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?
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.
My takeaway from the war in Ukraine is: it’s going to get worse and last longer than anyone ever imagined.
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.
I'm not an American so I'm not sure if the voting base actually believed him.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
Can you elaborate a bit on what was unrealistic? (Maybe you have different posts or claims by him in mind?)
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.
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.
Replace "Iran" with "Ukraine", the difference being that the latter gave them away.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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).
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
America is isolating itself in so many ways. You could rewrite that scene and reach the same conclusion.
It's after the ramp up in production of weapons used in the shooting war started.
If everyone had electric cars charging from solar then Iran's strait gambit would be much less effective.
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.
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.
(HMS Warspite, a WW1 era ship, managed a 24km hit on another moving ship!)
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?
(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.
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?
It would be a black swan if this didn't happen.
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.
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).
Translation: "The victor is not victorious if the vanquished does not consider himself so”
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.
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.
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.
“The war will surely achieve regime change,” replies the oracle.
“Great, let’s go,” says Trump, who never read Herodotus.
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.
> 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.
who rigs the results of a war game and believes the results - only an idiot drunk on power.
I suggest a significant cause is Trump's arrogance and only listening to the advice he wants to hear.
At which point Israel is over. I have no doubt about that.
"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)
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.)
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.
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.
Fixed that for you.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. 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. But I am a scholar of military history with a fair bit of training and experience in thinking about strategic problems, ancient and modern; it is this ‘guy that analyzes strategy’ focus that I want to bring to this.
I am doing this post outside of the normal Friday order because it is an unusual topic and I want to keep making it clear that even as world events continue to happen – as they must – I do not want this blog to turn into a politics newsletter. I simply haven’t had the time to polish and condense these thoughts for other publication – the hard work of much writing is turning 3,500 words (or 7,500, as it turns out) of thoughts into 1,500 words of a think piece – but I need to get them out of my head and on to the page before it burns out of the back of my head. 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.
I am going to spend the next however many words working through what I think are the strategic implications of where we are, but that is my broad thesis: for the United States this war was an unwise gamble on extremely long odds; the gamble (that the regime would collapse swiftly) has already failed and as a result locked in essentially nothing but negative outcomes. Even with the regime were to collapse in the coming weeks or suddenly sue for peace, every likely outcome leaves the United States in a meaningfully worse strategic position than when it started.
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 about Israeli strategy. For what it is worth, my view is that Benjamin Netanyahu has is playing an extremely short game because it benefits him politically and personally to do so and there is a significant (but by no means certain) chance that Israel will come to regret the decision to encourage this war. I’ll touch on some of that, but it isn’t my focus. Likewise, this is not a post about the strategy of the Gulf states, who – as is often the sad fate of small states – find their fate largely in the hands of larger powers. Finally, we should keep in mind that this isn’t an academic exercise: many, many people will suffer because of these decisions, both as victims of the violence in the region but also as a consequent of the economic ripples.
But that’s enough introduction. What I want to discuss here is first the extremely unwise gamble that the administration took and then the trap that it now finds itself in, from which there is no comfortable escape.
We need to start by establishing some basic facts about Iran, as a country.
First, Iran is a large country. It has a population just over 90 million (somewhat more than Germany, about the same as Turkey), and a land area over more than 600,000 square miles (more than four times the size of Germany). Put another way Iran is more than twice as large as Texas, with roughly three times the population.
More relevantly for us, Iran is 3.5 times larger than Iraq and roughly twice the population. That’s a handy comparison because we know what it took to invade and then hold Iraq: coalition forces peaked at half a million deployed personnel during the invasion. Iran is bigger in every way and so would demand a larger army and thus an absolutely enormous investment of troops, money and fundamentally lives in order to subdue.

Via Wikipedia, a map of Iran. This is a very big country. It also has a lot of very challenging terrain: lots of very arid areas, lots of high mountains and plateaus. It is a hard country to invade and a harder country to occupy.
