ballistic missile (and to some extent) drone launch capabilities but that is going to keep getting degraded.
The US being a net exporter of oil should benefit from higher oil prices. Defense contractors will also benefit.
The 1970's were probably better than these days. ;)
> I don't think Iran can take a sustained air campaign for that long
Most probably, but Israel and US are now being more conservative with interceptor targets though so that seems to go both ways.
I hope you are right. My concern is that the Iranian regime is a lot tougher than we may think.
Upside: Maybe helps a tiny bit on climate change.
Exactly. ~90% of Iran's crude went to China. The oil revenue was ~75% of Iran's budget. Iran has been a significant area of military development for China, serving somewhat as a forward base.
That doesn't exactly limit the impact of cutting off the supply. It's a global trade market. If China buys on the global market from other places instead of Iran because that oil isn't available, that still creates a shortage for everyone and that still pushes up the price of oil for everyone.
Sure. But the US has substantial domestic production. So China (and everyone else who has to import the majority of their oil) gets hurt more.
Short term, you might be right.
However... higher oil prices also increase energy prices across the board, and China's energy sector is dominant in renewables. I think they're more than happy to have the competing energy sources become even more expensive.
How to win friends and influence people.
> the strategic window when it can do so
What's the latest thinking on the 2028 window?
The tl;dr here is, with all due respect, that your premises are basically all wrong.
> (1) reducing oil shipments to China is good posturing for the US
No, it isn't. For several reasons:
1. China has stockpiled ~1.4 billion barrels of oil. it'a net importer. Supplies from Russia aren't disrupted. At present, Iranian oil is still gointg to China;
2. China is rapidly decreasing its dependence on fossil fuels with renewable energy projects on a scale where they're building more solar, for example, than the rest of the world combined. They also produce those panels so there's no supply chain risk there;
3. While the US is a net oil exporter, it's not universal. California, for example, has no pipelines so 75% of its oil comes from the sea. ~20-25% of that comes from Iraq and is disrupted by the Strait being closed;
4. Qatar produces 20-30% of the world's Helium supply and ~20% of the world's LNG, both of which are disrupted;
5. ~30% of the world's fertilizer is disrupted by the Strait being closed. The US is way more impacted by fertilizer disruption than China is.
> (2) Iran isn't the only one who can control passage throught the strait. All gulf countries can do so.
The other Gulf states are US client states. Why would Saudi Arabia close the Strait, which especially hurts US interests?
I also doubt any of them can to the same degree. The entire Iranian military is geared towards this strategy with drone and ballistic missile production on a scale no other country is really built for. It has hardened military infrastructure designed for decades to resist US bombardment.
Other Gulf states don't have this hardened infrastructure and are more vulernable to Iranian attack if it came down to it. Take desalination plants as an example. Yes Iran has those too but Iran also has significant snow melt as a source of water, Mountains, remember? Iran has ski resorts they have that much snow.
> Russia invading Ukraine and failing
Russia has basically succeeded. You have fairly stagnant battle lines where neither side can particularly advance but Russia holds certain Ukrainian territory now for years. Russia is just going to wait for the West to get bored and give up. Russia's economy has proven itself to be surprisingly resilient.
Sanctions just don't work on enemies like Iran, Russia or North Korea as well as they do on allies or former allies because enemies have an entire national project to resist American imperialism. They have to be self-reliant in a way that allies just don't.
This is also why the US client states in the Gulf are hurting way more from the Strait being closed: their economies aren't built for it. Iran's is.
> ... the weakened China (due to oil constraints) would be simply unable to attack in 2028, the strategic window when it can do so.
So this is where you've really gone off the deep end. China is less affected by this, in part because of long-term strategy but short-term because Chinese shipments are still going through the Strait.
American imperialists (which is both Republicans and Demorats, for the record) have this weird idea that China will invade Taiwan. Or wants to. Or it can. None of those things are true.
It really feels like projection, like every accusation is a confession. China must be doing violent imperialism because that's what the US is doing.
China can blockade Taiwan but that won't really do anything any more than an aerial bombardment will do anything to Iran. China doesn't have the amphibious capability to land an invasion on Taiwan any more than the US does in Iran. If you think otherwise, I'm sorry but you're gorssly mistaken.
But all of that ignores the real issue: China doesn't need to invade (or blockade) Taiwan. Why? Because all but ~10 countries in the world already view Taiwan as part of China. In the US (and Europe) it's called the One China policy. It is US government policy and consistent across both parties.
Why would China upset the international order when everybody already agrees with them?
China's built strategy suggests they want to invade Taiwan. What else are those bridge barges for?
And yeah, it's a dumb idea, but Taiwan, unification in general, seems to be one of the handful of things China can't quite manage to be rational about. They didn't have to grab Hong Kong ahead of time either.
There are three things people often don't seem to realize about invasions:
1. What a barrier water is still to this day;
2. How many troops it would take to occupy a country; and
3. The logistics required to support an invasion.
Knowing these things, even a little bit, can dispel a lot of fearmongering nonsense one will see.
On a clear day, you can see the white cliffs of Dover from Calais, France. I believe at its narrowest point the English Channel is 17 miles wide. At its peak the German army in WW2 had ~10 million soldiers and a massive industrial war machine. Yet they couldn't cross the English Channel. They didn't even try.
The Allies did manage D-Day but mostly because German strategy was bad, they were asleep at the wheel and D-Day was logisitcally probably the most complex military operation in human history and it took years to plan.
Look at a map of Ukraine and see where the front line is. The Dnipro River will feature strongly along much of it. That's not a coincidence. To cross even a river you need pontoon bridges to get tanks across and then trucks for supplies. Those bridges can be built quickly but the entire operation and any bridgehead you establish is incredibly vulernable to attack.
100 miles of ocean separates the Chinese mainland from Taiwan. It may as well be 10,000. Or 10. It just doesn't matter.
Taiwan has 1-2 million soldiers (including reserves) and a national project to resist an invasion and occupation. China would probably need at least 1-2 million troops to occupy Taiwan and they would have to get them across the ocean and them supply and arm them.
China simply doesn't have that amphibious capability and Taiwan could play havoc with their supply lines.
I really wish more people would ask "what would an invasion of Taiwan take or look like?" because then we could all waste less time worrying about things that just aren't going to happen. You could reduce any scenario to "can they?", "do they need to?" and "do they want to?". The answer to all three is "no".
Creating fear of this is just another tactic to sell weapons and, to some extent, more revealing about the Western imperialist psyche.
So no, I don't care about what barge ships China is building. At all. It doesn't matter.
I already agreed it was a dumb idea. If that always stopped the leaders of powerful countries from starting wars, we wouldn't be talking about Iran.
> On a clear day, you can see the white cliffs of Dover from Calais, France. I believe at its narrowest point the English Channel is 17 miles wide. At its peak the German army in WW2 had ~10 million soldiers and a massive industrial war machine. Yet they couldn't cross the English Channel. They didn't even try.
Notably they were in a position of air inferiority the whole time, despite certain popular perceptions. So not really comparable. (Indeed if China, by contrast, is making preparations for an amphibious invasion, surely that says something)
> Look at a map of Ukraine and see where the front line is. The Dnipro River will feature strongly along much of it. That's not a coincidence. To cross even a river you need pontoon bridges to get tanks across and then trucks for supplies. Those bridges can be built quickly but the entire operation and any bridgehead you establish is incredibly vulernable to attack.
That the front in a somewhat evenly balanced war would stabilise on a natural obstacle isn't so surprising. We can't leap from there to say that such natural obstacles would make for stable defensive lines in a less balanced war.
Everything you say is probably true and I agree... and yet.
What matters is not just what you plan to do, but what your opponent thinks you'll do. The US in general believes that China wants to invade or control Taiwan in some way. This mere belief is sufficient to cause it to take action.
> Take desalination plants as an example. Yes Iran has those too but Iran also has significant snow melt as a source of water, Mountains, remember? Iran has ski resorts they have that much snow.
Iran has suffered six consecutive years of drought, which has been bad enough that they were considering (before the war) moving the capital from Tehran to Makran on the coast of the Caspian
> US is way more impacted by fertilizer disruption than China is.
China is also a big food importer, they'll feel it eventually
I mostly agree with everything you say, I just see the balance lying elsewhere on the spectrum. I think China is on it's way to securing its energy supplies with renewables but not quite there, and that the US is taking this window of opportunities to do what it can to attempt to degrade China.
Whether China plans to actually invade or blockade Taiwan or not doesn't matter if the US thinks it will. AFAICT the US is convinced it will, and the mere threat of this is enough to justify Venezuela and Iran, I believe. Higher oil prices are less worse than no more semiconductors.
And I think Russia might have gained some territory, but at the cost of being completely sucked into the conflict, having lost strategically by (1) being unable to support and defend its proxies and (2) having its arsenal and technology thoroughly analyzed and proven ineffective against US weapons. All actors involved know this and it will not remain, but until solved this means that the US knows it can strike countries defended by Russian weapons, at least until counter measures are researched, developed and distributed. This is a temporary advantage and moment of clarity that lasts a few years, not a sustained advantage.
The risk of the US being equally sucked into Iran and suffering the same fate is very high. And China's best strategy here is probably to sit and wait and help US opponents keep the US busy for a while, like the US did on Ukraine with Russia.
The US is an arms dealer empire. It's economic strength and power come from its ability to sell weapons. The military budget is pushing $1 trillion (and probably will exceed it with supplemental funding for the Iran boondoggle). Rumor has it the administration will be asking for $1.5 trillion in the next Budget. That is a staggering and utterly unsustainable level of spending. Most of that is going to defense contractors.
The US doesn't want to live in a multipolar world. It wants to remain the hegemonic global superpower, basically to make a handful of really wealthy people even more wealthy at the expensive of everyone else.
So do I believe the US wants to treat China like an enemy that "needs" to be degraded? Absolutely. Do I think it should be that way or has to be that way? Absolutely not. But that is a minority position in US political circles. One thing the Republicans and Democrats are united on is the US imperialist project.
You have a handful of candidates like Graham Platner who think the path forward with China is one of cooperation not competition [1]. The Democratic Party, just like the Republican Party, hates this kind of rhetoric. That's what we're dealing with.
Part of selling that is convincing everyone is that China is or wants to do the exact same imperialism that the US is doing. What's China actually doing? The Belt and Road Initiative [2] where China basically sues its massive trade surplus to go around the world and build ports, airports and roads and to fund mines, farms, power plants and oil and gas. All on significantly better terms than the World Bank and IMF offer [3], so much so that Africa is considered "lost" to US interests in favor of China.
Fun fact: the United States Africa Command is headquartered in Germany [4]. Why? Because no African country wants it. It's one region where the US only has a handful of bases (eg Djibouti, Kenya).
When the country that produces most of the world's weapons is telling you that there's some big military threat that can only be solved by selling more weapons I just ask: consider the source.
[1]: https://x.com/PollTracker2024/status/2028936316285546537
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
[3]: https://www.cgdev.org/publication/chinese-and-world-bank-len...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Africa_Command
You have to be corrected on a few critical things. The US' power doesn't come from it making so many weapons. The structure of the government. The principles it stands for. The geographic perfection it lucked into. The allies it has (which, despite appearances, are still there.) The economic influence it has. The human talent it has soaked up from around the world as people moved to the US.
China can't replicate any of those things in the next 100 years. They are also handicapped by their ideology, which weakens their capacity to work the necessary logic for critical outcomes. They've tried and failed to achieve some kind of belt and road initiative to make up a bit of the difference in their supply chain dependencies. They've tried and failed to clone so many of our technologies, but what gets promoted are the ones they've succeeded at.
One of the admirals in the Pacific said something along the lines of (paraphrasing), "China is complaining that we're trying to contain them. My question to them would be, 'well, do you need to be contained?'"
China constantly contradicts itself about its ambitions. What you need to understand, from all this stuff you've been writing in this thread, is that China is no longer China. That great history, so much of its critical culture from the past. It's all trashed. China is now communist. It's now what communism wants, not what China wants or needs. Taiwan isn't about reunification with a brother, it's about communists crushing democracy.
If you look back at World War 2, it was in large part caused by communism. Comintern believed that communism could not co-exist with capitalism, so communism would have to be established globally. This threatened Japanese and German sovereignty. Granted, the Japanese and Germans had their own ideological problems, but just the threat of global communist expansion was enough to start a race for global resource control.
We downplay this about WW2, but if you want to understand anything about US national strategy, it is that we have been hedging our resource control against a potential flaring up of global communist ambitions again.
Now what is China doing? They're building the largest military in history that has no use other than expanding. Xi Jinping is purging his military like Stalin did before he invaded Poland and Finland.
The contradiction about communist ideology is that it is anti-western and anti-imperialism, but the success of communism is that it has to become western to suck less and it has to manufacture a psychological empire to succeed. Western "empires" have largely been a result of good fortune in water access. The US is the absolute pinnacle of that. Russia and China are worse off and since they are at a disadvantage there, the alternative is psychological expansion.
China is trying to make up the difference by using a massive population, but the entire logic around it is weak. China is easy to choke off and scale down. It would go the same way World War 1 and World War 2 went, except with more turmoil in each other's countries. It's easier now than ever to project power from inside enemy's countries than to need to send ships and missiles thousands of miles to reach them. The issue is that, China is more fragile in this regard than the US is in every regard despite all their social controls.
> The US' power doesn't come from it making so many weapons. The structure of the government. The principles it stands for.
This is high school propaganda. It's classic "they hate us because of our freedom" nonsense.
What principles? America was established on white supremacy, slavery, genocide, religious intolerance and exploitation. The government we formed was by and for wealthy white slaveowners.
Do you know when the last slave ship survivor died? It was 1940. Slavery survived in practice well beyond Emancipation. Forced servitude existed up until 1941 [1] and that only happened because of the propaganda threat from World War 2.
You're right about the geographical "luck" (other than, you know, the whole genocide part of it).
> [China is] also handicapped by their ideology
No, they're not. The reason the US goes after communist and socialist governments so vehemently is because any success threatens capitalism, not the other way around. If these systems were all doomed to fail, why can't we simply serve as a good example? Why do we need to militarily intervene, overthrow governments and starve countries that dare do anything different? Don't you find that odd?
China has transformed itself over recent decades and brought ~800 million people out of extreme poverty in the last century. All while living conditions and infrastructure crumbles in the West.
> One of the admirals in the Pacific said something along the lines of (paraphrasing), "China is complaining that we're trying to contain them. My question to them would be, 'well, do you need to be contained?'"
I don't know what point you think you're making with this. It can just as easily be used to justify imperialism because "we don't like anyone else succeeding". What kind of argument is that? If anyone needs to be contained, it's the US military, actually.
> China is now communist.
This isn't really true in practice. Sure it's the Chinese Communist Party and you may see labels like "socialist/communist transitional state" but what China really is is a command economy [2]. Chinese people have seen their standard of living change massively in their lifetimes. What do we do? Further concentrate wealth in the hands of the 10,000 richest people because it matters that Jeff Bezos has $210 billion instead of $200 billion.
> If you look back at World War 2, it was in large part caused by communism.
This is hitorically revisionist nonsense. Communism (if you define the USSR as such) saved Europe by defeating Nazi Germany at terrible cost. Stalin tried to warn Britain and France about Hitler and form an anti-Hitler alliance. Britain and France refused.. Japan was imperialist. Germany was imperialist. WW2 started at near the peak of the British Empire. Communism didn't cause the Rape of Nanking or the Holocaust or Japanese internment in the US.
For the rest of it, all I can say is "read a book".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_slavery_in_the_United_S...
You're making a lot of weak arguments that aren't based in real historical context.
Xi Jinping absolutely believes in Marxism-Leninism. You could argue there were reformers in past decades that held sway, but he doesn't want to see himself get replaced with a reformer.
There has never been a communist state, when we talk about communists we talk about movements that aspire to communism. Maybe the old CCP operated things more like a command economy, but today's China is more like planned mercantilism, which is a weaker regression from "capitalism" which is itself an inaccurate Marxist caricature of how regulated free markets actually work. The CCP leadership are very firmly Marxist-Leninist.
Industrialization amplified power potentials of trade and production, which did leave Japan and Germany operating below their potentials, but communism threatened them both. Look at the first actions Japan took and who made those decisions and what they were concerned about. Look at the first actions the nazis took in Germany, look at who they allied with Japan against, look at the book Hitler wrote about the threat he saw, look at who he labeled and what he did with them.
Russia is the largest country on Earth, by accident? No, because it expands its empire. China is huge, because it's never expanded its empire, it was just born that way? No, it has taken over adjacent regions and expanded its culture. It even tried to expand into Russia, but Russia threatened to nuke them.
Italian fascists and German nazis were a direct reaction to communists psychological imperialism. Marxist global expansion is itself a contradiction, because they hate imperialism, and yet aim to achieve the same goals. Communist International in the USSR was a prime enemy that Japan and Germany allied against. The US got Stalin to dissolve Comintern to try to deflate German and Japanese motivations, but also because the US was very anti-communist. We just saw Germany and Japan as the more immediate threats to the world.
Russia couldn't have beaten Germany without aid being shipped in from the US constantly.
What the US sees right now is the threat of another world war caused by communism.
Personally, looking at the kind of things you write, I think you should step way back, forget everything you've been taught and instead focus on the fundamentals. Go back into history and just understand the basic behaviors of countries, like they are organisms. How trade, industry, economy, military, geography, psychology, culture, communication, transportation, demographics, power imbalances, etc all contribute to the various behaviors and outcomes. Then you can say, ok, there are all of these details, but how many of the details are just....details and not the trend?
The threat that China poses is unmistakable. They have the warped ideology, societal repression, information control, massive state propaganda, most rapid military build-up in history, they have the largest global network of spies in history, they're threatening almost all of their neighbors (not just Taiwan) and so on. The list just keeps going.
If you think the US should simply sit back and watch it unfold without pushing back at all...yeah, we're not that naive.
I'm not the person you're responding to, but there are some counterpoints to your arguments.
China's stockpile of oil is only enough for a few months and that is only assuming that nothing happens to the stockpiles or the ability to access them. China does have a lot of renewable energy infrastructure, but these numbers don't convert directly into oil not being important. Oil is still very important. Their military runs on oil and for many kinds of products oil has no alternative. A lot of their population still uses ICE cars. You can put a percentage on it, like they are 60% less reliant on oil, but these numbers are useless if they still fundamentally rely on it in critically important ways. Which, they do.
Russian oil infrastructure has been under attack, which shows China that their oil imports from Russia are not guaranteed and their own infrastructure can be reached. Being at Venezuela and Iran's doorstep also shows that oil imports from them are not guaranteed.
As far as Iran goes, they can harass, but they can also lose all of their income and imports. While Iran and Russia are being scaled down, more western energy infrastructure can be coming online to replace it over the coming years even if this current situation gets resolved soon. Iran is being boxed in militarily, politically, economically, and more. They can troll, but even their trolling options are being slowly reduced. Their long range missiles can only achieve those ranges by removing the warhead and adding extra fuel. They are incapable of defending the island that most of their income flows through.
Speaking of islands. Xi Jinping absolutely wants to take Taiwan and he's been purging his military just like Stalin did before he invaded Poland and Finland. They've been building out manmade islands and military bases in the sea to increase their claim and threaten anyone who would intervene.
There is also a very big difference between political or token recognition of Taiwan as part of China as a cost of doing business vs real belief. The CCP sees Taiwan as a threat to harmony, because it serves as an example of democracy which China will always be a poor example of. If the CCP falls, Taiwan might be able to serve as a new center of gravity, which was also a credible threat from Hong Kong. That is the flip side of the "One China" policy, where it's only good for them so long as the CCP survives. Even without that, travel and communications between them increases interest in a true democracy that gets compared every time the CCP fails at something. COVID, property investment, unemployment, you name it. Ukraine was a similar issue with Russia, partly because they see Russian language and culture as an encapsulation that their mechanisms of control need to dominate within.
Taiwan is in very close proximity, so even if there is a lot of leverage against China from all angles, if they put everything into it they would probably be able to do it at great cost. They don't have the capability matrix to sufficiently achieve a Venezuela. If they tried that right now, it would just start a new 100 years of humiliation if the clock didn't already start the day Xi Jinping got in.
> China's stockpile of oil is only enough for a few months
China is still getting oil from Iran. Maybe that'll change but there's still (IIRC) >100M barrels of oil in transit to China.
Aside from that, the point isn't to have indefinite supplies. It's to have supplies the last longer than other countries. This is going to create huge problems for the US beofre it creates huge problems for China.
> Russian oil infrastructure has been under attack
This is a delicate balance. Ukraine can only do so much against Russian energy infrastructure before the US and Europe, who supplies the military, reins it in because of the damage done to the global energy market. This included restricting the supply and use of long-range weapons that could be used to strike energy infrastructure deep in Russia.
Like, did you know that some countries (eg Hungary) are still buying oil and gas from Russia [1]?
> As far as Iran goes, they can harass, but they can also lose all of their income and imports
Iran can do more than harass. They're winning. There is no military path to victory for the US and Israel short of the wide-scale use of nuclear weapons.
> ... more western energy infrastructure can be coming online to replace it over the coming years even if this current situation gets resolved soon
This is just wrong. No Western infrastructure can replace 20Mbpd of crude oil production and losing 20-25% of the world's LNG supply. None. You're talking about investment in the trillions of dollars over a decade or two, assuming you can even find raw resources to extract, whihc is far from certain.
> Speaking of islands. Xi Jinping absolutely wants to take Taiwan
Sorry but no. China considers this its territorial waters. And yes I know some of these "islands" (some are just reefs, basically, that they build artificial islands on) are closer to Taiwan or the Phillipines. China considers Taiwan part of its territory so that's no issue for them. Most of the world agrees (ie only ~10 nations recognize Taiwan).
China doesn't want the US or its allies to militarize "islands" right off its coast. Can you blame them?
> The CCP sees Taiwan as a threat to harmony, because it serves as an example of democracy
This is just "they hate us for our freedom" type Ameribrainned propaganda. China does more for its people than the US does. China pulled ~800 million people out of extreme poverty. The truth is that the Chinese government is quite popular with Chinese people. How do Chinese people talk about the US? One good recent example is the "kill line" [2].
Westoids project Western imperialism on China when China has no modern history of doing imperialism. "But Tibet" is the usual rejoinder. That was 1950. Other than that? There was a dispute with Vietnam over like 50 square miles in the late 1970s. And that's it. You want to compare that to the US history with regime change [3]?
Taiwan just isn't the threat to China Westerners make it out to be. We make it out as a threat because it justifies American imperialism. It's the result of propaganda. China believes that the Taiwan question will ultimately be resolved peacefully and there's absolutely no reason to resolve it militarily.
This is a difference of time frames. Every problem we have is immediate requiring a kneejerk reaction. China operates on five year plans but more than that, China plans far mor ein the future than that.
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/3/how-much-of-europes...
[2]: https://fpif.org/how-the-kill-line-redefined-the-american-dr...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
love your very cute assumption that China is going to sit there and do nothing.
you must be living in the Disneyland?
China's foreign policy has been rooted in non-interventionism since the time of Jiang. The only thing happening is Disneyland is belief that this is going to change because gas prices spiked above 10RMB/L
Comment was deleted :(
non-interventionism of letting your oil supply to be cut off?
life must be great in your lala land
> assumption that China is going to sit there and do nothing
One of the few advantages this war might bring would be China letting American radars paint its kit.
Is this some kind of astroturfing comment? China is supporting Iran and Russia economically and technologically, and is preparing for a Taiwan invasion.
I agree. He's missing a lot. If the US ends up with some measure of success this is a big counter to China and Russia. Is this some sort of 4D chess by Donald Trump. Probably not. But it can still have good outcomes. Are there risks? Sure.
"I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any special information, so I am going to treat that all with a high degree of uncertainty." - Then proceeds to tell us about the Iranian regime and other things he is not an expert on.
- Iran's conflict with the US didn't start in June 2025. While it had its ebbs and flows Iran has been in conflict with the US since the Islamic Revolution.
- Iran has been helping Russia in its war with Ukraine. That does have strategic implications to the US. So it's not true that Iran does not matter strategically. Those Shaed drones are flying into Ukraine by the thousands.
- Iran has supported the Houthis in Yemen (which effectively can close the Suez Canal traffic when they feel like it) and has levers on Saudi Arabia both directly and indirectly through Yemen. Another strategic lever.
- The whole comparison to Iraq's ground war is completely irrelevant. Iran and Iraq are very different countries with very different history and this conflict is very different in many ways. The US is not going to invade and conquer Iran.
- If Iran has made so much trouble over the years without ICBMs and nuclear weapons should we just wait for them to acquire these technologies? What do we think about the rationality of this regime vs. the North Korean one? Is North Korea really the right analogy? "Iran was not a major strategic priority" maybe add yet? When it becomes a major strategic priority with ICBMs and nuclear weapons then what?
Nobody knows where this war will end. Did the US have to go to war now? Probably not. Was there an opportunity between the internal unrest, the massacre of Iranian civilians, the intelligence and military superiority. Yes. What would the outcome be of not going to war? What's the certainty of that outcome? I don't think a nuclear Iran with ICBMs would be a good thing for the world and they would definitely go there.
> More relevantly for us, Iran is 3.5 times larger than Iraq and roughly twice the population.
Worth noting that at the time of invasion of Iraq they had about 25 million people per gemeni. They now have about 46 mil people per wikipedia. All else equal, we are comparing 25 mil to 93 mil and not half of 93 mil to 93 mil.
Excellent catch.
I also used this as an opportunity to reference the now archived[0] CIA Factbook[1] which does put the 2003 Iraq population at 25 million.
Also don't forget that Iran is far more technologically advanced than Iraq was. Iraqis had 70s tech, while Iran has stuff like hypersonic missiles that even the US can't produce right now.
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I'd be curious about a citation for the "lose half of their babies" statement.
This review of the data & papers has some grim numbers, but nothing remotely that dramatic.
From over a decade ago .. its still happening:
https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/2/e004166
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2009_2014/documents/...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277304922...
But of course, it depends who you ask. American institutions cannot be trusted, obviously.
Your first link is the same as mine.
Nothing in any of the links seems to support the assertion that “Even still today mothers in Baghdad lose half of their babies to deformities caused by the US' criminal use of depleted uranium”
I have no doubt that what happened, and is still happening, is tragic. I do doubt that statement.
I agree with the OP, American sources are untrustworthy on this matter. Do you read Arabic?
I'm not disputing that American sources are untrustworthy. I'm not disputing that the situation is bad.
I don't read Arabic, but I'd be happy to look at a citation with assistance: if 50% of babies in Baghdad are dying, someone would be reporting on it.
Second link:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2009_2014/documents/...
Maybe you didn’t read it.
Right, 15 years ago in a recently heavily bombarded city 50% of children were born with defects, according to one study. Terrible even if off by an order of magnitude.
Nothing in that document, or anything else I've found, supports the claim that today in Baghdad half of all children are dying from birth defects.
Things were bad. Are still bad. But throwing around inaccurate numbers does not help matters.
The Straight of Hormuz is open to any country willing to pay $2M per voyage. Any country except the U.S. and Israel.
The most important aspect of the "toll" is that Iran prefers payment in yuan, not dollars.
If Iran succeeds in nationalizing the Straight and is successful in enforcing the toll, it represents a very serious threat to the dominance of the U.S. Dollar as the world's reserve currency for trading energy.
> The Straight of Hormuz is open to any country willing to pay $2M per voyage. Any country except the U.S. and Israel.
The straight is not physically closed by Iran. It's closed by insurance companies which asking a very high war risk insurance premiums. Even if you pay $2M it unlikely will reduce the cost of insurance. That's why very few ships are choosing this option (and some of them are shadow fleet tankers which probably have no insurance).
well, you can view it Iranian are willing to insure the vessel for $2M fee - that it will not get hit by them during the crossing ;). Once they are in the Oman sea, they can use traditional insurance.
You can view it like that, but most people don't. At least the people involved manning those tankers don't.
And why should them? It appears that the Iranian armed forces started acted quite autonomously, by design. They know that communications are not secure, so local commanders have a very high latitude in what actions they deem correct to take. If such a commander deems that asking and collecting $2 MM per vessel is a good idea, they'll do it. But if another commander thinks that sinking a passing vessel is what their standing orders are, they'll do it too, not being aware that the toll was paid. So, if you are the captain of such a vessel, what do you do? Do you complain to Iran for not holding their end of the bargain?
They are all in a whatsapp or telegram together.
I mean ships are going through right now, so clearly at least some people do view it like that.
People work on dangerous fishing trawlers because of the $. People can be found who risk their life for money.
Right, clearly you can always find people to ship oil through the strait. So the whole notion that nobody will use it because it's dangerous is nonsense.
this is not how the maritime industry works in any way.
It seems Iran sent a notice to the UN recently declaring the straight closed, which, uh, no. But sure.
> The most important aspect of the "toll" is that Iran prefers payment in yuan, not dollars.
> If Iran succeeds in nationalizing the Straight and is successful in enforcing the toll, it represents a very serious threat to the dominance of the U.S. Dollar as the world's reserve currency for trading energy.
This theory seems to predict that CNY/USD should have gone up since Feb 27 as everyone rushes to trade and obtain yuan so they can pay the Iranians. But in fact the opposite is the case; that currency pair peaked Feb 27 after a bull run (well, only about +7%) since approximately "liberation day".
Seems pretty unlikely that the Yuan is going to be the dominant world currency, given its capital controls.
It would legitimately be hilarious though if the result of this conflict was iran being the one to enact regime change. In terms of the global order
Heh. Trump asks the oracle at Delphi what will happen if he launches the war.
“The war will surely achieve regime change,” replies the oracle.
“Great, let’s go,” says Trump, who never read Herodotus.
That's what will happen due to iran's dickhead move...
Being bombed does not mean it can target non-combatant countries without consequences... Nor does it mean it can start tolling ships $2M per voyages...
Now that current iran regime has learnt it can do those things...
what choice do the gulf nations, or even all the asian+european (strait users) nations have?
Form a coalition against iran, and send troops to change the regime...
even if US backs away, the others will finish the job
> iran's dickhead move...
Remind me again, which country started this whole mess?
> what choice do the gulf nations, or even all the asian+european (strait users) nations have?
They can go "yeah, you know, the US has been less than reliable as an ally recently, what with absurd tariffs, saber rattling around greenland, belitteling NATO, etc., and they seem unwilling to change, so we're just gonna pay the piper, and get oil, and make arrangements with the Chinese (aka. the worlds most powerful industry), and if they US doesn't like it, that sounds like a them-problem..."
What's very likely not gonna happen, is other countries fighting the US's war for them. NATO already told trump no, other countries won't give different answers.
And anyone who wants to actually invade Iran...well, let's put it this way: Iran is 3-4 times the size of Afghanistan, with even more difficult terrain, and has a standing army of 600,000 men, with over 300,000 in reserve. They have an air force, are proficient in the manufacture of drones, have a working intelligence network. And they've had 4 decades to dig into defensive positions.
In short, it's not gonna happen.
Don't think there is much of a point replying to this person seriously as he is obviously a troll. You can take half a minute to check his profile
People having worldviews you disagree with does not make them "trolls".
> which country started this whole mess?
what has already started, is already started -- I agree on Trump being dick, but does that make iran's "making new enemies" a wise move?
> NATO already told trump no, other countries won't give different answers.
of course it said no BEFORE IRAN started the $2M toll (and other countries don't like trump due to tariff-for-everyone)
if the current iran regime was strategically wise, iran should have fired everything it got to Israel, and make the missile interception rate down to 40%. That would have actually showed it's power.
now, with even UAE's missile interception rate of 96%, iran actually showed its missiles are nuisances, not some existential threat.
600,000 men and 300,000 in reserve -- well that would have mattered a lot in medieval wars... "they have an airforce" -- well do they actually have planes? "have a working intelligence network" -- hmm...
no you're way way way over-estimating iran
the only strategic move for iran was selecting one specific target (israel) and focusing all its might, not becoming a rambo
Their win condition isn't destroying Israel, its outlasting the American will for the war until a leadership change happens. They aren't the attackers in this war. They need to just defend until America and Israel give up because it is too costly at home.
> its outlasting the American will for the war until a leadership change happens
well even in the best-case scenario (trump impeachment), I highly doubt any democrat president can actually stop at status quo -- rather, the next president has exactly zero choice but to wipe out iran MORE than trump (and call trump a weakling)
just leave Iran be and get out? well he/she could, GIVEN that Iran didn't show its potential to be bully on the gulf states and didn't even think about that $2M toll...
now? well even if a pirate has a sad back story, doesn't mean the navy can leave them be.
by missiling everyone nearby, iran just became too dangerous to nearby neighbors...
by even talking about $2M toll, iran just became too financially dangerous even to strait users... I mean, even if it's "just $2M", what will stop iran from asking $5M, $10M, or even $100M ?
> iran's "making new enemies"
Those countries were already enemies of Iran by virtue of housing US bases, military installations, etc.
> what has already started, is already started -- I agree on Trump being dick, but does that make iran's "making new enemies" a wise move?
There is no downside on making the Gulf states enemies. Quite to the contrary: they might lobby the USA to end this madness. It's a serious damage to the importance of the USA in the region if it can't or doesn't want to open the strait again, either by force or by making a deal.
Delusional. The GCC has only 40,000 troops.
But they swear an oath to serve Richard Stallman unto death.
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woah so you read this as "iran is morally wrong"?
well, that's secondary thing right now
what's dumb is dumb
what's the least thing you should do when fighting a war? making more enemies.
even on moral side... if someone in walmart bullies you, and you bully back to your classmates, does that make you morally justified?
plus, if you showed your cards ("decades-old deterrence threats"), you're out of options
Iran is not flattening Emirati hospitals, like Israel would be doing in their shoes.
Iran is targeting direct US/Israeli interests, which includes military facilities, military personnel, and energy facilities with substantial US/Israeli partnerships. That latter part is particularly key here, and what pro-Israeli propaganda is anxious to suppress.
> plus, if you showed your cards ("decades-old deterrence threats"), you're out of options
Yes, it is a desperation move after undeterred US-Israeli terrorism and brazen violations of international law. But it's also working.
But it's still described as a $2M toll, not a 13.81M CNY toll. So I guess we're not there yet.
USD dominance isn't going anywhere, because all of the critical metrics are still basically uncontested by any alternative. China and Russia are losing allies left and right. They're demonstrating that they support terrorism. Nobody is going to decide that their currencies are the new hot thing.
China poses a huge threat, but some of their worst advantages aren't viable. We know things they have, so we tell them things we have. If you do X, we do Y. Thus some of their big advantages are nullified, unless they get reckless. Same as the nuclear issue, weapons you've invested in yet cannot even use, because they become part of new rules.
Some of that has been clarified in the trade tug of war, showing each other's dependencies. Some is being shown by also showing how easy it is for Russian infrastructure to be hit, or how easy it is to put a choke hold on critical energy, or to simply capture a dictator for that matter. It isn't even just those things, it's also the cadence and timeframe. Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and Russia all under severe pressure within just a few months at the start of 2026.
At most we've maybe seen some limited sabotage of infrastructure inside the US and perhaps aboard a carrier, some sharing of targeting information, etc.
If Russia and China are leveraging any of their real potential for pressure, it sure is hard to tell.
What about... Euro. Gold. Bitcoin. Currency baskets.
I mean, Gold is an asset. Bitcoin is an asset. Those aren't currencies, even if people like to think of them that way.
As far as the Euro, Europe is not America. The European Union is also not the United States. America has geographic advantages that Europe lacks. The US has structural stability advantages that the EU lacks. People sometimes argue things like, the EU is more of a framework or general agreement, while the US is an actual country.
The amount of USD in circulation dwarfs all other currencies and makes it more cushioned against shocks. It's much more liquid than gold or bitcoin. If you need to get actual things done in the real world and you need to get them done quickly, USD is the currency you want to generally have.
It's also the least likely to simply poof or disappear. China is the only real threat the US has faced since World War 2 and we're handling it pre-emptively. You could argue we were pre-empting the CCP even before World War 2, since we were supporting the anti-communist forces inside China before Japan attacked it and unified them against it.
The outcome of a lot of wars comes down to physics. The physics are on the side of the US. USD isn't going anywhere. Iranian and Venezuelan oil will be traded in USD now as well.
The list is longer than just the US and Israel, it includes all allies and nations supporting them, so, most of the gulf states.
Iran letting ships through for too small price means that oil price will fall and their only leverage over USA goes away.
But Iran let the International Maritime Org that anyone who is not US/Israel or not attacking or supporting attacks on them can pass through the strait of Hormuz. Is the $ 2M still a thing?
No one in the US asked for this. Such a dumb move from the current administration.
The traders with a five-minute preview of trump's tweets beg to differ
I've often wondered why the stock market oscillates while Trump is in office. If I just knew a little in advance...
Yeah who could have guessed electing a narcissistic moron surrounded by incompetent clowns would result in dumb moves?
Who could have possibly guessed that when voting for fascists, they'd start doing the same thing as all the other fascists.
You can’t say that. Trump is very inconsistent and a consummated liar, so plenty of people didn’t believe on his promises to deliver fascism. And plenty of people did believe on his promise to end wars. /s
Whether your little black heart wishes concentration camps or you’re just hoping your paycheck goes a bit further, voting for a con man is a terrible idea.
You write "/s" but that's unironically the logic a lot of these idiot enablers use.
"Oh he's just trolling", "it's a negotiation tactic, didn't you read his book?", "chill out, it's just a joke", "but what about OBAMA!?"
I mean it can't be worse than Biden right? RIGHT?
idk this move, along with firing missiles even to non-combatant countries, is going to fuk-up iran...
I mean, even before the $2M toll, if you're kuwait/UAE/saudi/etc, what choice do you have? form a coalition against iran
now.. with that $2M toll, iran just learnt it can just toll the ships...
so what choice do all those strait-using countries have? pay $2M or more, even after US leaves?
nope... they'll form a coalition against iran
it's highly unfortunate that trump started the war, but iran's way of things are just making more enemies -- it'll pay with regime change within few months
> now.. with that $2M toll, iran just learnt it can just toll the ships...
But the strait has two sides and Iran only controls one side. The UAE/Oman on the other side could equally threaten to attack Iranian ships unless Iran pays them a toll.
According to this map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Strait_of_hormuz_full.jpg shipping lines are in Oman's territorial waters. Iran controls the whole area by creating a risk that a ship can be attacked. And if Oman would try to impose payments it would break the UN convention on the Law of the Sea.
well I guess that makes Iran really fked up...
the strait-using countries are surely going to "make a lesson out of" iran exactly for that reason
I think what we should have learned from this is that it's extremely hard to "make a lesson out of" Iran if you depend on moving oil past their borders... the gulf states are much more exposed to this than the US is, and much less powerful.
They are also not neutral - they have been paying in to the US protection racket, and are discovering that their payments haven't bought much.
> it's extremely hard to "make a lesson out of" Iran if you depend on moving oil past their borders
it's not just gulf states -- look at who are the customers of those gulf states are. the whole asia, europe, and america -- the whole world is their customer.
Even if it's "extremely hard", those countries have no choice but "make a lesson out of" iran -- just like what we did with pirates
why would those "customers of gulf" just leave iran? after US leaves, will iran regime suddenly become nice and stop forcing that $2M-per-voyage bill?
no, and even if iran regime promises "I'll never bill those ships", how could you trust on that promise? the only way to ensure free-ship-passing would be obliterating Iran as an example, even if US backs away.
> They are also not neutral - they have been paying in to the US protection racket
hmm so were they "helping" US bomb iran? "being neutral" means it didn't participate on attacking iran, not whether it paid or not.
If Canada and Mexico started letting Iran launch bombing sorties against US cities from within their borders, would the US consider them neutral?
2 Million a ship seems like a pretty cheap price to pay for the damage the us and Israel have inflicted on Iran - they cannot be made to pay it though, so I suppose the rest of us will have to (through marginally higher oil prices in the long term - much less than the spectacularly high oil prices the US war will cause in the short term)
> price to pay for the damage the us and Israel have inflicted on Iran
Well if we're talking reparations, shouldn't Iran pay for the damage Hezbollah inflicted on Israel with Iranian supplied weapons for decades?
Since 1985, Hezbollah has killed approximately 600 Israelis (if you count IDF soldiers during the occupation of Beirut). Israel has killed 5x that number of civilians in the last two weeks, if you count Lebanon as well as Iran. If you count soldiers...
It would be miniscule compared to the damage Israel inflicted on Lebanon for decades
The value of the oil / natural gas production in the Gulf states is not infinite. Nobody except the US has the force projection capacity to fight a major war against Iran. If they are not interested in fighting that war, the rest of the world will find that the cheapest and least disruptive option is to cut consumption. To assume that nobody is shipping oil and natural gas from the Gulf, until a new status quo emerges in the region.
> the cheapest and least disruptive option is to cut consumption
And good for the environment!
Most nations who are affected don't have a blue-water navy or similar means to pose a serious threat to Iran. They have to either back the USA or deal with the toll and the uncertainty that comes with it.
> they'll form a coalition against iran
and do what?
> and do what?
Bomb shit. The Saudi and UAE militaries aren't anything to sneeze at. (The area cross the Strait from the UAE is majority Arab [1].)
I think it's generally good strategy to not provoke new belligerents against oneself.
Saudi and UAE has less air power than US+Israel, whatever could be bombed already bombed.
But Saudi and UAE are ruled by rich regimes who benefit from oil revenue, and very vulnarable to Iran strikes, they more likely will pay those $2m.
> Saudi and UAE has less air power than US+Israel
Less plus some is still more.
> whatever could be bombed already bombed
This is plainly untrue. We're still bombing things. Missiles are still being fired. Power plants and refineries continue to run.
> Saudi and UAE are ruled by rich regimes who benefit from oil revenue, and very vulnarable to Iran strikes, they more likely will pay those $2m
That functionally cedes Emirati and Saudi sovereignty to Iran. Today it's $2mm. Tomorrow it's anything else Tehran requires.
> That functionally cedes Emirati and Saudi sovereignty to Iran. Today it's $2mm. Tomorrow it's anything else Tehran requires.
the point is besides full scale invasion which Saudi and UAE won't do, there is no reliable way to remove threat of Iran striking oil infra, they just don't have way to deal with the problem.
> full scale invasion which Saudi and UAE won't do
Don't need a full-scale invasion. Just a land grab on the coasts. They can't do it alone. But they can provide troops (and mercenaries) as well as staying power where the U.S. cannot.
> there is no reliable way to remove threat of Iran striking oil infra
Barring invasion: mutualize the damage. Pot Iranian tankers. Seed their ports with mines. Israel locking up the Caspian and the UAE and Saudi Arabia locking up Hormuz to Iran changes the calculus of the war in Tehran and makes suing for peace–not with America and Israel, but with the Gulf–tenable.
>Don't need a full-scale invasion. Just a land grab on the coasts.
As the article points out, this just makes the soldiers on the coast the targets of the drones and missiles.
And it is a very large coastline to secure. How many mercenaries can they feed into the grinder? They certainly can't keep it up like Russia.
There was a semi-stable equilibrium and the US ruined it. Now Iran controls the straight and it will be very very costly to go back.
> this just makes the soldiers on the coast the targets of the drones and missiles
Correct. That also reveals the locations of launchers, artillery pieces, et cetera. A winnable game if you have cheap bodies.
> it is a very large coastline to secure
To secure the Strait? Absolutely. To converge firepower onto a few beachheads? Not necessarily. And a Gulf land grab wouldn't be comprehensive. Just the islands (e.g. Larak, Hengam and East Qeshm) and maybe the land directly across from the Musandam Peninsula. (Probably not to hold. Just draw fire and trade back to Tehran. Hell, gift it to Trump.)
Kuwait and Iraq remain screwed. But if you're a Gulf exporter, that isn't necessarily a bad thing...
> There was a semi-stable equilibrium and the US ruined it. Now Iran controls the straight and it will be very very costly to go back
Sure. The point is how those costs will be borne. I don't think the emerging status quo is tenable for the Gulf.
Without the US, Saudi Arabia et al would be significantly outnumbered in a war with Iran. It's very unlikely that they have the capacity to invade Iran, even without considering drones. Factoring in drones, they will simply run out of soldiers before Iran runs out of drones, and the Iranian army can conduct mop-up operations at their leisure.
> Without the US, Saudi Arabia et al would be significantly outnumbered
True. Without the U.S., the most they can do is pot Iranian ships so they sue for limited peace.
> Factoring in drones, they will simply run out of soldiers before Iran runs out of drones
Both the KSA and UAE have access to mercenaries. They wouldn't be running out of fodder any time soon.
> Don't need a full-scale invasion. Just a land grab on the coasts. They can't do it alone. But they can provide troops (and mercenaries) as well as staying power where the U.S. cannot.
they couldn't win this against much closer, smaller and weaker Yemen. They just don't have functional military.
> mutualize the damage. Pot Iranian tankers. Seed their ports with mines.
I don't believe they will do this because they love oil money too much, unlike Iranian regime, which is idiologically/religiously driven, and endured for many years of various attacks and sanctions.
> couldn't win this against much closer, smaller and weaker Yemen. They just don't have functional military
KSA went it alone in Yemen. And from that–as well as various proxy wars in Africa–both it and the UAE have learned.
> don't believe they will do this because they love oil money too much
Loving oil money means wanting to export your oil. That said, I think the monarchies are more politically vulnerable. So it's harder for them to commit to this path. (It would also involve pissing off Trump.) But that doesn't mean it's strategically off the table, particularly for Saudi Arabia, which is less dependent on the Strait than the UAE.
> KSA went it alone in Yemen.
there were many countries involved in coalition. UAE specifically sent troups to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Aden_(2018)
But the issue is that KSA just didn't perform on the ground, well equipped troups were overrun by Houthies with AK consistently. Not clear if they changed anything.
> Loving oil money means wanting to export your oil.
right, if Iran will take reasonable cuts, gulf states won't escalate.
> if Iran will take reasonable cuts, gulf states won't escalate
Unlikely. Again, a reasonable cut today can turn into any ask tomorrow. It's worth tremendous costs to the Gulf to ensure the Strait returns to at least neutrality.
If there is a good time for unreasonable ask its today, Iran has strong incentive to say: you withdraw US troupes/bases or no tankers through the strait. If they don't do it today, they won't do it in next few decades.
Also, I don't think controlling shoreline will give anything: tankers are easily strikeable via drones/missiles from inner-Iran.
The only solution: is deep invasion supported with internal uprising with full defeat of current regime.
well I don't actually think Saudi & UAE will send their own countrymen...
rather, they'd just use oil money and pay gurkha mercenaries
this didn't work for them in Yemen. And Iran is farther and stronger.
The Saudi and UAE militaries are indeed something to sneeze at. Go read the comments about them from anyone in the US military whose worked with them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/19ckc6l/saudi_a...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/qhmbog/why_i...
https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/hqfatn/why_are_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/fbd97k/is_...
well you don't expect them to fight bravely -- well, I don't even expect Saudis to even send their own citizens to iran
rather, you expect them to pay for the missiles and mercenaries like gurkhans
gurkhans are few and already employed, and there is no much substitution.
>Iran would have to respond and thus would have to try to find a way to inflict ‘pain’ on the United States to force the United States to back off. But whereas Israel is in reach of some Iranian weapons, the United States is not.
This is too complacent for my liking. Every rusty trawler is a viable launch platform for Shahed type drones (operational range ~2500 km per Wikipedia). Nearly every US oil refinery and LNG terminal are on the coast. And then there are floating oil platforms (e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perdido_(oil_platform))
The article then says:
>One can never know how well prepared an enemy is for something.
And:
>And if I can reason this out, Iran – which has been planning for this exact thing for forty years certainly can.
I'll leave it here for y'all to ponder.
> Every rusty trawler is a viable launch platform for Shahed type drones
And where exactly are you planning to operate that trawler out of? Or are you going to send it across the Atlantic on its own (well, with a couple of tankers accompanying it, but never mind that) and hope no-one pays attention?
> operational range ~2500 km per Wikipedia
I think you either added an extra zero or were looking at the hyped prototypes rather than the models in actual use. The Shaheds have ranges in the hundreds of miles, not thousands.
>I think you either added an extra zero or were looking at the hyped prototypes
I thought I was clear where I was looking - here, you may check for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136.
> Its range has been estimated to be anywhere from between 970–1,500 km (600–930 mi) to as much as 2,000–2,500 km (1,200–1,600 mi).