In practice, given that Iran did not and never has posed an existential threat to the United States (Iran aspires to be the kind of nuclear threat North Korea is and can only vaguely dream of being the kind of conventional threat that Russia is), that meant that a ground invasion of Iran was functionally impossible. While the United States had the raw resources to do it, the political will simply wasn’t there and was unlikely to ever be there.
Equally important, Iran was not a major strategic priority. This is something that in a lot of American policy discourse – especially but not exclusively on the right – gets lost because Iran is an ‘enemy’ (and to be clear, the Iranian regime is an enemy; they attack American interests and Americans regularly) and everyone likes to posture against the enemy. But the Middle East is a region composed primarily of poor, strategically unimportant countries. Please understand me: the people in these countries are not unimportant, but as a matter of national strategy, some places are more important than others. Chad is not an area of vital security interest to the United States, whereas Taiwan (which makes our semiconductors) is and we all know it.
Neither is the Middle East. 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. None of the region’s powers are more than regional powers (and mostly unimpressive ones at that), none of them can project power out of the region and none of them are the sort of dynamic, growing economies likely to do so in the future. The rich oil monarchies are too small in terms of population and the populous countries too poor.
In short then, Iran is very big and not very important, which means it would both be very expensive to do anything truly permanent about the Iranian regime and at the same time it would be impossible to sell that expense to the American people as being required or justified or necessary. So successive American presidents responded accordingly: they tried to keep a ‘lid’ on Iran at the lowest possible cost. The eventual triumph of this approach was the flawed but useful JCPOA (the ‘Iran deal’) in which Iran in exchange for sanctions relief swore off the pursuit of nuclear weapons (with inspections to verify), nuclear proliferation representing the main serious threat Iran could pose. So long as Iran remained non-nuclear, it could be contained and the threat to American interests, while not zero, could be kept minimal.
That deal was not perfect, I must stress: it essentially gave Iran carte blanche to reinforce its network of proxies across the region, which was robustly bad for Israel and mildly bad for the United States, but since the alternative was – as we’ll see – global economic disruption and the prospect of a large-scale war which would always be far more expensive than the alternatives, it was perhaps the best deal that could have been had. For what it is worth, my own view is that the Obama administration ‘overpaid’ for the concessions of the Iran deal, but the payment having been made, they were worth keeping. Trump scrapped them in 2017 in exchange for exactly nothing, which put us on the course for this outcome (as more than a few people pointed out at the time).
But that was the situation: Iran was big and hostile, but relatively unimportant. The United States is much stronger than Iran, but relatively uninterested in the region apart from the uninterrupted flow of natural gas, oil and other products from the Gulf (note: the one thing this war compromised – the war with Iran has cut off the only thing in this region of strategic importance, compromised the only thing that mattered at the outset), whereas Iran was wholly interested in the region because it lives there. The whole thing was the kind of uncomfortable frontier arrangement powerful states have always had to make because they have many security concerns, whereas regional powers have fewer, more intense focuses.
Which leads us to
The current war is best understood as the product of a fairly extreme gamble, although it is unclear to me if the current administration understood they were throwing the dice in June of 2025 rather than this year. As we’re going to see, this was not a super-well-planned-out affair.
The gamble was this: that the Iranian regime was weak enough that a solid blow, delivered primarily from the air, picking off key leaders, could cause it to collapse. For the United States, the hope seems to have been that a transition could then be managed to leaders perhaps associated with the regime but who would be significantly more pliant, along the lines of the regime change operation performed in Venezuela that put Delcy Rodriguez in power. By contrast, Israel seems to have been content to simply collapse the Iranian regime and replace it with nothing. That outcome would be – as we’ll see – robustly bad for a huge range of regional and global actors, including the United States, and it is not at all clear to me that the current administration understood how deeply their interests and Israel’s diverged here.
In any case, this gamble was never very likely to pay off for reasons we have actually already discussed. 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 – in this case they picked the previous leader’s son, so the net effect of the regime change effort was to replace Supreme Leader Khamenei with Supreme Leader Khamenei…Jr.
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. These sorts of governments can collapse, but not often. 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, but I honestly do not think the attempt would have worked before.
The gamble here was that because the regime would simply collapse on cue, the United States could remove Iran’s regional threat without having to commit to a major military operation that might span weeks, disrupt global energy supplies, expand over the region, cost $200 billion dollars and potentially require ground operations. Because everyone knew that result was worse than the status quo and it would thus be really foolish to do that.
As you can tell, I think this was a bad gamble: it was very unlikely to succeed but instead always very likely to result in a significantly worse strategic situation for the United States, but only after it killed thousands of people unnecessarily. If you do a war where thousands of people die and billions of dollars are spent only to end up back where you started that is losing; if you end up worse than where you started, well, that is worse.
The problem is that once the gamble was made, once the dice were cast, the Trump administration would be effectively giving up control over much of what followed.
And if administration statements are to be believed, that decision was made, without knowing it, in June of last year. Administration officials, most notably Marco Rubio, have claimed that the decision was made to attempt this regime change gamble in part because they were aware that Israel was about to launch a series of decapitation strikes and they assessed – correctly, I suspect – that the ‘blowback’ would hit American assets (and energy production) in the region even if the United States did nothing. Essentially, Iran would assume that the United States was ‘in’ on the attack.
That is notable because Iran did not assume that immediately during the Twelve-Day War in 2025. Indeed, Iran did not treat the United States as a real co-belligerent even as American aircraft were actively intercepting Iranian missiles aimed at Israel. And then the United States executed a ‘bolt from the blue’ surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, catching Iran (which had been attempting to negotiate with the United States) by surprise.
The problem with that strike is that attacking in that way, at that time, meant that Iran would have to read any future attacks by Israel as likely also involving attacks by the United States. Remember, the fellow getting bombed does not get to carefully inspect the flag painted on the bomber: stuff blows up and to some degree the party being attacked has to rapidly guess who is attacking them. We’ve seen this play out repeatedly over the last several weeks where things explode in Iran and there is initially confusion over if the United States or Israel bombed them. But in the confusion of an initial air attack, Iran’s own retaliatory capability could not sit idle, waiting to be destroyed by overwhelming US airpower: it is a ‘wasting’ use-it-or-lose-it asset.
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.
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.
Which is the case here. Because…
Once started, a major regional war with Iran was always likely to be something of a ‘trap,’ – not in the sense of an ambush laid by Iran – but in the sense of a situation that, once entered, cannot be easily left or reversed.
The trap, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz and the broader Persian Gulf. The issue is that an enormous proportion of the world’s shipping, particularly energy (oil, liquid natural gas) and fertilizer components (urea) passes through this body of water. The Gulf is narrow along its whole length, extremely narrow in the Strait and bordered by Iran on its northern shore along its entire length. Iran can thus threaten the whole thing and can do so with cheap, easy to conceal, easy to manufacture systems.
And the scale here is significant. 25% of the world’s oil (refined and crude), 20% of its liquid natural gas and around 20% of the world’s fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz which links the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean. Any of those figures would be enough for a major disruption to trigger huge economic ripples. And even worse there are only very limited, very insufficient alternative transport options. Some Saudi oil (about half) can move via pipeline to the Red Sea and some Emirati oil can move via pipeline to Fujairah outside of the Strait, but well over half of the oil and effectively all of the natural gas and fertilizer ingredients are trapped if ships cannot navigate the strait safely.
And here we come back to what Clausewitz calls the political object (drink!). Even something like a 50% reduction in shipping in the Gulf, were it to persist long term, would create strong global economic headwinds which would in turn arrive in the United States in the form of high energy prices and a general ‘supply shock’ that has, historically at least, not been politically survivable for the party in power.
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.
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. 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. “If the regime is threatened, Iran will try to close the strait to exert pressure” is perhaps one of the most established strategic considerations in the region. We all knew this.
But the trap here is two sided: once the strait was effectively closed, the United States could not back off out of the war without suffering its own costs. Doing so, for one, would be an admission of defeat, politically damaging at home. Strategically, it would affirm Iran’s control over the strait, which would be a significantly worse outcome than not having done the war in the first place. And simply backing off might not fully return shipping flows: why should Iran care if the Gulf states can export their oil? An Iran that fully controls the strait, that had demonstrated it could exclude the United States might intentionally throttle everyone else’s oil – even just a bit – to get higher prices for its own or to exert leverage.