You presented the absolute maximum estimate as if it were the conventionally accepted value. That's incredibly misleading.
Comment was deleted :(
I assume that smuggling drones into the US is easier than it was for Ukraine to smuggle them into Russia.
Its harder. 20% of Russians(my estimate) have connections to Ukraine (relatives, friends, or were born there) and could be Ukrainian agents, there are lots of land routes how you can smuggle stuff. Things are not as well connected between Iran and US.
Agents in the US would just be normal citizens asking for money/crypto. You'd need to find fools to deceive, but a lot of people fall for scams to get small gains. Many hard drug users in particular are often rather self centered in my limited experience.
Or if you wanted to attack refineries, you could possibly select some climate change activists to do it for you?
Or find angry children to do it. Make things go bang for fun.
Our industrial infrastructure appears to be vulnerable to me (as a superficial opinion).
The real fix is to help poor people in other countries to like the US. And work hard at avoiding doing things that radicalise dangerous haters.
I believe all those pools of opportunities are much smaller to what Ukraine has in Russia.
We're getting into Tom Clancy novel territory here.
You know what they say when you assume.
These people are used to executing civilians when they are the police. That's how IRGC, hamas and hezbollah work. You won't see much action from people like that when they can't just shoot anyone that they don't like.
> And where exactly are you planning to operate that trawler out of? Or are you going to send it across the Atlantic on its own
China operates fishing fleets all around the globe but Iran is not known for this so Iranian fishing vessel in western Atlantics will rise suspicions. An ordinary cargo vessel heading to the Central America on other hand may sail unnoticed.
How to identify a vessel as Iranian though? They can just register it in a Caribbean country and give it a less suspicious name.
2500 km is a realistic range of you follow the war in Ukraine. Kyiv is frequently attacked with Shahed drones and it is far from frontlines.
> Kyiv is frequently attacked with Shahed drones and it is far from frontlines. reply
It's a couple of hundred miles from the frontlines in Kharkiv, and the Russian border to the North is even closer.
Shaheds are launched not from the frontline (to avoid a launch site being attacked) but I would agree that a typical attack distance is around 500 km (which is much less than the range stated in wikipedia). Still this unlikely the max range of this drone and there is a tradeoff - one can increase range by reducing the war head mass.
The genius of the Shahid drone is that the fuel is the warhead. Look at Shahid attacks - mostly FA damage, very little HE damage. They are for killing people and destruction of soft infrastructure by fire, not destruction of hardened infrastructure by explosion.
The fuel tank is heavily segmented, so they are difficult to shoot down. When shot, they lose fuel but continue to the target. They get to the target with less fuel, but still get there. The HE them detonates the remaining fuel load.
A Shahid could do a 2500km mission, and arrive with a very small fuel load. That will be effective against targets that already have enough fuel to burn there, such as apartment buildings, petroleum energy infrastructure, office buildings, etc. Less so against places with little flammable material concentration such as hospitals, military installations (other than fuel and munitions depots), roads and runways, etc.
Kyiv is pretty close to the Russian border to its north, even Moscow itself is less than 1000km away.
I think the furthest hits Ukraine has been able to achieve with drones were on a refinery about 1300km from Ukraine controlled land.
It's surprisingly difficult to find ships if they don't want to be found. Iran has been able to maintain it's shadow fleet for decades for a reason. It'd be more difficult to get a boat that close to the USA for sure, but not impossible. What is more likely are attacks by the various Iranian terrorist organisatons that have been showing up especially in the UK [1, 2].
[1] https://news.sky.com/story/four-arrested-on-suspicion-of-syp...
[2] https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-890851
It's probably an accident, since I would normally expect them to claim responsibility and victory, but a refinery exploded in Texas the other day: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/valero-oil-refinery-explosion-t...
> Every rusty trawler is a viable launch platform for Shahed type drones
The point is Iran isn't going to be landing tactical, much less strategic, fire on America unless we royally fuck up. It will be closer to terror/psyop attacks.
The war should be over by March 31st.
Netanyahu has a deadline. He is facing a snap election. If the Knesset doesn't pass a budget by March 31st, Israel votes 90 days later, and Netanyahu is not expected to win. Worse for Netanyahu, he's on trial for corruption charges, and once he's out of office, he's probably headed for jail.
The war was intended to give Netanyahu's popularity a boost, but that did not work out.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-seeks-av...
The elections would happen by default in October: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Israeli_legislative_elect...
The budget will likely be approved in parliament. Netanyahu has a solid majority and his partners are not interested in triggering elections. I'd be very surprised if that wasn't the case. Netanyahu survived many worse political crisis. I'll be happy to see him gone but he always pulls out some magic trick from his hat. The biggest factor will be whether the Arab parties will unite and actually get their people to go and vote. That they didn't in the last elections is how Bibi got to form the government again. Even if that happens this becomes tricky because you'll likely end up with a minority government.
90 days vs. October isn't that much of a difference either and a lot can change in 90 days.
Jesus, I had no idea that the Arab vote in Israel was so cruicial and that voter turn out is so low. Mid fifties for the 2022 election?
The Arab parties are potential "kingmakers" in the coalition arithmetic. In particular, it was Mansour Abbas that made the "change government" (Lapid-Bennett) and if there's any chance of unseating Bibi again it'll come down to him. And to my knowledge he hasn't ruled out joining Bibi either, if there's a deal to be made.
A lot also depends on whether the Arab parties run together in the coming elections or not.
This toothpaste is probably not going in the tube by March 31, even if Netanyahu tries to scrape it back in.
Iran has made it quite clear that it is not up to the aggressors as to when this ends.
> Iran has made it quite clear that it is not up to the aggressors as to when this ends
Israel and the U.S. can absolutely end the war and leave a turd in the Gulf states' mess kits. The former would focus on Hezbollah. The latter start laying into Cuba or whatever.
They can try. I don't think they'll like the consequences. Imagine if Saudi Arabia decides it's not friends with the US anymore and won't send any more oil here. That'll shake things up a bit, won't it? And Iran will be even more pissed off and determined to get a nuke than before, probably still choking the strait. You're talking about the US and Israel leaving the biggest, most obvious turd in history on the entire world's dining table.
Not saying it can't happen. There doesn't seem to be a bottom to the incompetence.
> don't think they'll like the consequences
Sure. The point is strategic depth absolutely gives America this choice. The way it could actually happen is with a regime change. Special election in Israel or midterm full switch of the Congress together with war-powers resolutions in America.
To be clear, I’m not advocating for this. But it’s a bit silly to say Iran gets a veto on this at a kinetic level. They don’t. They have a de facto veto on strategic and messaging levels. But so did Vietnam.
> Imagine if Saudi Arabia decides it's not friends with the US anymore and won't send any more oil here
This isn’t a realistic threat. America and Israel are not in positions to be lectured by Riyadh. Like, we started this mess without bothering to materially loop them in.
Oil is a fungible commodity.
It's not as fungible as you would hope. Funging refineries and transport capacity takes time.
I read on HN actually about different types of crude. Needing different refineries. Hence Venezuelan oil being atttactive.
Certain kinds of crude gets refined in certain refineries. The economic shockwaves are going to be felt in ways no one expects. We will see!
Sorta. There's different makeups for oil (light vs heavy, sulfer content, etc) with refineries being tuned towards a particular type. Retooling for a different type isn't necessarily economical so it depends on the types of oil being discussed.
That would work great politically for both - we shot some bombs are basically realized we killed a bunch of innocent people/children and realized we gotta jet now achieving nothing but making sure Iran can continue even stronger than before (after China replenishes what was “bombed” in a few months?
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Iran, got that? 31st March. Add it to your Google Calendar.
He writes that the region is not very important to the USA. It's not, but it is a strategically important area, not only in terms of its location, at the nexus of Asia, Africa and Europe, but also because of the oil there.
Now the US is not dependent on Middle Eastern Oil, but Japan, China and other countries are. So controlling the region will mean a lever of power over those regions.
At present, gasoline prices in China have risen by 11% since the war started. In the U.S., they have risen by 33%.
The U.S. is dependent on oil and the oil market is global. Even if the U.S. is a net exporter of oil, Americans still pay increased prices for pretty much everything as a result and the economy suffers. The only way around this would be a scheme in which domestic oil producers are forced to sell to American refiners at pre-war prices, similar to the "National Energy Program" that was tried in Canada during the '80's. (Spoiler: It didn't turn out well.)
Yes, the U.S. is less likely to see its pumps run dry and U.S. oil companies are going to be very happy with the increased prices. However, unless it goes the NEP route, U.S. companies are going to export more oil creating shorter supply at home. Americans will pay the same high prices everyone else will be paying. As we're seeing now, the U.S. might actually see even higher price increases than countries like China.
Imagine if the US government diverted the billions spent on this war into building out green energy infrastructure.
If everyone had electric cars charging from solar then Iran's strait gambit would be much less effective.
American citizens have known since 1973 that their dependence on oil puts them at the mercy of every Middle East dictator. The governments have known this clearly since the 1940s - see the Barbarossa operation. The US had literal generations to reduce their oil dependency and yet chose to remain dependent. It has nothing to do with the current war.
The US succeeded in reducing their oil dependency and the country is now a net exporter. That doesn't solve the environmental concerns, nor hermetically seal the country from trends in global oil markets, but the US's energy independence agenda has definitely been successful on its own terms.
Unfortunately, it hasn't diminished the number of American foreign policy experts who think it's very important to fight lots of wars in the Middle East.
It seems to me that the current war in the middle east has more to do with ensuring those who chant Death To America do not develop nuclear weapons and to set back their ballistic missile program.
It's kind of a problem if you can't definitely say why a war of aggression is being fought, no? But if we do say that this war is being primarily fought to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons, then it has to be considered an unmitigated failure. The current outlook is immeasurably worse than it was at the end of the Biden administration, and I'd charitably describe Biden as having done next to nothing to stop them.
I agree those are big problems! That's why I supported JCPOA. The US foreign policy blob wanted to bomb Iran instead, though, with very unclear explanations of how bombing Iran would cause a kind and non-belligerent government to take over. The more articulate members seem to take it as an article of faith that people react to American bombs by doing what the American government wants; the less articulate members have just been insulting journalists when they ask basic questions about whether there's a plan or what the goal is.
A treaty whose key articles would start expiring in.. late 2025. Which Iran had no motivation whatsoever to extend had it being kept (imagine this Iran but with 2-4 trillion dollars more, more than a few going to drones and missiles). You'd have this war but on way worse terms.
If Trump truly cared about nukes, he wouldn't have torn up the treaty in his first term. This war's about catering to Israel and distracting from the Epstein files.
The treaty that would have expired in January 2026 and left Iran with far more resources? Biden gave Iran $6 billion, a month later the Gazans infiltrated Israel with Iranian-funded weaponry.
The article states that it's not important for any reason other than oil and shipping:
"The entire region has exactly two strategic concerns of note: the Suez Canal (and connected Red Sea shipping system) and the oil production in the Persian Gulf and the shipping system used to export it. So long as these two arteries remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States."
Unfortunately these two things have been the major drivers of politics of the last 80 years in the region.
China is a primary adversary for the US. Oil is a major resource for both countries, supporting economics and defense.
First, observe the top 10 oil reserve countries:
1. Venezuela: ~303–304 billion barrels (mostly heavy crude) 2. Saudi Arabia: ~267 billion barrels 3. Iran: ~208–209 billion barrels 4. Canada: ~163–170 billion barrels (mostly oil sands) 5. Iraq: ~145–147 billion barrels 6. United Arab Emirates (UAE): ~111–113 billion barrels 7. Kuwait: ~101 billion barrels 8. Russia: ~80–110 billion barrels (estimates vary) 9. United States: ~40–70 billion barrels (reserves fluctuate with prices/technology) 10. Libya: ~48 billion barrels
China is the world's largest oil importer. Stats are hard, things get mislabeled due to sanctions, but somewhere between 15%-20% of China's oil is-or-was from Iran+Venezuela.
In my view, this partially explains the move in Iran, considering a 3-10 year strategic timeline.
So it’s not about nuclear weapons?
It was never about nuclear weapons, Netanyahu has been saying Iran was one week away for over 30 years. Europe goes along as an excuse to support politically unpopular war to maintain US support for Ukraine.
No, he hasn't been saying that, despite what you may have read in a random reddit comment. In the 90s he was saying 3-5 years. In 2010 it was 1-2 years.
The first time any kind of claim measured in weeks was immediately before Rising Lion last year, and guess what, the IAEA agreed with him.
In 2015 he said weeks. I think we can agree a few weeks passed before that and bombing Iran ten years later.
I think we can agree that being weeks away from having enough fissile material for a nuke is different from being weeks away from having a nuke. Unless you think you just get your fissile material and then pop it in the next day
What would you expect Europe to do? It’s not like they openly support this war. The Iranian diaspora supports it, there is the secularism element, but the US doesn’t care about the Iranian people anyway
The diaspora is happy about the regime being targeted. They will be much, much more ambivalent if the US starts targeting power infrastructure and innocent people in hospitals etc start dying en masse.
Power infrastructure & hospitals are already being targeted and bombed. Just doesn't make the news.
> Power infrastructure & hospitals are already being targeted and bombed
It's absolutely not. If they were being targeted, material fractions of them would be getting destroyed. Instead we're seeing one offs, which look more like fuckups or Israeli nonsense.
The diaspora somewhat supported it for a week. Then a desalination plant was hit, and I guarantee the support grew way, way weaker. Now we're 3 weeks in, and the only Iranian I keep contact with is extremely sad that the outcome is this bad. I won't tell him 'i told you so', because unlike people on HN who argue for the operation, he doesn't deserve it, but to the 'regime change' supporters: I told you so.
its always oil and 'freedom'
the nuclear weapons program has cost about 2T USD for Iran, and definitely makes certain arguments for intervention more acceptable, but it doesn't negate the other side of the equation. the cost of intervention is still enormous. (and since the enriched uranium is an obvious target it is obviously even more protected)
A war continuous until one side has caused the other more suffering than it can take.
When dealing with the Middle East we keep underestimating the amount of hardship the people I these countries can endure or be forced to endure.
> A war continuous until one side has caused the other more suffering than it can take.
The article is in large parts about how that's not true. It makes the point that the very existence of the Iranian regime hinges on its opposition to the US, to capitulate would mean for the leaders to lose all support, be overthrown and likely die: so there's no level of suffering that it "can't take anymore". And similar in the US, the leadership cannot survive politically to a capitulation. Hence endless escalation on both sides.
The Iranian regime is unlikely to capitulate fully. They don't want to end up like Syria and Lebanon, where Israel can just bomb them at will.
Trump has more flexibility. Really all he needs is an endpoint that FOX News is willing to describe as a US victory. He cares more about image and perception than reality. So, in that space, there is probably room for some negotiated outcome.
Can FOX bamboozle my local gas station too to drop 40% on the price?
No, but they can explain that has nothing to do with the war. It's because Newsom won't allow new oil drilling off the CA coast.
And I expect that (or something like it), will in fact satisfy core MAGA voters.
"Qui vincit non est victor nisi victus fatetur" -Ennius, Annales, XXXI
Translation: "The victor is not victorious if the vanquished does not consider himself so”
you miss the asymmetry here: If there's a country goes thousands miles from far away to invade the US, then American can endure much more to fight than the invading country. The balance will be the opposit.
The often missing asymmetry reflects something deep in the mindset of large portion of western population.
Economic collapse means hardship.
Inflation means hardship.
Iran is the first conflict in many years that might inflict tangible suffering on the American people.
Adding they can hang out in bunkers that are 500 meters under the mountains for decades. US leadership come and go every few years and they know it. They need only wait them out. There are no bunker busters or nukes in existence that I am aware of that can do anything to the missile cities. I would love to be proven wrong by their actions ideally without sacrificing 15k ground troops which I believe is the current count on the ground not counting the 50k naval forces.
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Yes, this is definitely a way to gain leadership that is more amenable. There definitely has not been any historical cases of one country inflecting mass suffering on another country’s innocent population for the other to hold.. let’s say a strong grudge against the aggressor.
And there are cases like Vietnam that are USA best buddies now. And a lot of people that grew on a morning brew of agent orange and napalm are in their leadership now.
Would you say that the Vietnam War was a success for the US?
Indochina and SEA remained communist free ... according to the domino theory the whole point of USA involvement there was to contain the spread.
> Indochina
Huh, that should be Indonesia... Because Indochina (as in the former French colony) was well and fully communist after the Vietnam war
> Return them to stone age until the leadership becomes reasonable.
Worth reflecting on this sentence. What is "reasonable" supposed to entail here?
ETA: "Become secular" is a wild demand from theocratic regime that wants to "Kill Amalek and Build the Third Temple".
I think Iran gaining nukes and a strong military and reduction of US interest in Israel would mostly solve the problems. It will cause a balancing of power and Israel less willing to start random wars and violence. Iran will be a shitty country to its own people as always of course but the Israel csused chaos would mostly be reduced a lot.
Alternately Israels nukes are made legal and decommissionied and or brought to neutral third parties for safekeeping, that would significantly reduce the incentive for its neighbors to want to make nukes. As long as israel has nukes, its neighbors would never feel safe without and keep trying to build nukes.
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Give away the enriched uranium, become secular.
Edit: Sometimes the only answer to the weaker side claiming that something is impossible is Vae Victis. I am sure that there are enough powerful people in Iran that wouldn't mind secular state if they are the one to lead it. It is not as if their kids are not wild partying in europe anyway.
> Give away the enriched uranium, become secular.
TFA explains why this is impossible for Iran.
Once again - it is impossible for a very select few. There are a lot of generals that could stage a coup. Or colonels. They just summary execute those above them and say new rules bitches.
TFA argues that the Iranian regime works "bottom up", and there's no "select few" group of leaders that can be removed or changed that would topple the regime or make it change course. TFA argues that the US fundamentally misread the situation (it also argues that Israel didn't misread it but also doesn't care what happens in Iran, they just want to destabilize it for short-term gains, mainly benefiting Netanyahu; but that this war is also a mistake for Israel longer term).
> The Islamic Republic of Iran is not a personalist regime where the death of a single leader or even a group of leaders is likely to cause collapse: it is an institutional regime where the core centers of power (like the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or IRGC) are ‘bought in’ from the bottom to the top because the regime allows them access to disproportionate resources and power. Consequently if you blow up the leader, they will simply pick another one [...]
> But power in the Iranian regime isn’t wielded by the Supreme Leader alone either: the guardian council has power, the council of experts that select the Supreme Leader have power, the IRGC has power, the regular military has some power (but less than the IRGC), the elected government has some power (but less than the IRGC or the guardian council) and on and on.
And this bunch of people cannot easily change course, TFA convincingly argues, because:
> And so that is the trap. While the United States can exchange tit-for-tat strikes with Iran without triggering an escalation spiral, once you try to collapse the regime, the members of the regime (who are making the decisions, not, alas, the Iranian people) have no reason to back down and indeed must try to reestablish deterrence. These are men who are almost certainly dead or poor-in-exile if the regime collapses. Moreover the entire raison d’être of this regime is resistance to Israel and the United States: passively accepting a massive decapitation attack and not responding would fatally undermine the regime’s legitimacy with its own supporters, leading right back to the ‘dead-or-poor-and-exiled’ problem.
So they cannot yield power and they cannot stand down because their whole legitimacy (of sorts) rests on being belligerent towards Israel and the US. If they flinch, the worst case scenario for them is to lose power and get killed.
TFA calls this a "trap" for both the US and Iran. It's a situation they are locked in now, both sides forced to escalate because backing down spells political doom for whoever does it, but escalating is still bad for both of them.
Once again there is no regime in which military coup by those in the middle is impossible.
And my solution still remains viable - returning their tech tree to pre WWI levels will defang them no matter their power structure.
> Once again there is no regime in which military coup by those in the middle is impossible.
Just very unlikely in this case. TFA explains its case and why yours is very unlikely; while you're just repeating your opinion based on faith ("once again"), with no analysis and no demonstrable knowledge of the specifics.
> And my solution still remains viable - returning their tech tree to pre WWI levels will defang them no matter their power structure
TFA explains why this isn't feasible without massive loss of life and dollars spent, and furthermore, it also explains why keeping the Strait open and low risk is unfeasible without boots on the ground (not just strikes from the skies), which, in turn, would be very costly for the US in Iran. I mean, all of this is addressed in the article.
A core trait of my personality can be summed up as "always look on the bright side of life". To that end:
This war seems more than likely to drive up oil prices not only in the near term, but in the medium and long terms too! In addition, petroleum usage seems likely to become dependant on sucking Iran's proverbial dick, a notion that very few people in The West will find palatable.
Optimistically then, perhaps this will finally light a fire under everyone's asses to switch to renewable energy sources! Wether it's wind, solar or hydro, a underappreciated property of renewable energy is the energy sovereignty they provide. Once deployed, international trade can stop completely, and you'll still have electricity to heat your homes, cook your food, and drive your car.
No more being dependant on dubious regimes like Iran for your day-to-day.
Admittedly this is true for coal, too, but I think we've already established that it cannot economically compete, so that should play out in favour of renewables in the long run.
In January, the youtuber Technology Connections did a whole rant about how ridiculous it is that we're not rushing as quickly as possible to get off of non-renewable energy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
It really is crazy that environmentalists were like, "hey look, free energy," and suddenly everyone started screaming "No, boo! We like the way things are!" I have a friend who has never used an induction range before that is dead set that he never wants one. I just don't get it.
To be fair induction ranges aren't without issues, not due to the concept itself but failures in implementation.
Touch screen controls are rife and not only become impossible to use when, say, grease is splattered on them or your hands are wet/wearing gloves (common when cooking on a stove top), they can even be falsely activated by such things. Cold spots can also be a concern depending on your cookware.
Unfortunately a lot of promising technology has matured in a time of consumer product enshitification, and there is no established track record for people to be nostalgic for.
Again, I’m talking about someone who has never used one who has their mind made up.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with preferring gas. It has many superior use cases. My point is that “no, I like things this way and won’t ever consider trying the other thing, much less changing, even though the other thing ends up being effectively free in the long run” is silly, and almost certainly based in some kind of identity.
Where as I think most curious people would think "Oh, neat, a new cooking surface. I'd like to try that thing."
At least as recently as a few years ago, a lot of induction ranges on the market would tend to break and need expensive repairs. I've forgotten which part it is, I think it's the inverter or something. I've seen it happen once at somebody's house then I remember reading about that very same problem on reddit from a repair guy IIRC. I think some of the electrical equipment is somewhat under spec'd and can't handle the current. Repairs tend to be in the several hundred dollar range and can happen somewhat frequently, like annually. (This may not be a common problem anymore)
LG makes an induction range with knobs. I have one. It's wonderful.
> LG makes an induction range with knobs. I have one. It's wonderful.
It is encrapified with a bunch of intrusive "smart" features that nobody asked for?
Just don't connect it to the internet.
This is exactly it. If you don't connect it, it's a dumb stove like any other.
I was extremely dubious about connecting it, but I decided to do it anyway and see whether it's worth it. So far I've noticed two things:
* It sets the clock with NTP and follows daylight savings time. This actually might be worth it, I'm one of those people who otherwise just lives with clocks set an hour wrong for half the year. The odd thing though is that this isn't default behavior, I had to install an add-on in the mobile app.
* It gives me a mobile notification when the oven gets to temp. Not really compelling.
So depending on how you feel about clocks, feel free to skip the wifi setup.
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When you realize that trillions have been spent on anti-renewables propaganda over the last half-century, it gets easier to understand. Many people have been indoctrinated into fighting tooth and nail for the right of oil companies to destroy the environment.
> environmentalists were like, "hey look, free energy,"
It's not free. It costs trilliions of dollars to build and maintain. I think it's worth it. But one place where the climate-change movement lost the plot was in underplaying costs and overplaying the doom.
If I install solar panels, a battery, and a next gen breaker box in CA, even with premium equipment and no subsidies, I'm looking at a max payback period of like 20 years, right? At that point yea, it's effectively free energy.
Is it an investment? Sure, but it's an investment that trivially pays for itself.
I’m sleep deprived so maybe not the right words, but isn’t there an implicit IRR that a household would maintain and usually a 20 year payoff would be maybe not the first use of investment dollars? I feel maybe that’s more the problem here with renewables. It’s cheaper but not cheap enough to put the dollars there instead of somewhere else
> isn’t there an implicit IRR that a household would maintain and usually a 20 year payoff would be maybe not the first use of investment dollars?