So once the strait was closed, the United States could not leave until it was reopened, or at least there was some prospect of doing so.
The result is a fairly classic escalation trap: once the conflict starts, it is extremely costly for either side to ever back down, which ensures that the conflict continues long past it being in the interests of either party. Every day this war goes on make both the United States and Iran weaker, poorer and less secure but it is very hard for either side to back down because there are huge costs connected to being the party that backs down. So both sides ‘escalate to de-escalate’ (this phrase is generally as foolish as it sounds), intensifying the conflict in an effort to hit hard enough to force the other guy to blink first. But since neither party can back down unilaterally and survive politically, there’s practically no amount of pain that can force them to do so.
Under these conditions, both sides might seek a purely military solution: remove the ability of your opponent to do harm in order to create the space to declare victory and deescalate. Such solutions are elusive. Iran simply has no real way of meaningfully diminishing American offensive power: they cannot strike the airfields, sink the carriers or reliably shoot down the planes (they have, as of this writing, managed to damage just one aircraft).
For the United States, a purely military solution is notionally possible: you could invade. But as noted, Iran is very, very big and has a large population, so a full-scale invasion would be an enormous undertaking, larger than any US military operation since the Second World War. Needless to say, the political will for this does not exist. 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.
One can never know how well prepared an enemy is for something, but assuming the Iranians are even a little bit prepared for ground operations, any American force deployed on Iranian soil would end up eating Shahed and FPV drones – the sort we’ve seen in Ukraine – all day, every day.
Meanwhile escort operations in the strait itself are also deeply unpromising. For one, it would require many more ships, because the normal traffic through the strait is so large and because escorts would be required throughout the entire Gulf (unlike the Red Sea crisis, where the ‘zone’ of Houthi attacks was contained to only the southern part of the Red Sea). But the other problem is that Iran possesses modern anti-ship missiles (AShMs) in significant quantity and American escort ships (almost certainly Arleigh Burke-class destroyers) would be vulnerable escorting slow tankers in the constrained waters of the strait.
It isn’t even hard to imagine what the attack would look like: essentially a larger, more complex version of the attack that sunk the Moskva, to account for the Arleigh Burke’s better air defense. Iran would pick their moment (probably not the first transit) and try to distract the Burke, perhaps with a volley of cheap Shahed-type drones against a natural gas tanker, before attempting to ambush the Burke with a volley of AShMs, probably from the opposite direction. The aim would be to create just enough confusion that one AShM slipped through, which is all it might take to leave a $2.2bn destroyer with three hundred American service members on board disabled and vulnerable in the strait. Throw in speed-boats, underwater drones, naval mines, fishing boats pretending to be threats and so on to maximize confusion and the odds that one of perhaps half a dozen AShMs slips through.
And if I can reason this out, Iran – which has been planning for this exact thing for forty years certainly can. Which is why the navy is not eager to run escort.
But without escorts or an end to the conflict, shipping in the Gulf is not going to return to normal. Container ships are big and hard to sink but easy to damage. But while crude oil tankers are hard to set fire to, tankers carrying refined petroleum products are quite easy to set fire to, as we’ve seen, while tankers of liquid natural gas (LNG carriers) are essentially floating bombs.
The result is that right now it seems that the only ships moving through the strait are those Iran permits and they appear to have a checkpoint system, turning away ships they do not approve of. A military solution this problem is concievable, but extremely difficult to implement practically, requiring either a massive invasion of Iran’s coastline or an enormous sea escort operation. It seems more likely in both cases that the stoppage will continue until Iran decides it should stop. The good news on that front is that Iran benefits from the export of oil from the Gulf too, but the bad news is that while they are permitting some traffic, precisely because high energy prices are their only lever to make the United States and Israel stop killing them, they are unlikely to approve the transit of the kinds of numbers of ships which would allow energy markets to stabilize.