Yes. Also, the risk for industry is going all in right before a new technology comes out. At that point, you either write off your original investment and deploy the new kit. Or you accept a structural energy-cost disadvantage.
I am massively pro renewables. But you have to ignore a lot to pretend it's without risk.
The system already pays for itself. The only thing you lose if a new technology comes out is opportunity cost. You also likely don’t want to be an early adopter of the newest tech anyway if this is a concern for you.
This doesn’t really make sense to me as an objection, so maybe I misunderstood.
There's a sort of mixing of units happening here, and I think it's causing some confusion. Here's an example (greatly simplified) scenario highlighting a flaw in your rationale:
1. Energy at your normal usage costs $1000/yr.
2. You can spend $20k now to have access to equivalent energy output for the next 40 years before it degrades to unusability.
3. Next year, somebody invents a flux capacitor bringing all energy costs for everyone down to $1/yr.
If you don't buy the thing, you spend $1039 over the next 40 years. If you buy the thing you spend $20k, and it's hit its expected lifespan, so you don't recoup any further benefits.
The real world has inflation, wars, more sane invention deltas, and all sorts of complications, but the general idea still holds. If you expect tech to improve quickly enough and are relying on long-term payoffs, it can absolutely be worth delaying your purchase.
If you predict massive improvements in solar/battery/etc tech, the only way it makes sense to invest now is if those improvements aren't massive enough, you expect sufficiently bad changes to the alternatives, etc. I.e., you're playing the odds about some particular view of how the world will progress, and your argument needs to reflect that. It's not inherently true that just because solar pays off now it will in the future.
> system already pays for itself
No, it yields savings. This is a massive difference.
> You also likely don’t want to be an early adopter of the newest tech anyway if this is a concern for you
This is a real concern for any long-term investment, particularly when we're talking at utility/industrial scales. Dismissing it like this is basically arguing that solar is too new to be properly talked about, which is nonsense.
I guess, though, the actual “solar” part of the solar set up is by far the cheapest part.
The vast majority of the set up costs are just getting electrification done right.
Like, even if LNG becomes crazy cheap, a battery set up will still save you money in the long run just by allowing off-peak demand.
This is why I’m confused: for this to me remotely a bad investment, basically everything possible has to go wrong for you, whereas the risks associated with carbon energy production are very obvious and very likely.
Do you have some more likely counter scenario?
> even if LNG becomes crazy cheap, a battery set up will still save you money in the long run just by allowing off-peak demand
See Uruguay. Bet heavily on renewables [1]. Baked in a high cost [2].
If LNG becomes crazy cheap and you're stuck with expensive solar and battery, the countries with cheaper power will eat your industry. On a household level, you wasted money. The alternate you who didn't put money into the solar and battery set-up could have earned more from other investments and had cheaper power.
Put another way: if you remove the decommissioning costs, the same argument could be used for nuclear. Once you've built it, it's sort of "free." Except of course it's not. Building it took a lot of work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Uruguay#Electricity
[2] https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Uruguay/electricity_price...
Per your sources it looks like they are subsidising industry use of electricity with household usage:
Household electricity prices are 157% of average in SA, and 200% of industry prices. That's not a case of renewables backfiring, it's a case of strange policy resulting in weird pricing.
> they are subsidising industry use of electricity with household usage
Germany had to do the same thing when their power costs threatened de-industrialisation. The base cost of electricity in Uruguay is higher than its neighbors’ in an environmentally-wonderful but economically-problematic way.
Germany made the worst possible mistake. They decided to decommission all their nuclear power in one year "for the environment"
Then they started importing all their energy from neighbouring countries including:
Nuclear power from France
Coal (!) power from Poland
Hydro from Sweden
Etc,etc.
The anti nuclear crowd in Germany fucked the environment to sate their delusional beliefs.
Electricity prices in Sweden tripled because of that and still haven't returned to normal.
Worst decision in the history of the German nation! (This statement is true, but only on a technicality: the current nation of Germany is young!)
I mean, the payback period is like 5 years if you count all the subsides. My point is only that, you can effectively take most of your house of the grid, even in an urban area, with a relatively short payback period, and an almost guaranteed return.
Is it the most profitable place for investment dollars? Probably not, but it's effectively risk-free, and there are plenty of knock-on benefits, like having power in a blackout, and having the option of getting an EV in the future.
I think most sensible people who are even moderately risk-averse would think that's a fairly winning deal when we're only talking about a small amount of up front capital.
I agree with this, but I don’t trust that it will stay this way.
It always seems like there’s no real way to ‘get ahead’. They’ll always find a way to make the system cost such that it barely pays itself off, by introducing fees or cutting rebates.
For example, there was a proposal in Australia to raise our fixed grid access fee from something like $1 a day to $5 a day.
Or consider even just the feed-in-tariff for solar — that’s gone down as solar power has gotten cheaper, which is expected, but it’s another thing that increases that mythical payback period for the system.
Now to be clear I think the tech is wonderful and would 100% have a big battery and solar system if I could, but not for financial reasons.
For all intents and purposes you’re just pre-paying for the next X years of your electricity. I would at least want my battery warranty to be four times X, which it currently is not. Now in 5 years there might be battery tech that gets to that multiplier that I want and THEN I could start thinking of it as investing in ‘free electricity’.
But I’m sure the government and electricity suppliers will close any loopholes they can to prevent that.
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> Is it the most profitable place for investment dollars? Probably not, but it's effectively risk-free
One could even say it is risk-negative. It decreases the risk one runs of future oil price hikes.
If you buy solar cells, you buy futures on energy delivery at a guaranteed price.
To be fair, CA is one of the only places that's true, largely due to PG&E fuckups paired with a legislature keen to grant them unlimited money to kick back to shareholders.
That’s just not true, there are plenty of places where the math works easily without subsidies.
Every place I've lived other than CA has had >3x cheaper electricity. If the max break-even period in CA is 20yrs, that's 60yrs in those other places, which is both longer than I practically care about (not that I'm not a fan of non-renewables for other reasons, but we're in a thread talking about costs) and also far beyond the useful life of any of the renewable tech involved, meaning I wouldn't achieve a full 60yrs of benefits in the first place, even if I let the system run for an indefinite period of time.
I know there are other places with high energy costs, but for the majority of the US (both by land area and population count) solar doesn't make economic sense without additional incentives.
And even that analysis assumes that you're forced to use electricity. Many home appliances are vastly more efficient dollar-wise when powered by various petroleum products.
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...What does induction cooking have to do with renewable energy?
Some people (myself included) are quite attached to cooking with gas. Induction seems to be the best alternative and doesn't require non-renewable fuel.
> What does induction cooking have to do with renewable energy?
Gas stoves aren't renewable. For most countries, they're dependent on volatile exports.
See, when I initially wrote that comment, it legitimately did not occur to me that there was even such a thing as a "gas stove" until I walked away from the computer. In my world they're a strange novelty.
Seriously, people are going to downvote me for not automatically thinking of gas stoves, when I haven't even seen one in like over a decade?
Resistive electric stoves aren't super popular for cooking on. Gas stove use gas which can't be powered by traditional renewables. Induction cooking is competitive with gas cooking and can be powered by renewables.
Self-sufficiency is a myth. Even if you wanted to try and be energy independent, for the short and medium term (and maybe longer, who knows?) you will be dependent on China and all the baggage that they bring because of their dominance of rare earth mineral processing. Need a new solar panel? Don't make a certain country mad (whether that's your local Ayatollah or CCP official).
And that's just energy. What about pharmaceuticals? Financial markets? Who protects your shipping lanes? Who builds your semiconductors? Where do those factories get their energy from?
I support the diversity of energy sources because they all have strengths and weaknesses. We've got to figure out climate change. But we also can't have, even if you want to somehow "move off of oil" a single country run by lunatics who can decide whenever they don't get their way that they get to seize 20% of the global oil supply. We can't have China dominating rare earth processing either. For some others it may be a reliance on American military technology.
There is a huge difference between buying a solar panel once and having it generate energy for the next 30 years vs. buying a barrel of oil now and consuming it by next week.
It's the same difference as buying a house now and owning it until it collapses vs. renting a house and being at the mercy of your landlord, or buying a piece of shrink-wrapped software and using it for the next 18 years vs. renting a SaaS subscription that provides a different product next month.
> buying a piece of shrink-wrapped software and using it for the next 18 years
I'm wondering how that works. I have written software that was still being used, 25 years later, but it was pretty much a "Ship of Theseus," by then.
Old hardware or emulation of old operating systems on new hardware.
Quite common on old industrial machinery and other capital equipment like lab equipment. San Francisco BART for example has to scrounge eBay for old motherboards that still allow DMA to parallel ports via southbridge because it’s too expensive to validate a new design for controllers.
I remember visiting a doctor, about ten years ago (so well into the 21st Century). His laptop was an old one, running NT.
The software they would buy, cost tens of thousands of dollars, and they couldn’t afford to keep upgrading (or the original vendor went belly-up).
I have a G5 with a bunch of old boxed software that runs as well as it did the day I bought it. And an Xbox 360 with the same. Not everything has to keep up with the times.
Not all software can be sufficiently insulated from external changes, but almost all software I care about can be. My normal update cadence is every 2-3 years, and that's only because of a quirk in my package manager making it annoying for shiny new tools to coexist with tools requiring old dependencies. The most important software I use hasn't changed in a decade (i.e., those updates were no-ops), save for me updating some configurations and user scripts once in awhile. I imagine that if I were older the 18yr effective-update-cycle would happen naturally as well.
My gut reaction is that the software you're describing relies heavily on external integrations. Is that correct?
The software that I wrote was a device communication SDK, written in C. It abstracted the hardware/link stuff, and presented a common API.
Basically, a driver. Pretty involved one.
There's someone who posted on HN yesterday about running Kubuntu on the same PC for 18 years:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47502310
He had upgrades, but I was running Kubuntu about 20 years ago, still have a bunch of Red Hat and Mandrake ISOs from the early 2000s, and can confirm they still work.
Beside, on the rate earth materials, it just happen that China is able to exploit it cheaply but other countries also have access to them and could very well exploit.
> other countries also have access to them and could very well exploit.
only in your wet day dreams.
let's just look at Gallium which is arguably one of the most critical for defence. to produce 100 tons of Gallium, which counts for 10% of the global supply each year, you have to have 200 million tons of Alumina capabilities. "other countries" won't be able to do it, as they don't have affordable electricity and skilled workers to make the Alumina business itself profitable. how they are going to use or sell those Alumina? to absorb loss of 2 million tons of Alumina for each 1 ton produced Gallium, "other countries" will have to lift their Gallium prices to stupid level.
that is assuming Chinese choose not to fight back on the Alumina front - they control 60% of Alumina production worldwide, they can just flood the global market with cheap Alumina to bankrupt your Gallium production.
remember - 2 million tons of Alumina for 1 ton of Gallium.
Well I am referring about rare materials for battery, energy storage, solar panel because the discussion was about that.
I don't know about defense needs, could be true, but I guess they are much less important in volume that the other. You may be able to store them in case of disruption.
Gallium is of course crucial for modern solar panels, it is also becoming increasingly important in batteries as well.
The oil products are needed by many industrial processes.
My secret suspicion is that Trump knew of Israel's attack on the Qatar/Iran natural gas in advance.
If the Persian Gulf is closed for a long period, shale oil in North America will do very well.
Israel also has new natural gas reserves that will be in high demand.
Is the loss of market share of the Persian Gulf nations an unintended side effect?
Full solarization will not eliminate our need for fossil fuels. But it would reduce it so dramatically as to render our current market unrecognizable.
>It's the same difference as buying a house now and owning it until it collapses vs. renting a house and being at the mercy of your landlord,
I always take issue with the expression "buying a house now" when you actually mean "pay a mortgage for a house now". With a mortgage, you are at the mercy of the bank and whatever contract you signed. With a rent tenancy, you are at the mercy of the landlord and whatever contract you signed. A landlord will wake up tomorrow and tell you to leave, you have some notice period. Your fixed period deal ends and you can only get a deal that triples your rate.
It's like when people say that self-employed people have no boss, your customer becomes your boss. And you always have one. Everyone that exchanges services/products for money has one.
For some people "buying a house now" actually does mean "buying a house now, with cash". My mom bought her last house with cash - she just rolled over the money from the sale of my childhood home, which they paid off in the 80s. I needed a mortgage for mine, but now that I have it I'm clinging to my 2.75% rate, it's less than I can make with basically every other investment. In Silicon Valley it's not uncommon for people to buy houses (even $4-6M ones) with cash because they're sitting on an 8-figure exit.
Even besides that, there is a dramatic difference between a typical (U.S.) mortgage that locks your payments for 30 years, and a month-to-month rental where your rent can go up next month. It's the same difference as buying a solar panel that fixes your costs for 30 years vs. paying whatever electricity rates the local utility charges this month.
(And there is also a dramatic difference between having 1 boss vs. 10 clients vs. 1000 customers vs. 3 billion users. The amount you can ignore any one of them goes up exponentially, and the risk that they will all stop paying you goes down correspondingly.)
"For some people", yes nowadays, it's for wealthy people only unless it's a house in the middle of nowhere.
In a tenancy, your rent can go up but most decent countries have legal restrictions in regards to how many increases you can do in a period of time and by how much you can increase it at any given time, and gives tenants legal tools to contest it if needed. And you still get the freedom to move to a different city without losing money. Here, most people don't do anywhere near 30 year mortgages so maybe that's more of a US thing.
In an ideal world, businesses would have customers that are all equally valuable. But in the real world, many businesses have a few customers that account for most of the revenue and the rest of the customers. Those few customers become your boss and they indirectly dictate significant parts of your business because an average customer not spending as much will be ok but a major customer not spending as much will get you sweating and looking at your cashflow.
> Self-sufficiency is a myth
Self sufficiency exists on a spectrum. On the idiot end is autarky, which only works to keep a small group in power at the cost of national weakness. On the other end is a lack of stockpiles and domestic production that essentially negates sovereighty.
A country running a solar grid with EVs can withstand more economic shocks for longer than one importing oil. And while mining metals is geographically limited, making solar panels and batteries and cars is not.
> Need a new solar panel?
Recycle one of your old ones. You don't burn solar panels to make energy.*
I think people are still stuck in the fossil fuel mindset. I've started calling it gas brain.
* What happens if China stops selling you panels while you embark on electrification? Nothing. You already have enough electricity from your existing sources (presumably) so you just pause the PV rollout until they wise up. And other countries are starting to get into PV manufacturing. Exhibit A: https://solarmagazine.com/2025/08/india-solar-supply-chain-f... So you can always just buy from someone else.
I don't think they said it will give you self-sufficiency, rather that it removes one (important) dimension of dependency.
It doesn't though, it's the illusion of removing of a dependency which is rather dangerous. You're not only swapping one dependency for another in this specific case, but you're ignoring the rest of the global economy and its own dependencies and how they affect you.
A country that goes all in renewable is in a stronger positon. UK power grid doesn't give a fuck about this war.
Sure China. But unless they send in an army to retreive previously sold panels, or block the sun they can only harm future increases to supply.
> A country that goes all in renewable is in a stronger position.
Depends on the country.
> UK power grid doesn't give a fuck about this war.
Power grid =/= economy. You're missing the point. Rising prices affect the United Kingdom economy even if it was fully run on renewables. The ships bringing products to the country don't run on renewables, the cars mostly don't, your fighter jets don't, your fertilizer doesn't. &c.
It's important to not be dogmatic and be practical about this stuff. Every country on the planet needs and utilizes oil and gas and that will remain true for the foreseeable future because of globalized supply chains.
> Sure China. But unless they send in an army to retreive previously sold panels, or block the sun they can only harm future increases to supply.
Which, in the case of a war with the US would be true because the UK will be involved and sided with the US and/or certainly assumed to be by China. (This is indisputable). So sure you build up those panels, but then you see a war and now you lose access to those materials and if it isn't solved in the near term you have to switch all of your energy back to fossil fuels. No new EVs during the war, for example.
It is a sliding scale though. Having more renewables in the mix seems better than fewer. But indeed no one is immune to global trade and higher global prices.
Or wait 20 years for the panels to degrade...
Two things
1. It’s closer to 50 years, and even a partially degraded panel will work, just with less output
2. Even if we say 20 years, that means that you only need to buy panels once every 20 years! Not continuously. A complete and total interruption of solar panel production lasting 4 years will only mildly interrupt current output. How long can we last with a total disruption to oil supply chains?
The long operating life of a solar panel compared to a barrel of oil is a selling point when it comes to self-sufficiency. With 20 years of warning, any country that pretends to be a globally-relevant power can get itself to the point of producing acceptable solar panels if its survival depends on it.
More than enough time to stand up a domestic PV industry.
Swiss measurement of 30 year old panels showed 20% degradation.
All of the material in those panels is still there. You can break them down and build new panels out of their parts.
You're swapping a dependency which hits very quickly if disturbed, for one that would take a much longer time to manifest.
When Russia invades Ukraine or Iran cuts the straight of Ormuz energy prize go up instantly, chocking the entire world economy in the course of a few weeks. Even if China stops exporting rare earths, it would take years before it affects the energy market.
It's absolutely incomparable.
Cuba is a good example by the way: a country can survive for decades while being cut from most technology import due to sanctions, but if you cut its access to oil, it becomes dirty real quick. And because Cuba has been stuck in the middle of the 20th century, it's actually much less dependent on energy than most developed or even developing countries.
> You're swapping a dependency which hits very quickly if disturbed, for one that would take a much longer time to manifest.
That's not the entire point. You still rely on global supply chains. Those semiconductors in your MacBook Pro are made in Taiwan - many steps (perhaps most) in that supply chain to go from raw material to MacBook Pro, or EV, or fresh produce rely on oil. When Iran holds 20% of the world's oil supply hostage then prices go up for you too. Even if you are 100% renewables you are still dependent on oil for your economy.
Even the renewable power grid relies on fossil fuels for maintenance and service, many parts and components are built using materials made from oil (hello plastic), &c.
Nobody said that a modern economy can be completely independent, but that doesn't mean all levels and types of dependency are equal.
Right: My body will never be able to survive without taking in elements from the outside, but I'd rather have an interrupted supply of calcium than an interrupted supply of oxygen!
Eh, an operational dependency that immediately raises costs across your entire economy, across all geographies, all industries, within a couple days of disruption is very different from these more strategic dependencies.
The key would be to simply not ignore all the other dimensions of dependency.
Oil is disposable, solar panels are not. If you have solar, and then piss off the CCP to the point where they attempt to stop you from acquiring more of it, you don't lose the solar you already have. Those solar panels will continue generating energy for years, if not decades, afterwards.
It's also important to note that the US also produces oil[0]. There are some quirks of the market and refineries that make it difficult to consume our own oil, but we could potentially build more domestic processing. The real problem is that pesky global market that puts costs on the state's ambitions for power. To put it bluntly, American oil is expensive. We can survive an oil crisis iff we are willing to pay astronomical prices at the pump; but if we are doing this assuming we can just enjoy cheap gas while the world burns, we are going to get a rude awakening.
Think about it this way: buying your energy in the form of oil is like exclusively using streaming services for your entertainment needs. It's cheap, easy, convenient - until the plug gets pulled and it suddenly stops being those things. Buying solar is like buying physical media - you have to pay up front and it's more of a hassle to get started, but it can't be turned off on a whim.
[0] It also used to produce rare earths, too. The mines closed down because they were too expensive to operate - not because rare earths are actually rare.
I'd love to believe this, but very recent history has shown (in the US at least) that we are moving backwards and trying to resist renewable energy.
It's a complicated picture. Some Americans did not like the advice to "turn down the thermostat, and wear a sweater", and the next president removed the solar panels from the White House. It may be amusing to learn the country some of those panels ended up at, and the propaganda value in having such. Other Americans have improved water conservation ("Cadillac Desert" is a short and relevant read here) and those horrid land whales now leak far less oil; it used to be every parking spot had huge stains of oil beneath them. And the leaded gasoline, yum! Still other Americans howl about the toilets that use less water, and hoard inefficient light bulbs that do not last too long. So there are folks moving both towards and against reneable energy and conservation. Granted maybe there has not been as much movement as should have happened between now and when "The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf Is Here" (1973) got published, but that's not saying nothing has happened. Trends may help rule out some of the noise, or one might try to model things like the "Limits to Growth" study did, though other folks really did not like that report, and so these things go on and around.
I think a lot of people simply want to be contrarian to their perceived opponents: People in the other political clan like X so I have to hate X. No matter how much X might help them or how much better it is, they have to oppose it.
Economics will always win in the end. At the rate that costs are dropping for solar, it should just be a matter of time.
Biggest concerns are usually placement and durability to bad weather.
The remaining oil companies will profit tremendously from the high oil prices. I am sure they will have no problem allocating some of those extra profits to sabotage attempts to consider any alternative energy sources.
> Biggest concerns are usually placement and durability to bad weather.
And energy storage, and peaking, and matching demand to supply at the grid level. None of which are included in the usual "costs" of solar.
> Economics will always win in the end.
This may have been true in the past but the economics of today is "whether this is good for 1% of the population" and not in general, yes? If I can buy cheap solar panels from China (or say for the sake of argument someone "friendlier" like Germany) but that gets slapped with tariffs or other means the "administration" (bought by the 1% crowd) has at their disposal to prevent this from happening. If we lived in a free market this would be true for sure but we don't (by we I mean USA :) )
> very recent history has shown (in the US at least) that we are moving backwards and trying to resist renewable energy
A longer view of history shows a clear pattern: "After a gasoline price shock, households respond in the short run mostly by reducing travel, although estimates from the literature suggest the response in the short run is quite low (e.g., Hughes, Knittel, and Sperling 2006). Over long horizons, households adjust their vehicle technology and reduce further their consumption of gasoline.
...
The market share of full-size pickups, utility vehicles, and vans fell more than 15 percentage points between its peak in 2004 and early 2009. Small cars and the new cross-utility vehicle segment picked up most of this market share" [1].
[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086%2F657541#...
The petrochemical industry is huge we've yet to find alternatives for it. Half the stuff around you was made with something derived from oil, and you can't replace that with wind or sunlight in the foreseeable future.
Very little oil is used to make plastic.
In Europe between 4–6% of oil and gas is used for producing plastics and globally around 6% of global oil is used. By contrast, 87% is used for transport, electricity and heating.
6% is hardly a small fraction at scale.
If we could reduce our oil usage by 94% I'd weep with joy. Yes that's still a lot of oil. But it would be a complete sea change from what is currently happening.
there are pathways to produce synthetic oil from coal or using carbon capture if you have cheap energy. I hope they will catch up if fossil oil prices skyrocket.
Pretty much all chemical changes can be made with reasonable amounts of energy. That includes making "bioplastics" as well as the typical plastics we use today like polyethylene, polystyrol and so on, from biomaterials. What doesn't work in a way that's remotely economical is transmuting elements. It is, for example, possible to make gold today, the old dream of alchemists. But it's several orders of magnitude too expensive.
Common plastics are made from highly abundant elements, so running out of oil as a chemical feedstock is a quite surmountable problem given cheap enough energy.
This is the secret flipside of solar power's duck curve: it makes a lot of stupidly energy intensive paths towards non-fossil oil production a lot less stupid if you just have the energy to burn. Think about how in the 2000s we had a weird obsession with ethanol and other biofuels, only to learn that they were merely 40-50% efficient. If your energy mix is predominantly fossil fuels, you're better off just not burning the oil. But if you have solar, suddenly it becomes a good option for energy storage, especially in industries that need the weight properties of chemical fuels (i.e. aircraft, where you HAVE to be able to burn and exhaust your fuel or the plane will be too heavy to land).
A lot of what the petrochemical industry does took over from other stuff or isn't vital, there just hasn't been enough push back against it.
Stuff like medicine, sure, crucial and very hard to find replacements for.
But single use plastics can probably be replaced 95% (the environment would appreciate it if we banned them), dyes are mostly not vital, synthetic fibers can be replaced 95% with minor critical impact, just using natural fibers, etc.
The petrochemical industry is just the cheapest option in many cases in a world driven by conspicuous consumption of non vital items.
We should also note that wind turbines require huge amounts of petroleum derivatives to operate.
Yeah but at least the byproducts produce a solid that can last for years vs treating it as a consumable.
I'm fulling expecting someone will reply to me and say that making plastic wastes 75% of the oil or something during production, and that it's just as wasteful amortized across the lifespan of a wind turbine. I'm tired, man.
You can compare material intensity of different electricity generation technologies.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/material-intensity-electr...
According to International Energy Agency mineral demand for clean energy technologies would rise by at least four times by 2040 to meet climate goals, with particularly high growth for EV-related minerals.
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in...
You can recycle the minerals so it will also fall back down to almost 0 on a longer timescale.
If you keep burning gas you will never stop mining.
We have heard many claims from politician about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy
You can recycle the minerals and you should recycle minerals, but almost no recycling technology can recycle 100% of minerals and recycling has always costs attached to it (this can be for example capital costs, building recycling facilities, operating costs in form labor costs for separation, energy costs for melting material and purification processes).
For example aluminum is recycled, not because we have have a shortage of aluminium ore (Earth's mantle is 2.38% aluminium by mass), but because recycling is less energy intensive then production of fresh aluminum. https://international-aluminium.org/work-areas/recycling/
Recycling of EV batteries will lose between 1-10% of the valuable metals https://blog.ucs.org/jessica-dunn/how-are-ev-batteries-actua...
The worst kind of recycling is decreasing the costs of recycling by outsourcing to third world countries, by exploiting lax environmental regulations or corrupted environmental protection officials.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/18/world/africa/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chittagong_Ship_Breaking_Yard
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/10/05/g-s1-...
> aluminum is recycled... but because recycling is less energy intensive then production of fresh aluminum
So what?
> Recycling of EV batteries will lose between 1-10% of the valuable metals
How much gasoline, coal, and natural gas can you recycle?
> The worst kind of recycling is decreasing the costs of recycling by outsourcing to third world countries
That's going to happen as long as those countries are poor. They need to develop their economies quickly to demand better laws. Climate change will be a danger for many of them in the coming years.
Better, less-polluting recycling tech will help them far more than continuing to burn fossil fuels.
As opposed to gas or coal turbines which are naturally lubed somehow?
It will be a boost for renewables, but hardly the end for natural gas. Keep in mind that while ~20% of natural gas was supplied via the Persian Gulf, that means 80% was not.
I expect that batteries will eventually solve the day-night cycle for solar, but for seasonal storage, natural gas is much easier to store, so this still looks to me like a mix of energy technologies, with renewables getting a larger share.
this misses the fact that petroleum is incredibly useful outside of the burn it to make electricity and burn it to make car move use cases.
All the more reason to not squander a finite, precious resource to generate electricity.
Not really. If we only need it for petrochemical products, like medical plastics etc, losing 20% of available crude globally is a non-issue.
We can probably stand to use a lot less plastics too. Outside of medicine it's mostly replaceable, and reducing our usage to less than 80% of current usage would be trivial if we didn't burn it for energy.
In that scenario Iran can keep their strait. We won't need them.
So don't use it for cars. It's strictly optional these days.
Not really. Needing 1MM barrels gives you a lot more independence than needing 100MM.
> Wether it's wind, solar or hydro, a underappreciated property of renewable energy is the energy sovereignty they provide.
If your sovereign territory happens to support them geographically. This is true for many, but not all countries.
Also, without large storage capacity, you might end up being self-sufficient during sunny, windy days, but find yourself very dependent on your neighbor countries for imports on overcast days or at night without wind.
The combination of all of this is especially unfortunate for hydro, where you're pretty much fully dependent on the geography you've been handed.
So I'd say the self-sufficiency story of renewables doesn't fully hold. They benefit from regional cooperation and trade just as much as fossil fuels, if not more. (In my view, that's not really a counterargument, but it does raise the importance of having a well-integrated, cross-border grid even more.)
Why do you have to go to absolutes? If 90% of countries can be 80+% self sufficient, that’s still an amazing thing
These 20% will still make you dependent on foreign country.
For example Germany was dependent on Russian gas (before year 2022), which they later swapped for dependency on US LNG. In addition, Germany is dependent on China for PV panels.
> Germany is dependent on China for PV panels
This is gas brain thinking.
Panels aren't burned to make electricity. If literally everyone stops selling you panels (nearly impossible) you continue generating electricity the old way. Nothing bad happens. The panels you already have continue working.
Other countries make panels too. India has a glut right now.
https://solarmagazine.com/2025/08/india-solar-supply-chain-f...
You can't base energy of an modern industrial country on purely solar panels alone, they don't produce any electricity in the night and have electric output reduced by weather. You have always to combine them with other power sources for backup.
For Germany it's domestic wind + domestic coal + imported gas.
In case you ask for energy storage in Germany, the amounts are quite low. https://openenergytracker.org/en/docs/germany/storage/
So you admit then that using as much solar and wind and storage as possible reduces the need for imported gas. As such it should be a national priority.
but much less dependent. Its way easier to stockpile a big buffer supply of LNG if its only 20% of your supply, for example. Its way easier to trim some 20% demand and still keep the country largely running, for example.
"much less dependent" is still a huge win. Sure 100% independent is better. Isnt this obvious? i dont understand the point.
> Germany was dependent on Russian gas (before year 2022), which they later swapped for dependency on US LNG. In addition, Germany is dependent on China for PV panels
There is merit to putting one's energy policy on autopilot by doing the opposite of whatever Berlin is up to.
> doing the opposite of whatever Berlin is up to
So you're suggesting to cut solar incentives and never discuss SMRs?
I think you might be predicting future performance from past returns here.
If you're 80% self-sufficient, you're not self-sufficient.
If a kid lives on their own but their mom buys them groceries once per month and their dad swings by on thursdays with pizza and beer, that kid's still pretty darn self sufficient.
Similarly, if a country can use 80% less oil or imported fuel than they would have without renewable energy, I think they're pretty self-sufficient. They don't have to be isolated from trade, it's okay to import some things and export others. Energy sources can be one of those things. But if they rely on energy imports, then when something disrupts their supply then they are in trouble. However if they get 80% of their energy from renewable sources, then they have significantly less of a problem.
They have significantly less of a problem with regards to their balance of trade, but any meaningful dependency on imports means that electricity prices will still be entirely dependent on the price of whatever is imported, at any point in time imports are happening. Still not great, and I wouldn't call that sovereignty!
Also, highly depending on what metric we mean by "80% self-sufficient" (peak capacity? long-time average?), there might either be a lot of work left, or this might be "effective sovereignty".
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But the dependency turns from a stop the world calamity to an annoyance.
If you’re 95% self sufficient it will stay at headlines in the local press.
Losing 20% of your electricity supply is a calamity, not an annoyance. So unless you want the calamity, you're still dependent on imports.
Personally, I don't see an issue with that, as long as the neighboring countries you're importing from are reliable and will be able to supply at the times you need (i.e., they don't have the same possibly spiky import dependency as yourself). The other option is massive storage capacity.
I just don't think it makes sense to just equate renewables with automatic sovereignty.
Dunno about you, but losing 20% of my electricity supply is an annoyance. I just don't run the clothes dryer and hang my clothes on a rack instead.
(And yes, I have solar + battery, and have lost 100% of my outside electricity supply on a half dozen occasions since having it installed, and my actual response has been to not run the clothes dryer.)
That would be the situation in an integrated/"smart" grid. The grid could tell your washer/dryer to defer or worst case shed their load.
In the grid we have, where most people don't have batteries, nor a way to react to (or even perceive) network-side load shedding commands, you get rolling blackouts at best, and brownouts, damaged devices etc. at worst.
That's the point I'm making with my second paragraph. I'm not dependent on the grid. If we get into the situation you're describing, I just throw the main breaker (actually don't need to do that, the inverters switch over automatically) and my home generates its own electricity. It doesn't quite cover all my usage, but it covers all my usage except the clothes dryer, so I just don't run the clothes dryer.
It's true that there are tragedy-of-the-commons situations where not everybody has a battery, but it's also true that there are higher-level but subnational entities within the U.S. that have invested significantly in renewables + battery storage. This chart of where electricity comes from on a state-by-state level is illustrative:
https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/state-electricity-g...
California, Connecticut, DC, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington are > 95% renewables + natural gas, all of which is produced in North America. If it comes to the point where it's "keep the lights on or sever ties with fossil-fuel states", I'd bet that they choose the latter.
(Note that the table kinda refutes your point anyway: the only states that are > 1% dependent upon oil for electricity are Alaska and Hawaii. Other than natural gas, which is largely produced domestically [1], the other big fossil fuel source is coal, which is also produced domestically.)
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/where-our-na...
If a country were in your individual position, I'd definitely call that self-sovereign, but I don't think that's how "80% self-sufficient" would actually look like. (I don't think that 20% of most countries' consumption is entirely discretionary, for one thing, whether measured by peak or average load.)
At >95%, it's probably a very different story. At that point, you basically turn off your aluminium smelter and you're good :) (And note how GP said "renewables", which gas isn't.)
And my point really isn't about oil specifically, it's about GPs "renewables increase sovereignty" thesis in general.
More countries are able to produce renewable energy than are able to produce fossil energy. As such, renewable energy providers more energy sovereignty than fossil fuels which is what matters. If it's 100% or not is mostly irrelevant for the decision making. If we're being rational.
Going for the worst possible option, only because the better options are not 100% perfect, is to be considered irrational behaviour.
> Going for the worst possible option, only because the better options are not 100% perfect, is to be considered irrational behaviour.
I guess I'm collecting all the downvotes because I didn't make it sufficiently clear that I'm absolutely in favor of switching to renewables as quickly as feasible. My point was not to stick with fossil fuels in the interest of "sovereignty" or anything like that. Especially massive solar deployment just seems like a no-brainer at this point.
But as we do that, I'd love to be realistic about new interdependencies and failure modes being introduced, so that they can be mitigated as we transform and build out our grids, not discovered in very painful incidents that "nobody could have seen coming".
Kind of sad to see how ideologically driven discussions around energy policy still are, and maybe always will be.
> without large storage capacity
That's like saying without gas stations good luck getting gasoline to the people. It goes without saying that batteries are an essential part of most renewable solutions.
I'm still reading a lot about theoretical storage ideas, but much less than I'd like about massive deployments, so I think it doesn't quite go without saying.
> war seems more than likely to drive up oil prices not only in the near term, but in the medium and long terms too
"This recovery period doesn’t just get pushed out by 24 hours each day it gets longer as more production is forced to shut down or is damaged in the fighting. As I write this, futures markets for the WTI seem to be expecting oil prices to remain elevated (above $70 or so) well into 2028."
There are still processes that we haven’t replaced petroleum for, like Haber-Bosch. China has already banned the export of fertilizer for this reason.
Sure. And petroleum not burned for energy then becomes petroleum available for those processes.
I don't understand why so many people are raising an objection here when this should be a clear win-win.
On the dark side, it will take quite a while to offset the environmental costs of this war, even if this provided an essential incentive for switching. (In reality, energy infrastructure is often locked in longterm and not easy to switch in just in a decade or so.)
Pessimistically, this will lead to the return of old-school Imperialism to secure the necessary oil supplies and increased exploitation of known deposits.
Just because there's an obvious good choice for the average citizen doesn't mean we'll take it, as recent history has more than proven.
Only a small fraction of a typical barrel of oil is allocated to energy generation. The majority goes to transportation/industrial use-cases. The transportation usage can be allayed with sonar energy, but the industrial use-cases cannot.
I don't think anyone is making the argument that solar panels can completely replace fossil fuels in the short term. However, more electrification is better all around.
Nice.
Another upside seems to be that every Arab country in the Middle East seems to be on the same side as Israel. Nothing unites like a common enemy!
For the US to start going that route we need a certain group of politicians to stop telling everybody that windmills are killing whales and birds en masse, claiming solar "isn't there yet" (somehow it never is), and that there is such thing as "clean coal." Literally the only thing I don't hear them fighting (loudly) against is hydro power.
The politicians say what the people with money want them to.
Or they could just do their job in good faith because most of them come from money and have a good salary. A dream, I know.
The US just gave away a billion dollars to NOT build renewable energy.
As evidence supporting the "bright side" outcome of this conflict, two separate people I know here is Australia have fast-tracked a decision to replace their ICE vehicles with an EV. It only took a week's sticker shock at the fuel bowser to take them from "Eh, sometime next year" and "comparing a hybrid with ICE" to "Buying a BYD car ASAP". I'd be curious to know if there has been any significant effect of the market for electric scooters and bikes, also.
> the fuel bowser
The what?
> "Buying a BYD car ASAP"
A what kind of car?
I don't understand why I am downvoted. My questions are genuine. I legitimately have no idea what GP meant by either of those things, and legitimately don't understand why I supposedly should know.
Why didnt Iran use this earlier to get rich?
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Because it would have been an act of aggression to close off the strait. Iran did not want to invite war, the US and Israel have entirely been the aggressors in this recent conflict.
Sanctions were also an act of aggression. Iran could ask for fees for US ships to make up for their losses due to sanctions.
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It's very helpful to understand energy density to evaluate what a shift to renewables actually entails or what is even possible. Vaclav Smil is a good source or for a less dense version Nate Hagens has podcasts about it.
I am not sure getting a million people killed in another decades-long middle-eastern war (one whose scale and tragedies will likely overshadow all the previous wars we have seen so far in region) in a country of 90 million people is really worth the push to renewables.
> And I do want to stress that. There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad. But countries are often very willing to throw good money after bad even on distant wars of choice.
On the other hand isn't this how the russian revolution happened? An economic crisis due to a prolonged war leading to a revolution? While i wouldn't bet money on it, it seems at least possible that something similar could happen to Iran.
I would not wager money on a revolution coming from this war, either. But if a revolution does come as a result of the war, it seems at least as likely to be in the United States as in Iran.
I think a revolution caused by this war is more likely in countries like Egypt. The Arab Spring was triggered by a rise in food prices after all.
There is zero shot that a revolution is happening in United States.
Trump could literally go on TV and r*e a kid on stage in 4k, and most people would go to work and be like "damn what weird times are we living in"
If shit gets bad enough economically to where there are food shortages and such, you will see US split before any revolution happens.
While I agree that a revolution in Iran is not impossible, I rather doubt that whoever comes next will be western friendly and moderate; after the indscriminate military action of the past few weeks they are probably more likely to get ayatollah'd again.
> I rather doubt that whoever comes next will be western friendly and moderate
The Iranian people(not the Islamic Regime which is despised by the vast majority of the people in Iran) tend to be very western friendly and tend to be much more secular than most populations in the region.
> the indscriminate military action of the past few weeks they are probably more likely to get ayatollah'd again.
The Iranian people are well aware that the airstrikes are not at all indiscriminate but are targeting the Regime(there are plenty of videos coming out of Iran of people filming and cheering as airstrikes hit Regime targets), indiscriminate military action would be what the Islamic Regime did when they killed tens of thousands of civilian protesters by firing automatic weapons into crowds of people. The Iranian people understand what is happening.
>On the other hand isn't this how the russian revolution happened?
It happened because Russian empire (and German empire) lacked state security apparatus adequate to the threat. It was fixed by most authoritarian states after that, so e.g. Soviet Union survived for 70 years despite many popular uprisings, which happened almost the whole time of its existence. It went down only when elites in Moscow destroyed it from within.
Actually, there are lots of revolutions in Europe after WWI, but keep in mind that in this case the populations were blaming their governments for starting or participating in an unnecessary war with monumental casualties. In this case, the Iran government has two useful scapegoats and any casualties could be easily ascribed to the idiots bombing girl schools and not to the idiots sending millions to their deaths under artillery fire.
While possible they could scapegoat this, hasn't the rallying cry for Iranian protests prior to this been "Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neither_Gaza_nor_Lebanon,_My_L... - i think we are already at the place of the population blaming the government for its foreign policy consequences, at least in some segments.
Are we talking about Iran or US?
> While i wouldn't bet money on it, it seems at least possible that something similar could happen to the USA.
Fixed that for you.
Y'all mostly couldn't even be bothered to show up to vote. A population that is too lazy to vote (in a system where your vote does matter) is definitely too lazy to have a revolution.
> Neither is the Middle East [an area of vital security interest to the United States]
> So long as [the Suez Canal and the Gulf] remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States.
I feel his assumption there can't be correct. Just look at the amount of military bases the US has built in the region, or the sheer number of wars there that the US was involved in. I can't imagine that a country would spend that kind of resources, money and lives for an area it deems not of vital strategic importance.
That all makes a lot of sense. Mr. Devereux is being more realistic this time than he was at the start of the war in Ukraine.
My takeaway from the war in Ukraine is: it’s going to get worse and last longer than anyone ever imagined.
I remember his protracted war posts, and ... indeed there's still a war going there, and fortunately it did not even get into the anticipated guerilla phase.
Can you elaborate a bit on what was unrealistic? (Maybe you have different posts or claims by him in mind?)
I checked the blog, You have a point. Brett Devereux was more cautious.
"If you are trying to follow the War in Ukraine, I strongly suggest watching the War on the Rocks podcasts for the times they bring in Michael Kofman."
I’ve been caught up in “guilt by association” here. Michael Kofman always struck me as a cheap propagandist. (but I should shut up now)
Paying WoR subscriber here. Kofman likes to talk a lot and can't interview others because of it. He is also clearly pro-Ukraine.
But I never saw him as a cheap propagandist. Not even an expensive one.
Despite his obvious allegiance, he regularly criticised UAs actions and never went for any of the hurrah-hurr-durr delusions you had anywhere else. During the siege of Bachmut he repeatedly and clearly said that UA has nothing to gain from holding out. I remember him openly critical of the sacking of the defence minister, candidly describing the problems in UAs recruitment, never hyped up drones, avoided predictions and after that first fiasco with Trump and Vance last year he did not hold back criticism towards Zelensky and not once can I remember him painting the Russians as morons. On the contrary, in one episode he dismisses any sort of essentialism and related chauvinism, this was when refuting the idea that broad parallels can be seen between Napoleonic and today's Russia.
Force is supreme until you use it, then everyone knows it has limits.
Joe Kent [1] offered a possible way out of this - however slim the odds might be. Trump's one quality that may save us all from this quagmire is his ability to do a complete 180 on his previous committed path - "TACO" as his detractors like to call it. Like he did with ICE in Minneapolis, or in Yemen last year when he quit his bombing campaign after one month. If he could be convinced to just declare victory over Iran and move onto the next crisis of his creation - maybe send ICE to Cuba or invade Puerto Rico. He has the personal power to pull it off and his base will probably back him. Getting the Iranians to de-escalate and back to negotiations will be a challenge (after the second time he bombed them in middle of negotiations). The real problem will be restraining the Israelis who will likely do everything in their power to scuttle any deal and will do things to further drag the US and other countries in the region and the world into their war.
Another problem will be getting to through to Trump who seems to be cocooned in a reality distortion field cast by Fox News, the Israel Lobby and Israel-firsters in his administration. If enough people in his base and dissenters in his administration and the government can speak up and get through to him he might be convinced to change course.
The Democratic Party for their part seem to be quite unanimated in all this. It looks like they're playing a cynical double-game, hoping Trump gets further caught up in a web of his own making. I wonder if it will weigh on them at all if another school gets blown up or another thousand people die while they slow-walk the vote on the next war powers resolution.
[1] - Interesting interview between Kent and Saagar Enjeti https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XMyC2Cr7X0
I am just as annoyed at the Democrats, but let us not always pretend the Republicans lack agency. The majority Republican congress could do any number of things to curb his power, but they choose to abstain.
What would the democrats need to do for you to not be annoyed at them?
Literally anything. They are incredibly passive, we never hear anything from anyone of them. Trump is running the country to the ground live, each day going on unhinged nonsensical rants and doing obviously insane shit. Democrats should be banking on it, counter-messaging 24/7 but instead they're more unpopular than ever. Their leaders are still clinging on to these "moderate" and "bipartisan" lines when the voter base has made clear that they want the GOP obliterated and all of its members tried for treason. The democratic establishment only seems to concern itself with fighting the growing progressive wing of its own party, while holding unto their hard pro-Israel line which already cost them the previous election.
So it's just a matter of not following the right democrats on the right social media platform? They just need to tweet storm more where you can see it?
> while holding unto their hard pro-Israel line which already cost them the previous election.
Kamala Harris lost because of the economy, inflation, and a mismatch in perceived values among Asian and Hispanic voters. She did not lose because the election was any sort of referendum on Israel or Gaza – progressives want that narrative to be true because it was a core issue for them, but the data doesn't back it up:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-hate-inflation-more-...
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/what-drove-asian-and-hispanic-...
I find the links you provided uninteresting. Americans only care about what they're made to care about. Trump ran on inflation and oil price, accusing Biden every step of the way, negatively polarizing enough voters against his opponents. This was very successful and got him elected. Now that inflation and oil prices are worse than they ever were under Biden, why are so few complaining about it? Because the Democrats are fucking silent about it. Where are the Trump "I did this" stickers on gas pumps? Why aren't Democratic leaders going on TV daily to blame Trump for the crisis he 100% manufactured?
> Kamala Harris lost because of the economy, inflation, and a mismatch in perceived values among Asian and Hispanic voters. She did not lose because the election was any sort of referendum on Israel or Gaza – progressives want that narrative to be true because it was a core issue for them, but the data doesn't back it up:
The DNC decided to hide their own post-mortem of the 2024 election because it pointed to their unwavering support of Israel as one of the biggest reasons they lost. How do you fit this in your narrative?
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/22/dnc-2024-autopsy-harris-gaz...
Also, interesting read if you have some time:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/02/17/opinion/focus...
Of course, find a way to blame Democrats. As if they're not trying to protect the scraps of everything else the Republicans have ruined.
The reality is that plenty of Democrats are "animated" about the war.
> Trump's one quality that may save us all from this quagmire is his ability to do a complete 180 on his previous committed path - "TACO" as his detractors like to call it.
If you haven't been paying attention, Trump has declared victory and called it quits roughly every other day for the past several weeks. It hasn't stuck, principally because Iran is the main actor that can decide whether or not to call it quits, and they have no reason to call it quits until they believe that Trump is actually serious in calling it quits.
One of the most surreal things is the sheer disconnect going on. The energy sector and everyone who's impacted are basically running around going "the strait's gonna be closed for months, we're turbofucked." The finance people are betting that the crisis will be over if not tomorrow then next week at the latest. And Trump et al are acting as if the crisis ended yesterday.
> I wonder if it will weigh on them at all if another school gets blown up or another thousand people die while they slow-walk the vote on the next war powers resolution.
The Democrats are the minority party. They don't control the agenda of legislative votes. But sure, blame them for the things they don't control, rather than the Republicans who want to avoid embarrassing their dear leader even as he leads his party to what looks to be utterly crushing defeats in the next elections with some of the most historically unpopular policies ever.
He's declared victory, but obviously hasn't called it quits because the bombs are still falling.
The Dem leadership is almost as pro-Israel as the Republicans. Schumer will go through the motions of condemning the war, but inside, he's tickled pink. Remember, it was a Dem president who supplied bombs for the Israel genocide in Gaza for two full years.
Something the author didn't mention: what about building more pipelines to bypass the strait? If this war really cost 2B$ per day, why not allocate some of that money to finance pipelines across the gulf states? Might be worth it long term, especially if Iran plans to permanently impose a toll.
You can bomb a pipeline too
The problem is that Iran has the Houthi's in Yemen. And they're within missile/bombing range of the current pipeline.
"...it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result."
Another great resource is this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIS2eB-rGv0
It talks about how:
- It's much more expensive to shoot down a Shahed drone than to build one. - Iran could decide to attack water filtration plants in the Gulf countries. - It's almost impossible to win a ground invasion without spending a ton of money because of the mountains.
Basically, even if the US wins this war, the entire world economy will suffer tremendously.
Comment was deleted :(
A few thoughts.
1. The straight of Hormuz is crazy because of the sheer amount of options Iran has to threaten shipping. It's so narrow that they can even hit ships with artillery fire. No need for missiles or drones at all! Lobbing kinetic shells may sound primitive, but anti-missile defences are designed to deal with large projectiles with minutes or hours of warning, not shell-sized projectiles that hit within seconds. If a U.S. war-ship enters the straight, they could be struck by fire from artillery that's been concealed for decades before they know they're under fire. It's also worth noting that Shahad drones have a larger range than the size of Iran, and they're hidden all over the country. Any ship transiting Hormuz or any ground force trying to land in Iran could face drone attack from anywhere in Iran, or all of it simultaneously. A few drones are easy to intercept, but give Iran a juicy enough target and they could make the decision to simply overwhelm it. Drones are a heavily parallel capability.