Just as a measure here, as I write this apparently over the last three days or so Iran has let some twenty ships through their checkpoint, charging fees apparently to do so. That may sound like a lot, but it is a quantity that, compared to the normal operation of the strait, is indistinguishable from zero. The Strait of Hormuz normally sees around 120 transits per day (including both directions). That scale should both explain why five or six ships a day paying Iran to transit is not going to really impact this equation – that’s still something like a 95% reduction in traffic (and all of the Iran-approved transits are outbound, I think) – but also why a solution like ‘just do escorts’ is so hard. Whatever navies attempted an escort solution would need to escort a hundred ships a day, with every ship being vulnerable at every moment from when it entered the Strait to when it docked for loading or offloading to its entire departure route. All along the entire Gulf coastline. All the time.
Likewise, even extremely punishing bombings of Iranian land-based facilities are unlikely to wholly remove their ability to throw enough threat into the Strait that traffic remains massively reduced. Sure some ship owners will pay Iran and others will take the risk, but if traffic remains down 90% or just 50% that is still a massive, global energy disruption. And we’ve seen with the campaign against the Houthis just how hard it is with airstrikes to compromise these capabilities: the United States spent more than a year hammering the Houthis and was never able to fully remove their attack capabilities. Cargo ships are too vulnerable and the weapons with which to attack them too cheap and too easy to hide.
There is a very real risk that this conflict will end with Iran as the de facto master of the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, having demonstrated that no one can stop them from determining by force which ships pass and which ships cannot. That would, in fact, be a significant strategic victory for Iran and an enormous strategic defeat for the United States.
Which brings us to the question of strategic outcomes. As the above has made clear, I think the Trump administration erred spectacularly in starting this war. It appears as though, in part pressured by Israel, but mostly based on their own decisions (motivated, it sure seems, by the ease of the Venezuela regime-change) they decided to go ahead on the hopeful assumption the regime would collapse and as a result did not plan for the most likely outcome (large war, strait closure), despite this being the scenario that political leadership (Trump, Hegseth, Rubio) were warned was most likely.
The administration now appears to be trying to extricate itself from the problem has created, but as I write this, is currently still stuck in the ‘trap’ above. Now this is a fast moving topic, so by the time you actually read this the war well could have ended in a ceasefire (permanent or temporary) or intensified and expanded. Who knows! As I am writing the Trump administration claims that they are very near a negotiated ceasefire, while the Iranian regime claims they have rejected both of the United States’ interlocutors as unsuitable (‘backstabbing’ negotiators), while reporting suggests Israel may feel it in their interests to blow up any deal if the terms are too favorable to Iran.
That is a lot of uncertainty! But I think we can look at some outcomes here both in terms of what was militarily achieved, what the consequences of a ‘deal’ might be and what the consequences of not having a deal might be.
The Trump administration has offered a bewildering range of proposed objectives for this war, but I think it is fair to say the major strategic objectives have not been achieved. Initially, the stated objective was regime change or at least regime collapse; neither has occurred. The regime very much still survives and if the war ends soon it seems very plausible that the regime – able to say that it fought the United States and made the American president sue for peace – will emerge stronger, domestically (albeit with a lot of damage to fix and many political problems that are currently ‘on pause’ coming ‘un-paused’). The other core American strategic interest here is Iran’s nuclear program, the core of which is Iran’s supply of roughly 500kg of highly enriched uranium; no effort appears to have been made to recover or destroy this material and it remains in Iranian hands. Actually destroying (dispersing, really) or seizing this material by military force would be an extremely difficult operation with a very high risk of failure, since the HEU is underground buried in facilities (mostly Isfahan) in the center of the country. Any sort of special forces operation would thus run the risk of being surrounded and outnumbered very fast, even with ample air support, while trying to extract half a ton of uranium stored in gas form in heavy storage cylinders.
When the United States did this in Kazakhstan, removing about 600kg (so roughly the same amount) it required the team to spend 12 hours a day every day for a month to remove it, using multiple heavy cargo planes. And that facility was neither defended, nor buried under rubble.