2. There are only a couple of lanes deep enough for large ships in the straight. So far, no ships have been sunk outright, and that's probably a deliberate choice on Iran's part. If they sink a ship at the right spot, the straight could become barricaded. Clearing that barricade under threat of fire would be a far worse pickle than what we're seeing now.
3. The critical question to ask is, "How does the U.S. end this?" Just continuing to bomb Iran is phenomenally expensive and likely won't accomplish much. This is a regime that has been preparing for an American invasion since they overthrew the CIA-installed Shah 47 years ago. They probably never seriously expected to win an air-war against the U.S. and have obviously planned for an asymmetric conflict. The U.S. is not going to win this one without phenomenal amounts of blood, treasure, and will, but all of these are in short supply. A ground invasion of Iran would likely be worse than Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam rolled into one. The U.S. can't win this war because they simply can't pay the price. Unfortunately, the straight of Hormuz gives Iran the ability to prevent Trump from simply TACO'ing out and proceeding to invade Cuba. Iran could keep the straight closed even after the U.S. withdraws their forces, and likely will to make sure everybody knows they can control the world economy at will. They're going to expect a peace settlement, and it won't be cheap.
4. This conflict lights a fire under the behinds of all nascent nuclear states. Iran would not have been invaded if they'd managed to build nuclear weapons. Even Iran is more likely to develop nuclear weapons now. Contrary to what some think, Iran isn't going to give up their enriched uranium and end their program just because the U.S. promises not to attack them again. Something like the JCPOA only works if some level of trust is possible, but Trump personally burned that. The best the U.S. is likely to get in negotiations is a superficial promise not to develop nuclear weapons, backed up by absolutely nothing. If the U.S. decides to end the program by force, the result will also be uncertain. Say the U.S. locates and extracts Iran's HEU from those underground facilities. How will they ever be certain they got it all without occupying the whole country?
> It's so narrow that they can even hit ships with artillery fire.
I'm not a military export but it doesn't look like a very good option. To get accurate targeting information Iran will have to use radars. Radars can be detected and destroyed given that the US has air dominance. Also as soon as artillery will start to fire their position will be calculated by counter-battery radars (and they will be destroyed again thanks to air dominance).
So drones (both UAV and unmanned USV) are likely more viable options for Iran.
During daytime, a 24 mile artillery hit on a ship the size and speed of an oil tanker is entirely within the capability of WW2-era naval gunnery by optics alone. Provided they have time for a few ranging salvoes.
(HMS Warspite, a WW1 era ship, managed a 24km hit on another moving ship!)
OP forgot to mention just mining the strait, which is also an option.
> This conflict lights a fire under the behinds of all nascent nuclear states. Iran would not have been invaded if they'd managed to build nuclear weapons.
Replace "Iran" with "Ukraine", the difference being that the latter gave them away.
> If they sink a ship at the right spot, the straight could become barricaded.
Just a minor point, but, the shipping routes are thin, but they are not that thin. It would take several ships to do that.
> Unfortunately, the straight of Hormuz gives Iran the ability to prevent Trump from simply TACO'ing out and proceeding to invade Cuba.
Iran already proposed a soft-victory condition that Trump could use to TACO-out. He can just claim it's Europe problem, so Europe deal with the toll.
It's Israel that won't allow TACO.
Agreed on your points. This conflict, just validated the North Korea style of strategy to all regimes out there. It does the opposite of what it is intended.
I hope things do get de-escalated soon, as this is not good for any party (apart Israel and Russia, which are the main gainers of all this mess).
But it didn't really. Iran is poorer than it was before, even more of a problem than it was before. NK has two very special advantages (Seoul is within artillery range, and it is literally in the backyard of one or two relevant superpowers over the decades) whereas Tehran's "force projection" is mostly through proxies and affecting global commodity trade.
Without NK's hard deterrence (and without being next door to its allies) Tehran is an easy target up until the last second. And even then what's going to happen if they detonate a nuclear bomb? Everyone will sit back and let them build as many more as they feel?
> Iran is poorer than it was before, even more of a problem than it was before.
Iran seemingly is coming out of this mess stronger than it was before.
The regime remains unchanged, and is likely less willing to make concessions now. Hell, even sanctions on it being able to sell oil have been lifted, which is a boon to their economy.
They are in effective control of the strait, and justified in exercising it now. Yeah, other gulf countries may try to circumvent it with pipelines and whatnot, depending on how poorly they come out of this war - and it is not like you create a pipeline in a few days. Those are big engineering projects.
If I were a betting man, which I am not, I think they will just resume their nuclear weapons program unchallenged after this, and will likely achieve it. It is clear that no one can stop them doing so.
And frankly, they should. Every country that can have nuclear weapons should develop them, that much is very clear, as the last decade taught everyone.
> Iran seemingly is coming out of this mess stronger than it was before.
This is a wild take. Their top leaders and generals have been killed, they have no control over their own airspace, have their military and civilian infrastructure completely at the mercy of their enemies, and have no navy/airforce any more.
Oh, and their currency collapsed.
But other than that they are doing great.
Yeah, and for some reason this place that has "military and civilian infrastructure" completely at the mercy of their enemies is right now exercising full control of one extremely important sea trade route, and is wreaking havoc on all gulf states allied to the US, and is successfully hitting targets on Israel.
Facts have this annoying tendency of getting in the way of propaganda.
Explain how they are better off than when the war started.
Since you seemingly have trouble reading text, I'll try to condense it in some bullet points.
Unfortunately HN has no crayon functionality:
1. Regime still in power, legitimized by the defense against foreign agressors.
2. Internal unrest loses steam.
3. Effective control of the strait of Hormuz, being able to, for example, dictate who is allowed to pass through and/or demand tolls for safe passage.
4. Weakening of the US presence in the Gulf countries. In particular the destruction of radar systems. Those things are expensive.
5. Lifting of sanctions on Iranian oil, at a time where the resource is very expensive.
6. Likely will be able to pursue its nuclear ambitions undeterred.
1) What defense? They have been punching back but have been unable to stop enemy strikes. Do you understand what the word "defense" means?
2) That happened before the war, and the protesters have been told to hold off for now. Its completely irrelevant to this war.
3) They control it for now. We'll see how long they can continue threatening global trade. My money is not for long. [1]
4) Attacking radar systems is not weakening the US presence in gulf countries. What they have succeeded in doing is attacking almost every gulf country souring relations.
5) This makes no difference since they were selling to russia and china regardless
6) This makes no sense, as they had operational Nuclear facilities up until the moment Israel/US blew them up. There is no reason to think we wouldn't do it again.
[1] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/bahrain-uae-join-20-oth...
Needless to say, I think you are full of shit.
But we will see in the coming days and weeks how things progress.
Obviously the current US Mobministration is almost impervious to shame, but of course they still have their own egoistic expectations to grapple with.
They are not afraid to spend money (and blood) on a problem, even if it turns out to be bigger than expected. How much? We'll see.
The neighbors are motivated to not live next to one more nuclear state. We'll see how much.
> They are not afraid to spend money (and blood) on a problem, even if it turns out to be bigger than expected. How much? We'll see.
I agree, but it is unclear if "more money" is the answer here. Iran is a much tougher nut to crack than Afghanistan. Afghanistan is barely a country. Iran is an actual, functioning country, with a territory that is geographically very defensible. And on top of that, they have actually been preparing for this for decades.
The ironic bit is that I thought the Iranian regime was on an irreversible decline, as the unrest amongst the population was growing in recent years.
The analysis I have read point out that this attack actually further legitimizes the regime and takes steam away from internal unrest, especially if Iran comes out on top.
Every authoritarian government needs an enemy. The US-Israel axis provided a very real, tangible one.
> The analysis I have read point out that this attack actually further legitimizes the regime and takes steam away from internal unrest, especially if Iran comes out on top.
Yes. Unfortunately both things can be true (irreversible decline) and solidified regime due to any external intervention.
Counter point to 4. The Israeli's wouldn't be trying to kill the Iranian leaders if they hadn't spent the last 40 years waging a proxy war against Israel.
Tehran "spent" 2T USD on the nuclear weapons program, which they could have spent on water desalination for example.
Yes having the deterrent is strategically beneficial, but working toward it paints a huge target on your back, while you need to pay for development, endure sanctions, etc.
Any state considering such weapons development already knows this. So this war is not new information.
And it's far from over yet.
Iran could very well end up cut off from the strait as rival gulf states build pipelines, rail, and drone defenses. (Sure this kind of long term thinking is not characteristic of the actors involved, but politics change easier around Iran than inside it.)
> Tehran "spent" 2T USD on the nuclear weapons program, which they could have spent on water desalination for example.
(Side note: That... seems like a very high figure to me?) For comparison the US spent close to $1 trillion in 2024 on the military. It could have saved lives and spent that money on healthcare. But that's not how govts work. Iran didn't get a drawstring bag with 2T in it and chose to throw it all on nukes.
Additionally, you're trying to bring a (totally valid tbf) logical argument ("Desalination is critical and an excellent place to spend money that's not going into saving lives") to a government that behaves like a cornered wild animal. It will act to save itself first, even if attacking the aggressor hurts itself too in the process.
> It will act to save itself first, even if attacking the aggressor hurts itself too in the process.
Of course, but as we see simply focusing on ground forces, drones, and anti-air defenses would be strictly better. (Because they wouldn't be this sanctioned, and they could even have a civilian nuclear energy program too.)
> 2T USD
It's a number coming from an Iranian trade official.
I heard it in this video: https://youtu.be/OJAcvqmWuv4?t=1084 and unfortunately there's no source cited, but I think it's this one: "As former Iranian diplomat Qasem Mohebali admitted on May 20, 2025, “uranium enrichment has cost the country close to two trillion dollars” and imposed massive sanctions yet continues largely as a matter of national pride rather than economic logic."
https://www.ncr-iran.org/en/news/nuclear/iaea-report-and-geo...
see also https://freeiransn.com/the-two-trillion-dollar-drain-irans-m...
It can't be 2T USD. That's about 60 times the cost of the Manhattan project in today's dollars. It could maybe be 2T Iranian rials.
Iran claims 1T USD damages as a result of US leaving JCPOA alone - in 2021. Now add in 5 more years, wars, sanctions before JCPOA was signed, direct expenditures on enrichment...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/21/us-sanctions-inflic...
That's their claim for how much less economic activity Iran (not just the government) had in total due to sanctions, not how much the government "spent on the nuclear weapons program" that could have instead been spent on desalination plants.
But without a nuclear weapons program, the entire sanctions regime wouldn't have started (yea, I know today half of those are anti-terrorist sanctions, but that's not how it started, it was morphed later on). It should be considered as part of the losses.
I think the correct way of viewing this war is around internal White House power games.
I don't think Trump himself particularly cares about Iran (or indeed Israel) - as in I don't think he has strong heartfelt views or moral convictions that cause him to act one way or the other in the strategic sense.
But there are those in the White House who do.
My impression from afar is that JD Vance wouldn't have been very supportive of this war, but his faction lost some power after the success of the Venezuelan adventure.
I think that particular move was Marco Rubio, but I'm not sure he would have been crazy enough to make the jump from that working to thinking that war with Iran was a good idea.
It doesn't seem to have been Stephen Millar's idea either.
So maybe it was a bunch or fairly random people from the pro-Netanyahu faction in the WHite House (not sure of names? Maybe Hegseth?) who really believed that this would be a quick bombing attack to take out the Supreme Leader and degrade some Iranian military capabilities, and it would be quickly over?
Maybe it was just Pete Hegseth trying to seem extra macho and people actually listened?
Writing it down makes it clear how very confusing this it. Maybe no one actually wanted this and they just went along because no one was actively saying it was dumb?
Of those options I'd guess Hedgseth as he seems to be the one cheering the war and also using Christian rhetoric. Trump has also suggested he may have relied on Hedgseths advice to scapegoats Hedgseth in recent days..
Yes reading more of recent news coverage I think this is the likely explanation.
> Maybe no one actually wanted this and they just went along because no one was actively saying it was dumb?
It is possible that the current war launched by the US Department of War by the chairman of the Board of Peace is the result of the Abilene Paradox.[1]
However, this vile collection of idiotic thugs more likely reached a Dunning-Krugerian consensus that this would be a quick and easy win. They all think themselves smarter and even nobler than everyone else.
They are however simply more remorselessly corrupt than most people imagined.
Comment was deleted :(
It sounds like the idiots are now shelling Iran's nuclear power plant: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/bushehr-nuclear-plant-h...
The reason for the Iran war is very simple: Israel’s instigation, a potential strike against China, and Trump’s political immaturity.
The purpose of the war is to destroy the Axis of Resistance, Iran, Hezbollah and its allies, the only force standing in the way of US/Israeli hegemony in the region.
That’s a purely ideological way of looking at the situation which IMO is not sufficient. As the article states, this war was not unprovoked either, regardless of whether the provocations warrant such a response. Iran is seeking its own hegemony. Now, this does not negate your point on the hegemonic approach of US in the region. I think this war can be viewed as a power struggle between a regional and global power that’s developing into a struggle dominance and survival.
edit: typo
Is anyone going to mention what these provocations are? I've yet to figure it out after 6-12 months. Pretty much everything going on seems to involve the Israelis aggressively expanding their borders or viciously attacking anyone who might oppose their expansion. I've lost count of the number of negotiators they've killed.
Trump has averaged something like 1 bombing run on Iranian leadership ever 2 years. Iranian provocations must be quite effective at making him see red.
> Is anyone going to mention what these provocations are?
Sure, it’s not hard to find. These started long before Trump. You should look beyond the last few months’ news cycles. Iranian government’s issues with Israel are of ideological nature (according to the regime) and their open support (financially and militarily) of a part of Palestinian resistance and Hezbollah. Iran has been active at Israel’s borders for years. Their heavy involvement (including sending troops) in Syria’s civil war is another one to name. All of these are the ones that Iran openly admits to. You can’t explain these away with Israel’s expansionist tendencies because that’s not been a threat to Iran. No serious analyst believes that Israel wants/can to expand into even Iraq, let alone Iran!
The hostilities towards US and vice versa are a whole different topic.
Now to be clear I’m not siding with Israel on this and not saying that caring for Palestinians is not right, just answering your question and naming a few examples. Now, it’s all happened during many decades and not sure if it matters anymore who started it because it’s become a total shit show that is very hard to reconcile.
You might find it surprising that during Iran-Iraq war, Israel was the only country in the region who helped Iran against Iraq (which had the backing of the Arab countries including Palestinians).
> Iranian government’s issues with Israel are of ideological nature (according to the regime)
Opposition to the oppression of Palestinians is not ideological.
That’s a tough sell from a regime that oppresses its own people.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.”
Would it be fair to characterise these provocations as all involving Iran providing resistance to Israel aggressively expanding their borders? Because these cases seem to have a tendency to Israel controlling more land at the end of the day. It looks like a pretty classic situation where an aggressive power builds up in a series of "defensive" expansions.
> Iranian government’s issues with Israel are of ideological nature
I think they're just good at threat assessment. There seem to be a lot of Iranians dying of Sudden Acute Missile Disease this month. Frankly I'm struggling to see what aspect of their actions aren't just common sense over the last decade, except for their charmingly simplicity in that they didn't make a break for a nuclear bomb when they first got within a year or two of being able to develop one. Israel and their supporters have done a very bad job of offering an explanation of why the repeated hits were justified or helpful.
Israel withdrew fully from Lebanon in 2000, and this was certified by the UN, yet Hezbollah kept attacking them anyway.
If Hezbollah offered Israel a choice between: peace with Hezbollah OR occupy land in Lebanon, I think Israel would rationally choose peace.
But Hezbollah has never offered this. Their stated goal is complete destruction of Israel.
So if the options are: Hezbollah shoots at you from right across the border OR you occupy a buffer zone and Hezbollah still shoots at you but from further away:
Isn't it perfectly rational to choose the buffer zone?
Did Israel peacefully withdraw from the Golan Heights? No? Unilateral annexation condemened by nearly everyone in the international community.
Is there peace with Syria? No? So no unilateral withdrawal.
Israel just communited genocide in one place and displaced millions in two others.
It "ordered" wast places full of people to lead, destroyed bridges, created shoot at will area on other side and is getting ready to move settlers there.
Isreal is not defending itself. It is cleansing and expanding, feeling entitled to kill at will everyone not them.
> Would it be fair to characterise these provocations as all involving Iran providing resistance to Israel aggressively expanding its borders?
Considering the results of this war so far and the one before, as well as Iran's military strategy, it doesn't seem plausible to think Iran sees (or ever saw) Israel as a threat to its borders' integrity. This may be the basis for Iran's strategy in the region in some version of the future, but to extend it to what they've done in the past would be hindsight bias.
IMO, the regime is not as much worried about Israel as it is about the US. Just compare the number of missiles and drones they shot at Gulf countries vs Israel.
But consider that Israel, rightfully or not, can make similar claims, which actually conform to the Iranian regime's long-stated goal of "destruction of Israel".
> Frankly, I'm struggling to see what aspect of their actions isn’t just common sense over the last decade.
That’s because it didn’t all start in the last decade. As you get closer to “present” in this timeline, it looks more like a one-sided affair. This is similar to the view which sees the whole Israel-Palestine issue only from October 7th onwards.
> Israel and their supporters have done a very bad job of offering an explanation of why the repeated hits were justified or helpful.
True, I’m also not sure if this is going to turn out as they wish it did. Although the jury's still out, but as the article points out, it seems unlikely.
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> IMO, the regime is not as much worried about Israel as it is about the US.
The Islamic Regime is not a normal rational actor, their opposition to Israel is driven primarily by their ideology.
> Just compare the number of missiles and drones they shot at Gulf countries vs Israel.
This is probably more just a matter of Iran having more short range weapons than long range weapons, Israel is a long range target that much of their weapons will be unable to reach.
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>As the article states, this war was not unprovoked either
Using the same extraordinarily broad definition of "provocation" required here, can you name a single war in history that was unprovoked? And if not, haven't we just neutralized all meaning from the phrase "provoked war" with our overly broad definition of "provocation"?
What you see here is the limits of liberal discourse on war, it's always 'here are the reasons why the war is justified' now let me explain why i'm against the war. Then discourse devolves into 'what is war even'? Believe in something, anything, dear god.
It is to benefit Israel (so it can anex more territory in Lebanon), and it has no benefit to the US. The US had already a deal with Iran, which didn't threat its own interests directly. It is like leave a snake alone, but once you step into it, it will bite you.
This war is only to benefit Israel, and right now indirectly Russia (due to the rising prices). Basically, the US is the main loser/sucker in this war, and we are all poorer for doing it.
why would israel want to annex territory in Lebanon? Israel has fought in southern lebanon at least 2 times since I have been alive to fight hezbullah, they always go in, try to remove hezbullah and go back. From a geopolitical perspective what would israel gain by permanently annexing a this area?
> why would israel want to annex territory in Lebanon?
Why are Israeli settlers annexing land in the West Bank? Why is the right wing government letting them?
these two issues are completely different. judea and samaria do not equal lebanon, ideologically or geopolitically whatsoever.
Israeli military launching incursions into lebanon to fight hezbullah and prevent them from launching rockets randomly into israel (these rockets killing many arabs as well), is not the same as the squabbles of a small minority of civilians in disputed territory within israel proper.
Israel is an arm of the US empire. It's a very useful ally of the US in the region. And when I talk about the US here I mean ruling elites.
The US is doing just fine from this war. The US is an oil and gas producer, the largest in the world. So they benefit from rising prices.
I'd say the biggest losers are countries like Europe, and neutral oil importing countries around the world.
The oil and gas producers benefit from higher prices, in the same way that glaziers benefit from broken windows. Everybody else loses though.
> a potential strike against China
I think this is understated in every analysis I've seen. I would bet good money this was part of the main selling point for the US. Just type in "China Oil" into any search engine or even filter the search to 2023 and earlier. China's oil consumption was surging significantly and they get a huge chunk of their oil through the Strait. It wasn't until 2024 I believe that they started reducing their dependence on oil; which I think suggests that they saw the writing on the wall and were worried about this exact scenario. China is America's number one adversary. If we're making large global moves, there's a high chance it's a strategic move against China.
I do agree. China has only 3 overseas military bases, and only 1 official one, guess where is it ? Djibouti, overseeing the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb in the Red Sea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_oversea...
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i just remeber seeing a Trump video today and he is saying that 'china get 90% of its oil from iran..stuff'
it's a good selling point. i dont believe leaders cannot understand the diff between 'iran's 90% oil goes to china' and 'china get 90% ot its oil from Iran', but i'm sure some people will buy it
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>on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons
I've been hearing that line, from the same person for thirty years:
https://www.news18.com/world/weeks-away-by-next-spring-video...
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Those people with a straight face was all US intelligence agencies and their leaders that also testified to congress as Trump ripped up the deal because Obama did it. Are you saying that all US intelligence agency were wrong?
This comment is simply not true from a US national interest perspective. The article explains why this was not done earlier.
> on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons.
WMD 2.0 The Electric Boogaloo.
Isn't it interesting that the country that takes the nuclear threat most seriously and tries to prevent it is also the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons?
Russia? France? The UK? India? Pakistan? Israel? China?
There are many countries that have used nuclear weapons.
If you're talking about the USofA they didn't try that hard at preventing Iran from enriching - they tore up a perfectly good and well functioning monitoring agreement at the start of Trump's first term.
Those countries have tested nuclear weapons. Only the US has used them.
The USA is the only nation so far which has committed mass murder with nuclear weapons. It seems to want to reserve itself that exclusive right.
As an American, i can say that, yes, I want us to be the only country to ever have used nuclear weapons. I don't think that should be a controversial opinion.
As a non-American, I want Americans to quit using their warrior narcissism to ruin the world. I'd like to see you disarmed, personally - your regime is out of control and your nation is in the grips of a psychotic nationalist mental illness episode. Your nation should definitely not have nukes.
There is no evidence Iran has an active nuclear weapons program or has had one since the early 2000s, which even the article's author seems not to know. They have enriched uranium that could be further processed and used to make weapons, but there is no evidence they are doing so or have the capability to do so (and no, Israeli government/military sources are not reliable. They have every interest to lie about Iran having/nearly having nuclear weapons)
When Trump left the agreement Obama made with Iran all US intelligence agencies agreed that Iran was not working on a bomb. Netanyahu has screeched about Irans destruction for 40 years, he was there to lie to congress about WMDs in Iraq. This conflict is engineered.
It's Israel.
This war doesn't make any sense for US to be involved in. It makes every sense for Israel to have the US involved in.
Another failed war with the USA fighting to the death for israel.
Why does this happen? It is because israel blackmails American politicians.
It would be better to show all the dirty shit to the public than for the world to die for israel.
They even have missiles targeting the USA in case "they feel over run"! They are an enemy to the world.
Why is a "War on Iran" being labelled as a "War in Iran" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47525839
> Please understand me: the people in these countries are not important, but as a matter of national strategy, some places are more important than others.
I assume/hope this was meant to say "the people in these countries are not [un]important"? (or just "are important")
As an entirely secular person, I believe every innocent human life is important.
I think he meant to write "not unimportant". His proofreading isn't perfect and he has typos or missing words in a lot of his work. I'm a fan of the work itself.
Trying to parse the whole sentence, especially the "but" afterwards, the most reasonable explanation is that there is a "not" missing.
He's speaking from a military, America-first perspective (which I suspect may be somewhat affected, because he is hoping to convince people who sincerely think that way). The people in these countries are not strategically important.
The typo is fixed now.
He emphasizes relative importance, he doesn't claim that the actual people are not important.
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No one seems to discuss the worst case scenario for this war. In the best/average case the world takes an economic hit. But I can think of one really big black swan event which no one seems to even consider (except Nassim Taleb). This war could trigger regime collapses all over the Arab world and put populist leaders in charge who rise to power on the basis of Gaza genocide fury. That would be catastrophic to Israel: they could face Iran from the air and Arab ground forces from multiple directions. In fact there are already signs that Egypt is moving towards that, troops are moving in to the Sinai. There is a real chance that Israel could cease to exist.