Subsequently, administration aims seem to have retreated mostly to ‘fixing the mess we made:’ getting Iran to stop shooting and getting the Strait of Hormuz reopened and the ships moving again. They do seem to be asking for quite a bit more at the peace table, but the record of countries winning big concessions at the peace table which they not only haven’t secured militarily but do not appear able to do so is pretty slim.
Now it is possible that Iran blinks and takes a deal sooner rather than later. But I don’t think it is likely. And the simple reason is that Iran probably feels like it needs to reestablish deterrence. This is the second sudden bombing campaign the country has suffered in as many years – they do not want there to be a third next year and a fourth the year after that. But promises not to bomb them don’t mean a whole lot: establishing deterrence here means inflicting quite a lot of pain. In practice, if Iran wants future presidents not to repeat this war, the precedent they want to set is “attacking Iran is a presidency-ending mistake.” And to do that, well, they need to end a presidency or at least make clear they could have done.
Iran is thus going to very much want a deal that says ‘America blinked’ on the tin, which probably means at least some remaining nuclear program, a de facto Iranian veto on traffic in the strait and significant sanctions relief, along with formal paper promises of no more air strikes. That’s going to be a hard negotiating position to bridge, especially because Iran can ‘tough it out’ through quite a lot of bombing.
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. For wars close to home that are viewed as existential? Well, the ‘turnip winter‘ where Germans started eating food previous thought fit only for animals (a result of the British blockade) began in 1916. The war did not end in 1916. It did not end in 1917. It did not end until November, 1918. Food deprivation and starvation in Germany was real and significant and painful for years before the country considered surrender. Just because the war is painful for Iran does not mean the regime will cave quickly: so long as they believe the survival of the regime is at stake, they will fight on.
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
So my conclusion here is that the United States has not yet achieved very much in this war on a strategic level. Oh, tactically, the United States has blown up an awful lot of stuff and done so with very minimal casualties of its own. 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.
None of the major goals here – regime change, an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions – have been achieved. If the war ends tomorrow in a ‘white peace,’ Iran will reconstitute its military and proxies and continue its nuclear program. It is in fact possible to display astounding military skill and yet, due to strategic incoherence, not accomplish anything.
So the true, strategic gains here for all of the tactical effectiveness displayed, are functionally nil. Well what did it cost?
Well, first and foremost, to date the lives of 13 American soldiers (290 more WIA), 24 Israelis (thousands more injured), at least a thousand civilian deaths across ‘neutral’ countries (Lebanon mostly, but deaths in Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, etc) and probably at least a thousand if not more Iranian civilians (plus Iranian military losses). The cost of operations for the United States is reportedly one to two billion dollars a day, which adds up pretty quickly to a decent chunk of change.
All of the military resources spent in this war are in turn not available for other, more important theaters, most obviously the Asia-Pacific (INDOPACOM), but of course equally a lot of these munitions could have been doing work in Ukraine as well. As wars tend to do, this one continues to suck in assets as it rumbles on, so the American commitment is growing, not shrinking. And on top of spent things like munitions and fuel, the strain on ships, air frames and service personnel is also a substantial cost: it turns out keeping a carrier almost constantly running from one self-inflicted crisis to the next for ten months is a bad idea.
You could argue these costs would be worthwhile it they resulted in the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program – again, the key element here is the HEU, which has not been destroyed – or of the Iranian regime. But neither of those things have been achieved on the battlefield, so this is a long ledger of costs set against…no gains. Again, it is not a ‘gain’ in war simply to bloody your enemy: you are supposed to achieve something in doing so.
The next side of this are the economic consequences. Oil and natural gas have risen in price dramatically, but if you are just watching the commodity ticker on the Wall Street Journal, you may be missing some things. When folks talk about oil prices, they generally do so via either $/bbl (West Texas Intermediate – WTI – one-month front-month futures) or BRN00 (Brent Crude Oil Continuous Contracts). These are futures contracts, meaning the price being set is not for a barrel of oil right now but for a barrel of oil in the future; we can elide the sticky differences between these two price sets and just note that generally the figure you see is for delivery in more-or-less one month’s time. Those prices have risen dramatically (close to doubled), but may not reflect the full economic impact here: as the ‘air bubble’ created by the sudden stop of oil shipments expands, physical here-right-now prices for oil are much higher in many parts of the world and still rising.