We saw regime collapses in the Arab Spring - it's not a simple or short process, most regimes survived (either directly or via reversion). Even when a regime was overthrown, the replacement was usually not more hostile to Israel. e.g. Syria isn't more hostile than it was. Thing is there isn't all that much 'fury' since Arabs already assume the worst of Israel, while reasons for relative peace remain as is or are actually strengthened by the revolution process (e.g. economy, desire for quiet following violent revolution, new regime wanting to establish itself, etc.)
> That would be catastrophic to Israel: they could face Iran from the air and Arab ground forces from multiple directions. In fact there are already signs that Egypt is moving towards that, troops are moving in to the Sinai. There is a real chance that Israel could cease to exist.
Israel is a nuclear power, there is no conceivable scenario in which Israel would cease to exist that doesn't involve nuclear war. Israel also has a long history of defeating coordinated attacks from their neighbors with conventional means alone.
"That would be catastrophic to Israel: they could face Iran from the air and Arab ground forces from multiple directions. "
Israel has little to fear from Iran in the air, the IRIAF has been destroyed and ballistic missile launches have tapered off.
In terms of Arab ground armies, only Egypt and Saudi pose much of a threat; the others are small, unintegrated and inexperienced and rely heavily on Western contractor support.
And if Israel, which has the most combat experienced air force in the World, somehow did struggle to defend against those forces, they always have the Samson Option of nuclear-tipped missiles from silos and submarines.
> ...they always have the Samson Option of nuclear-tipped missiles from silos and submarines.
At which point Israel is over. I have no doubt about that.
Hence the name Samson: caving the roof over one's self while taking down the enemies.
A not-unlikely outcome in this war is the fall of many gulf monarchies. A great outcome for some. A terrible outcome for others (such as Israel and the US).
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> This war could trigger regime collapses all over the Arab world and put populist leaders in charge who rise to power on the basis of Gaza genocide fury.
It would be a black swan if this didn't happen.
This is exactly why the Saudi leadership have been quick to debunk Western propaganda about the Saudi's itching to join the war, despite Iran's strikes on GCC territory. The domestic blowback in the GCC states would be fatal to the political system.
The GCC elites there are living well, with escape plans, but the people know they are viewed as subhuman "arabs" by the Israelis, and are in line for the Gaza Method (which is currently being deployed in the West Bank and Lebanon).
For all his faults and there are many. The no more wars aspect of Trump's campaign actually made me mildly optimistic.
I'm not an American so I'm not sure if the voting base actually believed him.
No one who understood what Trump is believed him. You shouldn't have either.
That this was so predictable, is the hardest thing to process. A friend shared this video by Jiang Xueqin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y_hbz6loEo&t=2s I find this guys hard to take seriously, his logic is erratic and often just absent. But his prediction has been frighteningly spot on regarding Iran. Towards the end he predicts American boots on the ground - and them turning into American hostages. I found that last part truly unbelievable until I heard Trump will have moved 3000 marines to the region by Friday.
N.B. The video is from May 2004 (during the Biden administration)
This guy is a weirdo that believes Jesuit illuminati run the world (listen to the end of his Breaking Points interview), his qualification is a BA in English, he teaches at the high school level, and holds discussions with manosphere figures like Sneako. Not sure I'd elevate what he says just because he has a good online presence and really don't understand why he would be at the time of this post in the top comment in this discussion.
I think you are missing the parent comment's point.
The point is not "this guy is a genius" but rather "this war was so predictable, even this weird guy could pinpoint with frightening accuracy how this war would happen two years before it started".
The biggest beneficiary of this whole thing will be the shift to renewable energy. I am surprised to see the greens up in arms about it all.
The ability of a state to run on energy pulled out of thin air is an obvious strategic benefit.
Surely the resources required to build and maintain solar panels, turbines, dams, and nuclear reactors are logistically more stable than oil has proven to be.
The ends don't necessarily justify the means. And it might just as well be a shift to nuclear energy instead, which greens are traditionally against.
I was just thinking how much this situation benefits China and their solar power industry.
> They did not and now we are all living trapped in the consequences.
They (rich and well connected) did, but they won't have to suffer the consequences, everyone else will. The Pedo of the United States is now a billionaire that will walk away in 4 years shrugging his shoulders laughing all the way to the bank with them.
Not one person that could stop it, did stop it. Legislature is sitting on their thumbs pretending not to work for Israel and selling us out to big tech and defense spending.
All the Baby Boomers are in the south enjoying the sunshine and shrugging their shoulders.
The only counterpoint to the article's central thesis I really have is that frankly I don't think there even was a "Strategy" for this war beyond the fact it will distract the American populace from the Epstein files and somehow enrich Trump and his political cronies.
That's it. That's the whole damn "Causus belli" for this so called "Special military operation." It isn't intended to accomplish any specific geo-strategic goals, it doesn't have a plan or purpose, it's just a convenient distraction and way for some already very rich folks to get even richer.
This is honestly my major issue with the whole "Geo-strategic analysis industrial blogger / YouTuber complex" in that I think they far too often ascribe deeper meaning and geo-strategic planning or purpose to state actions when they can far more easily be interpreted through the lens of the political capture of nations and institutions by the wealthy elites, their greed / self interest and their monological desire to preserve the status quo and thus their own political / economic power.
Nations very seldom do pretty much anything these days because it would be of benefit to their nation or people, they almost exclusively only do things that benefit the wealthy elites who control them.
This war, like all wars throughout human history, is a class war, in that the lives and livings of us regular folks are being sacrificed at the alters of power and profit, all so certain rich folks can get even richer and keep their boot on our necks.
I agree with most of the sentiment in the OP with a few key disagreements. OP repeatedly says Iran is not very important (not strategically important). This is clearly not true for a few reasons:
1) They control the flow of oil, as we're seeing now.
2) They provide a huge amount of funding to hostile forces throughout the middle east - Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, pro-Iran militias in Iraq. This destabilizes the entire region, including important partners beyond Israel (Saudi Arabia, UAE). Their support for the Assad regime in Syria and Hezbollah, who killed nearly half a million Syrians during the civil war there, also created a huge refugee crisis throughout Europe that has led to a rise in far-right parties who are reacting to the failed integration of these refugees.
3) They provide drones to Russia and instructions for how to build those drones.
4) They provide oil to Russia and China, two major geopolitical adversaries.
5) They are among the most significant propagandists that use social media to destabilize the west - having been caught repeatedly manipulating social media platforms like Reddit, Instagram, Twitter/X.
There are also some strategic benefits to the current war, especially if you're a narcissistic kleptocrat running the US:
1) We've already seen the market manipulation.
2) Every bomb dropped is a bomb taxpayers must replace; that money goes right to defense contractors
3) Then consider the American oil companies: they stand to make a lot more money from this, as their products are now more scarce and more valuable. The US, as a net exporter of oil (we import low quality oil because we're good at refining it; we export the good stuff), will make more money.
4) The disruption of the Persian Gulf hurts Russia and China far more than it hurts the US and EU. There are some US allies and neutrals who get hurt (those in east Asia, gulf oil states). But it's not a balanced impact - we definitely come out on top in the current situation in my view.
5) Electric vehicles are starting to look a lot better. Who's Trump's bff and biggest financial backer, again? Does he operate in that space?
I think the overall impact of the attacks on Venezuela and Iran sum to an attack on the hostile Russia-Iran-China axis, with the benefit of hurting some of their minor allies as well. It seems too perfect that we attack the two largest non-allied oil suppliers in quick succession for it to be coincidence. It might not be Trump's plan, but it seems like a long-standing plan to achieve a favorable geopolitical environment.
>but more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time in American history.
Dangerous stuff there pal, AIPAC coming for ya now. /s
Other than that, this whole thing is very well written and thought out. I found myself bobbing my head in agreement repeatedly.
I also must point out this gem: "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation." – Very well said.
>"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation." That is a quote by Adam Smith when one of his students lamented at the "ruin of the nation" when the American patriots had won their independence.
Thanks, didn't know that.
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"Just" taking Karg Island, 300 km of coastline, and 4 other tiny islands leaves the US occupying forces as sitting ducks under constant bombardment and drone attacks from the Iranian mainland.
US service members would be constantly getting killed, causing inevitable escalation and deeper and deeper incursions. It's a quagmire.
This stuff is the exact same reason Israel constantly feels the need to peel more territory off their neighbours after each war. "We're getting bombed near the borders, so we need to push our borders out to keep the border regions safe", which of course just creates a new, even bigger border region.
Regarding the first half of your comment, I believe that the article addresses both your recommendations.
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Really? The only thing that comes close is the sentence about Iran's regime collapsing "on cue", and let's be honest, the only attention that factor gets is a sound-byte dismissal with barely a reference to what happened in January.
> But a ‘targeted’ ground operation against Iran’s ability to interdict the strait is also hard to concieve. Since Iran could launch underwater drones or one-way aerial attack drones from anywhere along the northern shore the United States would have to occupy many thousands of square miles to prevent this and of course then the ground troops doing that occupying would simply become the target for drones, mortars, artillery, IEDs and so on instead.
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User > showdead
Everyone should have this option turned on.
As someone with it on, I'm very glad off is the default.
The majority are spam and rage baiting but a large enough amount to be concerning seem to be simply middle of the road opinions by otherwise fairly normal users who have strayed to far from the group in terms of some combination of tone or politics.
For those, we have a vouch button. But a dead comment doesn't send anyone to jail, so I agree that it causes less harm to hide a few harmless comments than to let everyone see some of the vile nonsense and/or blatant spam that gets flagged or hellbanned.
"Bret Devereaux" sounds more like of French origin, but if the author self-identifies as jew, this is useful meta-information, even if expressed in terms that are culturally unacceptable in US.
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Then I’d suggest you read the article because he absolutely mentions it, twice in fact.
As a consolation prize we can mention the unknown amount of unarmed civillians bombed by US+Israel forces instead.
Did you even read it? He mentions that, and also He says that the regime is 'odious' right in the beginning, and is looking more from the US self interest and strategic perspective.
"It certainly did not help that the United States had stood idle while the regime slaughtered tens of thousands of its opponents, before making the attempt,"
"Now, before we go forward, I want to clarify a few things. First, none of this is a defense of the Iranian regime, which is odious. That said, there are many odious regimes in the world and we do not go to war with all of them. Second, this is a post fundamentally about American strategy or the lack thereof and thus not a post"
The information on the number of confirmed deaths in Iran is so easy to find, I am a bit miffed that he wrote 'tens of thousands'. We have the number of confirmed deaths, we have a number of death still to verify, if he wanted he could have added both number, it would have been close to the truth imho.
Nor the hundreds of thousands murder by Israel in a genocide, which is why his strategic analysis doesn't see the gulf states are at risk of collapse if they engage Iran on what is perceived to be on Israel's behalf.
So the US can't help stop a slaughter because they don't help stop all slaughters in the world, is that your logic?
Selective enforcement of rules absolutely does discredit the enforcer and nullifies their "enforcement license".
Let's look at a scenario. I'm a local policeman who jails everyone in my neighborhood who steals from others, except one person that I allow to steal anything they want, whenever they want. When a victim of their theft tries to take their property back from the thief, I stop the victim and jail them for theft, because they tried to take what is now the property of the original thief. Some people say that I had no right to jail the victim for trying to take back what was originally theirs from the thief. Other people cite that it is technically theft and that someone else constantly getting away with theft does not mean that the policeman shouldn't stop this current case of "theft". Whenever the victims tried to do it the proper way and report the thefts to me, I did nothing.
Should the society trust me to continue doing law enforcement? Of course not. They should immediately replace me, and if that's not possible, they should exile me and organize themselves into a militia and enforce the rule of law on their own.
Going back to the real topic, USA has no moral right to intervene on the basis of punishing "slaughter" when they themselves are in the business of slaughtering people worldwide if it's in the business interest of its elite, and supports other countries slaughtering if it's somehow to the perceived benefit of the USA's leaders. The rest of the world should never allow it given USA's historical record, even a recent one.
The US doesn't stop a slaughter unless it is strategically relevant to the US' special interests - and it does promote slaughters if they are strategically relevant to the US' special interest.
Is the motivation to stop a slaughter really important if that stops it?
Yeah that’s called karma, the force of your intentions. It matters a lot. You can do good things with evil in your heart, and they come out evil. Like giving a nice gift, with strings attached.
If the strikes really stop protesters from being killed I'd give them credit, but is there any evidence they've made a difference?
The motivation to be known as the nation that stops slaughters should not occlude the truth that in fact, the nation only stops slaughters that serve its own interests.
That the USA allowed Gaza to happen has put an end to the idea that Americans are the good guys and only do things that are good. The rest of the world sees this, even if heavily propagandized American citizens cannot, for whatever justifications they give.
And the USA's inability to reign its security partners in when they commit genocide has put an end to the idea that the USA has any actual weight in its diplomatic efforts.
The world is moving on from American hegemony - we will have to look to others for help in stopping America and its partners' slaughtering.
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> I don't understand what this article has to do with Hacker News.
Taiwan has roughly 10 days left of gas supply.
Oil and gas are not only used for energy, but are the primary component of many, many materials and chemicals.
Some of the oil/gas plants that were hit will take months to fix. Pipelines have stopped.
We have a huge risk of a global supply chain destabilization for any sector. Think what happened with chip supply with covid, and make it much worse since the manufacturers never did stop during covid, while there is a risk they will have to stop now.
Not all machines and production can be stopped and started immediately, so even a short interruption can have lasting and cascading consequences.
Covid thought us that the world relies too much on just-in-time production, and we lack buffers in many, many fields. This has likely not changed.
> Right off the bat this guy is wrong. Nobody in their right mind would bet that the regime would collapse swiftly.
That "nobody in their right mind" would bet this does not, in fact, contradict his assertion that somebody did!
> I don't understand what this article has to do with Hacker News.
The continuing slow collapse of the United States is extremely relevant to all things technology and business. The source of all our funding may be cut off. It's important to monitor what's going on there.
Right off the bat your response raises questions because if the US leadership knew from day one this was a protracted fight then they stand having made entirely contradictory statements regarding their intent and expectations in that regard.
> then they stand having made entirely contradictory statements regarding their intent and expectations in that regard
Time Traveler, rushing to a computer after seeing a Skyrim for Sale poster and seeing this post: "WHAT YEAR IS IT!!!??"
Lying is second nature to them.
I always wondered what alternative reality are people supporting the administration are living in and this right here is the answer. As someone put it, Americans love to fool themselves in believing they are the ones 'winning' because they killed more people even if it means completely failing at the original objective.
I also love that he goes right to how much America and Israel have been pummeling Iran when the article acknowledges that to be the case, but rightly points out that even with that being true, the US is still in a losing position.
Because knowing this would require him to read the article but reading and details are boring.
I doubt reading it would have helped. The MAGA folks and anyone adjacent to them on the political spectrum are so propagandized right now it's nearly impossible to have a rational conversation.
I stll dont understand what you are doing 10000 miles away from the presumed borders of your country, and even more why on earth you think you have the right to dictate to 90 million people (let aside the rest of the world) how to govetn themselves.
I suppose it is some right given to you from above, now where have I seen this before..
> I don't understand what this article has to do with Hacker News.
Judging by your comment history it seems to be the majority of what you discuss. Maybe you're not the best judge of what HN finds interesting or salient.
I'm basing that opinion on the FAQ that states that most politics stories are irrelevant. But sure, I'm one vote among tens of thousands, and it's up to the mods to decide.
It's most of my comment history recently because I have family and friends in the region and I'm admittedly triggered by the callousness, heartlessness and sanctimony I see in these comments. It's not healthy, I know.
People are trying to preach good and honest values but are doing so through narrow, biased, misinformed and presupposed views of reality that are completely detached from what's actually going on on the ground, which you could tell by talking to anyone actually living there.
But that's beside the point. I was pointing out an objective observation: The Trump administration has said from day one that if regime change happens, it won't be by American hands, but by Iranian protesters' hands.
These protesters are being asked by all sides to stay home so the US and Israel can keep bombing Basij outposts without hurting them. They're doing just that. Where is the failure? All that's being demonstrated is this analyst's impatience.
It might work. It might not. But we'll only know in a few months.
The HN protocol to deal with this is downvote silently. Complaining about why and what is on HN is also in the FAQ as a no no.
If there was any serious preparation for a many months long campaign then why Kharg island is not occupied already?
The HN protocol is also to flag articles that are off-topic.
Where in the FAQ?
> If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
> The US and Israel have been pummeling them continuously, and they're not done
Is this the winning condition? Killing Iranians, all else be damned?
The win condition is that the Republican Party maintains control of government after the midterms and suffers no consequences for raping children on Epstein's island.
While I always avoid making any comments on US internal politics - I constraint myself on only commenting on foreign policy since it affects things beyond US proper... That does seem to be the case, all else be damned.
The article doesn't understand the real geopolitical implications at play.
JCPOA was due to expire beginning in October 2025, so it was not a permanent solution. Iranian nuclear proliferation was closely monitored by Israel and others as a top priority, and there's little doubt that this was the end game: no one could explain the vast enrichment activity in hardened, dug-in facilities otherwise (if you claim "Iran never had a military nuclear program!" while faced with the evidence of multiple scattered military-grade facilities, a missile program and nuclear material enriched to above-civilian grade then you're simply an idiot).
The Iranian combination of a huge missile and drone programs and effect on the Middle East through proxies (de-facto controlling Iraq through the Shia militias and Iran affiliated government, Syria through Assad, Lebanon through Hezbollah and Yemen through the Houthis) meant it had geopoltical control of the entire area.
Iran attacked oil infrastructure before; namely Aramco facilities in Saudi Arabia back in 2019. So it's a weapon it was willing to wield even before this war.
Iran was a key player in the Chinese/Russian axis (Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China) that was a global threat to Western interests.
There are persistent reports that Saudi Arabia wanted this war to happen, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the Gulf states supported that as well, because nothing threatens them more than Iran.
Iran getting nuclear weapons would throw the entire region into a nuclear arms race, so it was much more than the survivability of Israel alone. Saudi Arabia would pursue one, then Egypt (because of the former), and no one knows where it would stop.
I don't think this war was good, but doing nothing was even worse. I trust Israel more than I trust the US to have sound strategy on how this war ends. Israel is entrenched enough in Iran to be capable.
My bet? it will most likely end with a Venezuela situation, where the IRGC remains in place but with different people with different priorities. Iran keeps losing more and more infrastructure by the day, in Iran and outside (like what's going on with Hezbollah).
Assuming Iran can go on like this for a long time with their population suffering (remember the economy was in ruins and there was a serious draught even before this war started) is not realistic. They are playing the Middle Eastern bazaar-style negotiation, but there's not much behind it.
As for Israel: it's enjoying a huge economic boom with defense industry having record backlog (Israel just overtook UK!), massive R&D activities with companies like Apple and Nvidia (see Jensen's latest memo on his unwavering support of Israel and plans to build a 12,000 employee campus in addition to whatever Nvidia has in Israel). Amazon, Google, the works. Very unlikely that trade relations between US and Israel would deteriorate - there's simply no sound reason to do so, unless someone like Mamdani wins the presidency runs a Trump-style amok just with opposite beneficiaries.
P.S. no tears will be shed in Israel for Qatar, either. Qatar is the primary sponsor of anti-Israeli (not to say anti-Jewish) propaganda right now.
Amazing to me how impatient people are. It was six to seven months between the 12 day war in June and the mass uprising seen in December/January which was ruthlessly crushed. It will likely be a while between the end of this war and the next mass uprising. But every uprising that happens against a massively weakened regime means there's more chance of real change. Totalitarian regimes fall in ways that are hard to predict, but gradually and then suddenly.
Crazy how impatient people are while millions of people suffer, thousands die, and prices go up around the planet.
ive got opinions about this that id like to share but theyll likely be censored (your loss).
Author seems to not care about the prospect of the Iranian regime developing nuclear weapons, putting those weapons into the hands of its terrorist proxies, and sitting back while those proxies turn Western Europe and Palestine into radioactive wastelands (yes, Palestine, because it is not possible to restrict the fallout to just Tel Aviv, and the regime has shown itself to be far more anti-Israel than pro-Palestinian, the prospect of Palestine being a radioactive wasteland for a century is an acceptable price for destroying Israel). The US and the rest of the West should, apparently, just accept this as inevitable historical destiny, because $5/gallon gasoline or putting boots on the ground are apparently so utterly reprehensible.
Author's analysis, as critical as he is of American presidents breaking their promises, is completely absent of analysis of what would happen if American presidents broke their promises to never allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Never mind that JCPOA had a sunset clause that would allow Iran to resume nuclear enrichment to weapons-grade after the sunset clause.
The author's analysis pretty blatantly exposes reality: the West is losing because it does not have the political stomach to win. Instead of deciding that maybe society should try to develop that political stomach, instead of paying attention to a Trump who got elected in large part on mantras about how America was losing and it needed to start winning, no, Author says this was all a horrible idea and implicitly we should just sit back while our enemies progress along the road of putting nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists.
What makes you think they will give nuclear weapons to terrorists or use those weapons at all?
This does not happen even in the most insane examples like North Korea.
The more likely outcome would be that they would be able to avoid getting their schools/hospitals etc. bombed.
In your mind US should just nuke iran so there is regime change? Can you calculate how this would play out after that happens?
> What makes you think they will give nuclear weapons to terrorists or use those weapons at all?
The Islamic Regime is effectively a terrorist organization itself, so Iran getting nuclear weapons would be effectively giving a terrorist Jihadist organization a nuclear weapon. The Islamic Regime simply cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon and the military costs to stop them will continue to get higher as time goes, this is a problem that we will inevitably have to deal with and dealing with it sooner rather than later is likely always going to be the best option as the costs to deal with the Regime will only continue to increase.
> This does not happen even in the most insane examples like North Korea.
North Korean leaders value self preservation much more than the Islamic Regime leaders do, they also do not use terrorism in same way or to the same degree as Iran does. North Korean leaders also don't generally have ideologies similar to Martyrdom/Jihad like Islamic Regime leaders have(these ideologies specifically make traditional mutually assured destruction deterrence strategies largely ineffective).
> What makes you think they will give nuclear weapons to terrorists or use those weapons at all?
a. They have armed and financed their terrorist proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and others), who used those arms and capital to commit acts of terrorism against their regime enemies (the US and Israel).
b. Witkoff literally offered them free nuclear fuel forever for civilian purposes and they turned him down, bragging that they had enough highly enriched nuclear fuel already for nuclear weapons
c. I can put 2 and 2 together
In what universe does having nuclear weapons protect you from getting schools and hospitals bombed? Israel very likely has nuclear weapons, but Israeli schools and hospitals are getting bombed by Iranian missiles. So what?
>Witkoff literally offered them free nuclear fuel forever for civilian purposes and they turned him down, bragging that they had enough highly enriched nuclear fuel already for nuclear weapons
Can we believe anything that the senior people in the current US administration say, at this point in time?
Israel can't just be bombing Iran and then nuking them when Iran retalliates by bombing them back. Because this will be too much bad PR even for Israel as the vast majority of people will find evaporating people indiscriminately is unacceptable.
With all this considered I think it is clear why Iran is able to bomb Israel back and Israel can't just nuke them.
I think the points you made about why Iran would give nuclear weapons to terrorists make no sense. Because Iran would, presumably, get obliterated when those terrorists use those weapons on any country.
As far as I know, full-on invasion of a country that has nuclear weapons has never occured in history so far. So Iran having nuclear weapons in a defensive capacity is obviously good for them. In fact all countries having nuclear weapons in middle east might have made it more peaceful but would have been obviously terrible for Israel/USA
Donald Trump obviously doesn't care either, because every action he has taken during his two terms has increased the risk of Iran developing nuclear weapons.
JCPOA was highly flawed, but it was a lot better than nothing, which is what Trump traded it for.
If Trump was serious about stopping Iran's nuclear program, he would have made taking Isfahan a top priority of the initial strikes.
People repeat themselves saying "JCPOA was highly flawed, but it was better than nothing", as if JCPOA would have prevented Iran from getting nuclear weapons. It would not - it only delayed Iran getting nuclear weapons, and so by that line of thinking, it only delayed the onset of war.
Delaying the onset of war is not worthless, but it is not the same as arguing that war could have been avoided, which is what people who roll out that claim are really trying to argue. It's only true in a universe where Iran would have collapsed from within before the expiration of the sunset clause, and that clearly was not going to happen.
> as if JCPOA would have prevented Iran from getting nuclear weapons
"highly flawed" implies that it's not very good at its primary goal
> it only delayed Iran getting nuclear weapons
That sounds better than no delay
> That sounds better than no delay
That depends on what Iran does in the meantime, does it not? If Iran effectively turned their missile program into a true deterrent then negotiated delay is worse, because it would remove the ability to stunt the development through military means. Which is very much the argument being made for the “why now” of this war.
> It's only true in a universe where Iran would have collapsed from within before the expiration of the sunset clause, and that clearly was not going to happen.
No one can know this hypothetical, but some def bet their entire futures/careers on this: that an Iran with a more prosperous middle class (as a result of JCPOA) might have had a better chance for social/internal reform, i.e. regime change.
That doesn't change in the least the argument the OP made. The UN's IAEA has declared that Iran deceived them, didn't follow the agreements, and even accused them of violating the agreements with the intent to build a bomb.
As to Trump's motivations, they don't change this calculus. Iran intended to nuke their neighbors, and Israel, not just before Trump came to power but literally before the first Bush became president. And the full situation is even worse: right after the mullah's came to power in a leftist revolution in 1979, they begged for US and Israel's help to stop Saddam Hussein from nuking them. They got that help ... and then figured that nukes are a great idea.
Here's what the mullahs are most afraid of btw. The biggest threat to their power, the biggest problem for their central-London villas:
https://x.com/NarimanGharib/status/2036761330359615897
This local opposition to them has systematically worsened over time, btw. So I wouldn't put it past the mullahs to nuke Iran itself, eventually. It also means that Iran's islamic regime is threatening everyone, for the simple reason that if they make a single concession loosening their grip on Iran, they'll be lynched, one by one, in the streets, by people they went to school with. That is how much Iran's regime is "winning".
JCPOA was followed with minor discrepancies like having less than 1 ton too much heavy water. US intelligence agencies agreed that Iran was not working on a bomb as US left JCPOA, as they testified to in congress.
Well, here is the final UN report, from the horses mouth so to speak:
https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/25/06/gov2025-25.pd...
(they preliminarily reported the same stance even in 2024, before any attacks)
TLDR: Iran, despite having signed a treaty allowing access, is hiding highly enriched uranium, enough to build 9, maybe 10 nuclear devices. It is also not complying with its other obligations under the NPT treaty.
And then Iran responded to this ... by boasting of making nuclear weapons grade uranium to make bombs, to American diplomats:
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/iran-eastern-stat...
Now I get that American diplomacy is a shitshow since ... a certain event. However, I fail to come up with a worse attitude that Iran could have had at the time. They are openly boasting of having "the divine right" to enriched uranium that can only be used for bombs in negotiations ...
I also get that Americans (and everyone else, for that matter) feel that it's entirely unfair that they have to care about nuclear weapons in Iran. But if nobody does ... Iran's leaders have made it clear that as soon as they have the weapons, nuclear war starts. What I find baffling is that nobody cares ...
Of course, now it turns out that UAE and Saudi Arabia have since been SCREAMING at the US to do something. But the people it will affect the most are of course in Europe and Asia (everyone except Russia, Norway and Ukraine), who are effectively going to see yet another 3-4% tariff, except this one applies even on goods they produce themselves, for themselves. The EU is burning massive amounts of political goodwill trying to get a few percent savings, and now they'll have to do tell their people they're saving at least double that, in a few months time, with no real warning.
They started again in 2021, years after Trump left the JCPOA and imposed heavy sanctions. You see how one thing might lead to another? Its almost like someone wants this to happen.
I don't really care what you say, this is the IRGC, who massacred 50 people at Brussels airport for example. If they feel they are unfairly treated in any way, they can always report to the Belgian authorities, who I'm sure will provide a small windowless room with free meals.
And until they do that, and until they're let out again, no amount of arguments will ever make me agree that it's just not fair. In fact, if everyone even remotely involved with them gets shot THAT I will call fairness.
Yeah they should. Netanyahu and Israels leaders should report to the ICJ.
You don't really care because you don't have a valid argument. Fact is Iran was complying with JCPOA, as all US intelligence agencies agreed on. It was working. But it had one flaw, Obama signed it and the orange baby couldn't deal with that, and likely Israel/Netanyahu influencing Trump back then as well as they were opposing the deal from the start.
Now I don't think Iran should have nuclear weapons, but lets be fair here, they followed the deal, but still got sanctions put on them as if they were building a bomb, why not do it then? If we're to judge them by what politicians, generals or religious zealots has said in the past, then look no further than the US and what they thought about using nukes post ww2, I would argue they were much much worse no matter what Iran has said.
Like I said you cannot make a reasonable argument that Iran respected international treaties and is now being treated unfairly. That's utterly and completely ridiculous, regardless of the specific treaty.
Iran's government organizes massacres, inside and outside of Iran. Could you illuminate further to me which treaties that little practice follows and how unfair it is it causes bad things to happen to them?
>>Like I said you cannot make a reasonable argument that Iran respected international treaties
> Iran was complying with JCPOA, as all US intelligence agencies agreed on.
??? I'm not even the one making the argument.
You, me, solatic and acoup probably all agree that a nuclear weapon in Iranian hands is a huge danger.
But it's only Donald Trump that has used that as an excuse to make that danger greater.
And acoup has a great counter-point to your tweet in the article.
The Soviet Union dealt with massive internal protest quite successfully for pretty much every single one of its 70 years of existence. The Soviet Union only fell when insiders took it down.
Iran appears to be in absolutely no danger of that happening.
You seem to suffer from selective memory, your president declared Irans nuclear program "totally, totally destroyed" and your post "fake news". That was half a year ago. What necessitated another obviously useless strategic air campaign?
Its ironic it's not even discussed anymore in the US. A year in and you can't find a political post on HN, it's all blackholed - we've gone past "I didn't vote for him" straight to posts like this from alternative reality where he doesn't exist, doesn't say or do things.
In all my years, I've never seen Iran care one bit about influencing or bothering any country outside of its sphere of influence. But I've seen Iran be antagonized nonstop and respond accordingly.
As an American who lives abroad and travels around the world, I've never had the slightest worry about "oh man what if Iran does something?" But I've had to adjust flight and travel plans several times, I've had cost of living surge, I've witness chaos causing terrorist splinter groups that attack countries around the world because Israel and America have started some stupid conflict and said "we had no choice bro we had to attack them because in 80 years they would've made a bomb that might've killed a civilian bro you have to trust me bro." And frankly, I'm done even taking those arguments in good faith. I simply refuse. The mess these two countries cause has caused far more death than even if Iran had a nuke, ten nukes, or one thousand nukes.
> I've never seen Iran care one bit about influencing or bothering any country outside of its sphere of influence
Its sphere of influence includes Israel, Gaza (Hamas), Yemen (Houthis), Iraq (various Shia splinter groups), and Lebanon (where Hezbollah refuses to accept the sovereignty of the Lebanese government). You are being willfully ignorant.
Nope, not ignorant. I know that. And I don't care one bit if Iran dominates that area. I'm at a point where I'd prefer it because it's absolutely better than the mess the first country on that list causes, with hacking, election interference, terrorism, war, and ethnic cleansing to name a few. I think a growing number of people globally are sick of it.
And funny you mention Lebanon. Iran isn't the country bombing Lebanon every few years or seizing land there either. But right now another country is invading and seizing land and not accepting the sovereignty of the Lebanese government. [1] Always funny how accusations in 2026 really just are a way of confessing.
[1] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-89105...
Hezbollah has assassinated multiple government leaders and politicians and administrators within Lebanon, including a bombing that killed 23 people including the Prime Minister, and shootings that killed investigators responsible for investigating the Beirut port explosion a few years ago. Suspiciously this was shortly after Hezbollah was found by those investigations to have many links to the circumstances in which so much ammonium nitrate was being stored improperly in the first place.
Hezbollah also assisted the Assad regime in Syria during the Syrian Civil war - participating in laying siege to entire villages for long enough that people starved to death.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2017/11/syri...
You are willfully ignorant. There is tremendous anger at Hezbollah even within Lebanon, especially since they restarted the war on Iran's behalf in recent weeks, giving Israel the causus belli to resume their bombing campaign against them.
Man that's crazy. Just to compare, how many have died from Israeli attacks on Lebanon?
Looking at Wikipedia, apparently 1000+ have been killed in Lebanon so far during this war. So it seems Israel has done 50x more harm. Interesting.
> I've never seen Iran care one bit about influencing or bothering any country outside of its sphere of influence.
There’s this weird attitude I see where people claim “realpolitik” to give other nations colonial rights to their neighbors while denying the same to America. If you buy into “spheres of influence” as a concept it’s time to accept that the US, as the world’s preeminent military and economic power, has a sphere of influence that spans the globe.
It's not a war in Iran.
It's an unprovoked war by the USA and its handler, Israel, against Iran.
People are being killed, by choice, by the USA and Israel, and the USA and Israel are irreversibly destroying their own personas on the world stage.
Even US hostage Merz is starting to stutter about it.
Everywhere that isn't the USA or a USA vassal, they call the USA and Israel "The Epstein Coalition".
That's how it is viewed. Think about it. That's how appalling it is.
Downvote me, I have no fucks to give; the field is barren.
> It's an unprovoked war by the USA and its handler, Israel, against Iran.
Iran via their proxies have waged war for years against the US and Israel, the war is in no way unprovoked.
>Even US hostage Merz is starting to stutter about it.
Is he stuttering into an iron dome?
"Volkswagen may turn car factory into Iron Dome hub with Israel partnership"
https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/volkswagen-isra...
Yes, lets complain about building anti missiles defense systems.
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Next country to invade is monopoly/risk for 10 year olds inside 70 year old presidents.
Bret mocks the JCPOA, but the west found a way to work with the Kingdom of Consanguinity and Public Executions. What gives?
He wasn't particularly scathing about it - in the article it's presented as a decent solution to a difficult problem, just that in his opinion too much was paid for it - but that being so it should have stayed in place.
(are you talking about Qatar or Saudi Arabia?)
People often call this war "dumb".
IMO: this war is just the next step in the 1200-year old Shia-Sunni conflict. The Sunnis hate the Shia, and vice versa. Ever since 1979 when Khomeini came to power, the Sunnis have been on edge. The terrorist attack on Mecca shortly after made matters worse ( https://www.brookings.edu/events/terrorism-in-saudi-arabia-p... ). At first they thought they'd get Saddam to take out Iran; but that brutal war ended in a stalemate. Saudis and Kuwaitis gave billions to Saddam for this, and when it ended, they demanded refunds for a job not done.
This caused Saddam to try and take over Kuwait to wipe out his debts, which in turn freaked the Saudis out. They turned to the US to save them; which in turn pissed Osama off, who was riding tall after kicking the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Gulf War 1 happened, but that didn't placate Osama. Then USS Cole, Khobar Towers, 9/11 happened and US got dragged into the MiddleEast again, this time finally taking out Saddam.
When Trump got reelected, the Saudis and Qataris saw their chance to take out their archenemy Iran. They wined and dined him, invested billions into his and his family's shady schemes, gifted him a brand new jet. In that part of the world, every gift comes with strings attached. So, it was only a matter of time before the US would start trading blows with Iran.
And guess what? MBS is now pushing Trump to put boots on the ground: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-on-brink-of-groun...
The problem with the rulers of Iran was that they did not see the writing on the wall, and continued to poke at Israel via Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthies. They had already lost Syria (with the ouster of Basher Al Assad); they could have just cut their ties with Hamas and Hezbollah and made peace with Israel.
> IMO: this war is just the next step in the 1200-year old Shia-Sunni conflict.
US and Israel attacked Iran because of Shia-Sunni issues?
You need to think beyond first order effects.
Saudis want to get rid of Iran, for Shia-Sunni reasons.
Israel wants to get rid of Iran because of the 3 Hs.
Enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that; that's why KSA and Israel mended fences (for now).
Now Saudis cannot take on Iran at all; heck, they can't even take on the Houthis. So ... they found the 800lb gorilla (USA) and convinced it that those mean Iranians had made stupid faces at him.
Iran, meanwhile, showed colossal stupidity and arrogance by supporting these 3 Hs. Houthis, I can understand; they are going after Saudis mainly. But Iran had no dog in the Israel-Palestine fight!
> Iran was big and hostile, but relatively unimportant.
How unimportant was Bin Laden?
I think culturally he was important to a lot of folks in the 40-60 year old range, but the cultural take of the younger (20-30 year old) demographic really feels like all of Iraq was a huge waste of lives, time, and money.
Was he important? Genuinely curious because all I know is cultural vibes.
Bin Laden was from Saudi Arabia.
Bin Laden was not from Iran.
Exactly. You missed the point.
There are a few passages in there that in isolation are not very notable, but taken together are kind of interesting:
>But countries do not go to war simply to have a war – well, stupid fascist countries do, which is part of why they tend to be quite bad at war – they go to war to achieve specific goals and end-states.
>Again, it is not a ‘gain’ in war simply to bloody your enemy: you are supposed to achieve something in doing so.
There are a few other passages to similar effect, but for brevity, these two will do to illustrate the point: the author seems to be subtly implying that America is a "stupid fascist nation". Actually, the way he keeps clarifying the obvious, I think he expects a good amount of his readers to be "stupid fascists".
I cannot say I wholly disagree with his assessment!
> the author seems to be subtly implying that America is a "stupid fascist nation"
He does nothing of the sort.
I can clarify for you: the mention of fascist countries being bad at war is a link to another article by the author, which explains that fascist countries such as Mussolini's Italy and Nazi Germany were very bad at a war even while they mythologized and romanticized it, and derived their "sense of nation" out of symbolic struggle and might. The article you linked to describes many fascist or fascist-like nations, like Putin's Russia, but does not mention liberal democracies such as the USA.
I recommend you read it.
So why did the author mention that article in this context? Because he wanted to explain that countries -- unless they are fascist countries -- have strategic goals for going to war, and so does the US in this case, and therefore it's warranted to look into those goals and whether they have a chance of being met.
Again, I recommend you read the article in question (the one about fascists being bad at war) before jumping to unwarranted conclusions.
We read the article rather differently it seems. My reading is that he's pointing out the lack of goal for America here. Or at the very least the lack of a realistic goal. As he points out, it was clear 40 years ago that the stated objective stood very little chance of being achieved, which in turn makes one wonder if that was even a real objective at all.
And having a stated objective is quite different from having a real objective. Hitler had various stated objectives for all his wars (Lebensraum, fostering the Ubermensch, and rescuing Germans from the supposed oppressions of the Jews, which of course never existed and was purely a fiction to justify unspeakable horrors). If you take Hitler's words at face value, they were all motivated and not at all stupid wars. But you'd be very stupid to take Hitler's words at face value, especially with the benefit of hindsight!
I think the same arguments are applicable to trump. He has stated several goals, none of which are reasonably achievable. Take trumps words at face value and the war makes sense, but he has shown himself to be a pathological liar, so you'd be an idiot to believe him, especially when his statements lack any connection to the real world. Given how he tends to argue, it wouldn't surprise me at all if trump thinks that "bloodying your enemy" is a win in a war. That's how he works. That's how he handles trade. Doesn't matter if tariffs damage America, so long as they also damage other nations, it's a win. Of course he thinks that way about war too!
The end state trump is looking for is damage to Iran. He'll have it. But the rest of the world (including USA) will suffer tenfold. He doesn't care. Because he's a stupid fascist leader.
Thus, we end up with the conclusion that America had no real reason to start this war, and starting it anyway is an action historically only done by stupid fascist countries, therefore America is a stupid fascist country. It's a fourth order implication, which admittedly is not at all clear, and might not have been intentional.
I'm severely biased of course, I generally hold last week's turd in higher regard than I do trump (turds make great fertilizer!). So grain of salt and all that...
> But you'd be very stupid to take Hitler's words at face value, especially with the benefit of hindsight!
Well there are a lot of very stupid people in this world.
On that, we agree!
> That said, this post is going to be unavoidably ‘political,’ because as a citizen of the United States, commenting on the war means making a statement about the President who unilaterally and illegally launched it without much public debate and without consulting Congress. And this war is dumb as hell.
Proceeds to not mention the Epstein files at all. No comment here mentions it either.
All that mess and all those deep connections that were unraveling... I’m not a US citizen, but has that already been forgotten? Do people not consider that they might be relevant in some way to this situation? Or is raising that possibility now generally viewed as a conspiracy theory?
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It’s so cringey to witness how every techbro here is all of a sudden an armchair expert on geopolitics, intelligence, game theory, and the 50+ year long conflict with Iran. And they clearly know everything the biggest and most competent intelligence agencies in the world don’t… utterly bizarre times.
People that couldn’t place Iran or Israel or Lebanon on a map, let alone know the first thing about the rivalries in the region or have any skin in the game (beyond “the pump”) just feel like they can comment on any of this - taking cheap shots and crappy cynical takes at it. Where’s the moderation?
That's the internet for you. People read a wikipedia article or two and think they're an expert. I remember another article on here talking about beekeeping and suddenly everyone was a beekeeping expert. It's kind of amusing to watch, if nothing else.
I find it quite amusing.
Moderation? LMAO. This is peak HN.
It seems there's a flawed reading coming from a single point in time analysis
Region instability had ben regularly threatening freedom of navigation in the last five years
And USA may not consider the individual country strategic, but cares deeply about freedom of navigation, because the single market is basically the pillar for their hegemony.
Sarah Paine lectures give overall better lenses to look at this engagement.
As the article discusses in detail, if the US actually cares about freedom of navigation, the war was a massive own goal because it looks extremely likely to grant the current Iranian regime de facto control of the Strait.
Iran already had the strait in ransom, directly and indirectly with proxy receiving weapons. You don't get to ignore that part and call this a own goal, since inaction led to the same effective results.
The strait was navigable until three weeks ago. There are very few conceivable paths towards reestablishing this. This is absolutely not the same effective result.
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It seems you can't read a map. And btw it's very different targets, Hormuz vessel contain oil, gas and fertiliser for the Asian market. The red see is mostly foodstuff, cattle and Asian good for the European market. Way less impactful
You realize that the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf are different places, right? Your link does not support your argument.
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Same effective results as in it was causing constant global inflation and instability?
What are you talking about? The strait was open, and tankers were not paying tolls as they do now.
They held the threat of closing it, as a deterrent of an attack, and once attacked, they did just that.
You either live in a parallel universe, or are just spewing here propaganda.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/19/politics/houthi-red-sea-a...
Lol there were routine attcaks every time things weren't going their way. Whos been in a parallel universe?
And never said closed. I said ransom.
You know the Red Sea is a different body of water than the Persian Gulf/Strait of Hormuz? Iran does not control the Red Sea directly, but most likely by funding the Houthis.
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This kind of amateur analysis is not worth being front page of HN. Its not that it doesn't make a few good points, but overall, it just isn't high grade strategic analysis because it lacks a lot of information by the post's own admission.
Can you point out a better source or the major points that become invalid due to other circumstances?
> This kind of amateur analysis is not worth being front page of HN.
The author is a military historian and professor with a PhD, so not an amateur.
If you think this isn't high grade, or that it is mistaken, please explain how and why.
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Nah it's good. It shows exactly how far you can get with just a modest understanding of what strategy actually is at the level of nation states plus publicly available facts from the news.
Especially in the heavily jingoistic american context, where all of the focus is implicitly on the military means and technology and execution, but people have lost sight of, maybe can not even state plainly, what the point of a military is, what considerations are part of deciding to use it to accomplish a goal.
If you're going to accomplish a strategic goal with a military action, that goal had better be achievable through military action and this one plainly isn't. A historian can see it, a blogger can see it, a programmer can see it. Why wasn't it seen by people whose job is ostensibly to see it?
It doesn't even consider potential primary objectives, especially when viewed alongside the recent actions in Venezuela:
1. If US was to replace Iran as the one to control exports of oil through the strait, then thos would gain huge leverage on China via control of energy exports from Iran, Middle East more generally, as they have already done in Venezuela.
2. Making it clear that partnership with Russia and China will not provide security, which was shown to be worthless. This counters “The East is rising and the West is declining”, a go-to Xi Jinping line.
4. Securing South America for near-shoring production, decoupling of supply chains from China. Iran, China, and Russia have lots of
5. Disrupting Iranian ability to support Russia against Ukraine via manufacturing of drones in Iran and in Venezuela.
Whether these points are actually part of the strategy, I do not know, but they have been raised by others in the space, and seemed absent in the article.
If I understand correctly, I see all your points as potential rewards.
These rewards are useful to the US if they accomplish regime change to a friendly regime or at least military occupation of a good strip of land.
The article is about how these two preconditions for obtaining the rewards are unlikely to be fulfilled and, at the same time, non-accomplishment might achieve the opposite:
- Iran (and by necessity, other Gulf states if they want to export oil) align more with China
- US-partnership will not provide security (Arab states, South Korea and other allies are now less secure and the US can't protect them)
- US and allies are in a worse position to secure South America
Huge risk with little chances of a reward. That's the article.
Modifying the rewards does not change the game unless the probability of obtaining them increases or that of the risks decreases.
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Yea, the US joined in in 2025, what should it imply about a future war? The assumption that Iran doesn't know who's bombing it sounds rather dubious. If anything, it should be very much in their interest to assume away US involvement unless 100% proven, given fighting an additional enemy tend to be very bad and US is so powerful. Unless...
Maybe the strategic balance creates a situation where it's advantageous for Iran to pull US in regardless of non-involvement. They don't do well against Israel alone (see rather low damage of 4 separate large scale attempts at attacking Israel directly), but US is so much easier to pressure via the Gulf. Indeed, this scenario doesn't quite need Israel.
So US risked getting pulled in not due to attacking in June 2025, but because the cheque given to the Gulf was starting to expire, the power balance was objectively swinging in favor of Iran at the location where Devereaux sees as the most important part of the Middle East. Now, say there are powerful states who feel they are in a decent position now but also that the strategic balance would slip away. What do they tend to do? Devereaux can consult his WW1 history.
The blog post said that the Iran war costs the US at least 1 billion USD per day. The US is incredibly rich and can afford the cost. What I don't see being discussed: What if the US (and Israel) does not put troops on the ground in Iran, but continues relentless, daily aerial bombing... forever (1/2/3 years)? I am not saying that you can control a country from air superiority only (this has been widely discussed by military strategists -- it cannot), but you can endlessly bomb their military assets. What would happen? Honestly, I don't know. I don't think it has been done in the last 50 years of war. (Please provide counter examples if you know any.)
That's one way to make sure people living under aerial bombing firmly support a regime defending their sovereignty, hence legitimizing the islamic republic. Example: Taliban, with boots on the ground, didn't get any weaker at the end.
"There are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war. Well, my answer to that is that it has never been tried yet, and we shall see." - Sir Arthur Harris
The response is as applicable now as it was then. Time will tell.
This same blog really chastises that statement and tries to debunk it. I don't really see anything wrong with that article so until then, I guess I believe airpower can never win a war https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
The US bombed basically all of the Iraqi military in 1991, yet the war didn't end and Iraq didn't leave Kuwait until troops on the ground went in. Air power alone cannot control territory or compel political change
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Russia has been bombing Ukraine for years, and they're not closer to winning the war now than they were when it starts.
I don't think we could see a bombing campaign like the one we've seen so far anywhere near that length of time. Partly for munitions reasons and partly for target reasons. There is only so much stuff to blow up and only so many bombs to blow things up with. We can't produce them at any where near the rate that would be required to just to do this for years.
Many of their military assets are underground out of reach of bombers. And you need somewhere to stage out of. Probably not the Gulf bases that are being wiped by missiles and drones at the moment. The aircraft carriers have been having issues and are being pushed back out of missile range. So it becomes more difficult and expensive to keep the bombing up.
I mean the answer to underground facilities is you just keep bombing the entrance which is exactly what they've done. Iran still has insane supply levels of ballistic missiles so the US/Israel are eradicating their tele-launcher fleet.
The second the first bomb hit, the Republican Guard went from a standing military force to a guerrilla army, similar in a lot of ways to what the US faced in Iraq, just vastly better-trained and better-equipped. The US couldn't subdue Iraq with hordes of troops on the ground for years, so why would anyone imagine an air-only campaign would have better results against a stronger and larger opponent?
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