Essentially, the futures markets are still hedging on the idea that this war might end and normal trade might resume pretty soon, a position encouraged by the current administration, which claims it has been negotiating with Iran (Iran denied the claim). The tricky thing here is that this is a war between two governments – the Trump administration and the Iranian regime – which both have a clear record of lying a lot. The Trump administration has, for instance, repeatedly claimed a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia was imminent, and that war remains ongoing. The markets are thus forced to try and guess everyone’s actions and intentions from statements that are unreliable. Cards on the table, I think the markets are underestimating the likelihood that this conflict continues for some time. Notably, the United States is moving assets into theater – an MEU, elements of the 82 Airborne – which will take some time to arrive (two weeks for the MEU which is still about a week out as I write this) and set up for operations.
In either case, while I am not an expert on oil extraction or shipping, what I have seen folks who are experts on those things say is that the return of normal operations after this war will be very slow, often on the order of ‘every extra week of conflict adds a month to recovery’ (which was Sal Mercogliano’s rule of thumb in a recent video). If the war ends instantly, right now, ship owners will first have to determine that the strait is safe, then ships will have to arrive and begin loading to create space in storage to start up refineries to create space in storage to start up oil wells that have been ‘shut in,’ some of which may require quite a bit of doing to restart. Those ships in turn have to spend weeks sailing to the places that need these products, where some of the oil and LNG is likely to be used to refill stockpiles rather than immediately going out to consumers. For many products, refineries and production at the point of sale – fertilizer plants, for instance – will also need to be restarted. Factory restarts can be pretty involved tasks.
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.
Meanwhile, disruption of fertilizer production, which relies heavily on natural gas products, has the potential to raise food prices globally. Higher global food prices – and food prices have already been elevated by the impact of the War in Ukraine – are pretty strongly associated with political instability in less developed countries. After all, a 25% increase in the price of food in a rich country is annoying – you have to eat more cheaper foods (buy more ramen, etc.). But in a poor country it means people go hungry because they cannot afford food and hungry, desperate people do hungry, desperate things. A spike in food prices was one of the core causes of the 2010 Arab Spring which led in turn to the Syrian Civil War, the refugee crisis of which significantly altered the political landscape of Europe.

Via Wikipedia, a chart of the food price index, with the spikes on either side of 2010 clearly visible; they are thought to have contributed to the intense political instability of those years (alongside the financial crisis).
I am not saying this will happen – the equally big spike in food prices from the Ukraine War has not touched off a wave of revolutions – but that it increases the likelihood of chaotic, dynamic, unsettled political events.
But it does seem very clear that this war has created a set of global economic headwinds which will have negative repercussions for many countries, including the United States. The war has not, as of yet, made Americans any safer – but it has made them poorer.
Then there are the political implications. 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.

Again, predictions are hard, especially about the future, but it certainly seems like there is an open door to a future where this war is the final nail in the coffin of the American-Israeli security partnership, as it becomes impossible to sustain in the wake of curdling American public opinion. That would be a strategic catastrophe for Israel if it happened. On the security side, with Israel has an independent nuclear deterrent and some impressive domestic military-industrial production the country is not capable of designing and manufacturing the full range of high-end hardware that it relies on to remain militarily competitive despite its size. There’s a reason Israel flies F-35s. But a future president might well cut off spare parts and maintainers for those F-35s, refuse to sell new ones, refuse to sell armaments for them, and otherwise make it very difficult for Israel to acquire superior weapons compared to its regional rivals.
Economic coercion is equally dangerous: Israel is a small, substantially trade dependent country and its largest trading partner is the United States, followed by the European Union. But this trade dependency is not symmetrical: the USA and EU are hugely important players in Israel’s economy but Israel is a trivial player in the US and EU economies. Absent American diplomatic support then, the threat of economic sanctions is quite dire: Israel is meaningfully exposed and the sanctions would be very low cost for the ‘Status Quo Coalition’ (assuming the United States remains a member) to inflict under a future president.
A war in which Israel cripples Iran in 2026 but finds itself wholly diplomatically isolated in 2029 is a truly pyrrhic victory. As Thucydides might put it, an outcome like that would be an “example for the world to meditate upon.” That outcome is by no means guaranteed, but every day the war grinds on and becomes less popular in the United States, it becomes more likely.
But the United States is likewise going to bear diplomatic costs here. Right now the Gulf States have to shelter against Iranian attack but when the dust settles they – and many other countries – will remember that the United States unilaterally initiated by surprise a war of choice which set off severe global economic headwinds and uncertainty. Coming hot on the heels of the continuing drama around tariffs, the takeaway in many places may well be ‘Uncle Sam wants you to be poor,’ which is quite a damaging thing for diplomacy. And as President Trump was finding out when he called for help in the Strait of Hormuz and got told ‘no’ by all of our traditional allies, it is in fact no fun at all to be diplomatically isolated, no matter how powerful you are.
Of course the war, while quickly becoming an expensive, self-inflicted wound for the United States has also been disastrous for Iran. I said this at the top but I’ll say it again: the Iranian regime is odious. You will note also I have not called this war ‘unprovoked’ – the Iranian regime has been provoking the United States and Israel via its proxies almost non-stop for decades. That said, it is the Iranian people who will suffer the most from this war and they had no choice in the matter. They tried to reject this regime earlier this year and many were killed for it. But I think it is fair to say this war has been a tragedy for the Iranian people and a catastrophe for the Iranian regime.
And you may then ask, here at the end: if I am saying that Iran is being hammered, that they are suffering huge costs, how can I also be suggesting that the United States is on some level losing?
And the answer is simple: 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.
In short, please understand this entire 7,000+ word post as one primal scream issued into the avoid at the careless, unnecessary folly of the decision to launch an ill-considered war without considering the obvious, nearly inevitable negative outcomes which would occur unless the initial strikes somehow managed to pull the inside straight-flush. They did not and now we are all living trapped in the consequences.
Maybe the war will be over tomorrow. The consequences will last a lot longer.
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?
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".
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.
Going for the worst possible option, only because the better options are not 100% perfect, is to be considered irrational behaviour.
Biggest concerns are usually placement and durability to bad weather.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_oversea...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Why waste time convincing anybody of anything, when support for the war will just converge on the president's approval rating anyway?
edit: typo
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.
> 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.
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
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...
No president has ever been this fucking stupid.
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.
[0]https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/21/cq-brown-trump-fire...
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.
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.
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
[1] https://news.sky.com/story/four-arrested-on-suspicion-of-syp...
[2] https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-890851
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.
https://www.onthewing.org/user/Bonhoeffer%20-%20Theory%20of%...
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...
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.
"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 thought I was clear where I was looking - here, you may check for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136.
the strait-using countries are surely going to "make a lesson out of" iran exactly for that reason
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."
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
I think the furthest hits Ukraine has been able to achieve with drones were on a refinery about 1300km from Ukraine controlled land.
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...
Well there are a lot of very stupid people in this world.
It's a couple of hundred miles from the frontlines in Kharkiv, and the Russian border to the North is even closer.
It hardly seemed an unreasonable assumption.
The key would be to simply not ignore all the other dimensions of dependency.
I must have missed those, but I would expect HN to be able to count. There really are not a lot of Kurds.
You presented the absolute maximum estimate as if it were the conventionally accepted value. That's incredibly misleading.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But the US seems to be committed on repeating the Russian experience.
“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.”
Wikipedia has a lot wrong...
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.
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.
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.
If you’re 95% self sufficient it will stay at headlines in the local press.
Facts have this annoying tendency of getting in the way of propaganda.
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. Unfortunately both things can be true (irreversible decline) and solidified regime due to any external intervention.
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.
(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)
Opposition to the oppression of Palestinians is not ideological.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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)
Israel has given back more contiguous land captured during (defensive) wars its won than probably any other country in history.
Pretending the current conflict is because Israel randomly wants to take over it's neighbors is silly.
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.
edit: type
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
Tell us more about this white replacement theory, do you agree with Tucker?