What if today's Iran is resigned to a long, hellish war with the US?
(responsiblestatecraft.org)
from supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz to world@lemmy.world on 24 Feb 19:09
https://sopuli.xyz/post/41675480
from supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz to world@lemmy.world on 24 Feb 19:09
https://sopuli.xyz/post/41675480
If Washington’s participation in Israel’s June 2025 war with Iran elevated U.S. military force to a perfectly viable instrument of the United States’ Iran policy, the success of current talks would signal the formal undoing of that logic. But should the failure of talks pave the way for another full-scale war, the United States and Israel will be fighting an Iran vastly different from June. For the Iran of today appears to have made its peace with the grim conclusion that while a decisive slog with Israel and the United States is sure to be agonizing, it is preferable to the recurring attrition of repeated wars and a chronic strategic vulnerability that only emboldens adversaries to target Iran and its regional allies.
#world
threaded - newest
What if the reason Trump hasn’t attacked is because Iran is supplying Russia with the drones they need in Ukraine?
Yeah but the benefit of the US and other powers blowing through all their air defense missiles in another conflict with Iran would be so massive to Putin that in my opinion that is a major reason Trump is pushing this war.
LoL. Can you all not see how obvious it is that your analysis is fundamentally flawed? You both think Trump is doing Russia’s bidding and come to exact opposite conclusions that are both totally backed by your assumptions.
I mean, I couldn’t have asked for a better 2-comment encapsulation of the problem with this analysis.
I don’t feel gotcha’d here at all, the way I see it the most important, vital aide that can be given to Ukraine right now are missile interceptors/air defense, and it is politically awkward and costly for Trump to completely gum the works up and give nothing to Ukraine, same story repeated in other European nations harboring radical rightwing elements, so thus an easy solution for shitty people like Trump is to bomb Iran, get Iran to attack Israel and then print money for military industrial companies by utterly depleting air defense stocks for years among NATO powers while panicking about it.
Then… there is no political cost to withholding crucial air defense missiles to Ukraine because there aren’t any and the question of helping Ukraine can be turned against the need to protect the home country blah blah blah.
The logic is pretty straightforward in my mind? All that matters is that you assume Putin is Trump’s daddy, and I think we can all agree on that right?
US missile companies sure as hell aren’t going to lobby against this sequence of events either…
But this analysis requires entirely cutting out all context that might complicate your analysis.
For instance, Trump was the first US president to authorize weapons transfers to Ukraine.
Second, Iran is the last country on the list of 7 countries the US intended to invade as revealed by General Wesley Clark. That list of 7 countries was formulated under the GWBush administration, and the 7 countries that were on that list were:
So the conflict with Iran is at least 20+ years in the making and the plan has been followed not just by GW and Trump but also Obama/Clinton. The Biden administration continued the inter-administration policies in Syria, specifically the covert cultivation of the ISIS terrorist who eventually became the leader of Syria.
History didn’t start when Trump took office. The US has vested interests in the region and Trump is presiding over the administration of those interests. Just like Venezuela, the showboating may be influenced by Trump, but the development of the aggression against Venezuela started in 1999 and continued through every administration since then, Republic and Democrat.
The analysis that everything bad Trump does is because he’s really an extension of Russia is very clear example of a retreat to innocence. These are US decisions that have decades of history behind them, not idiosyncratic acts of a single president who is actually not part of US interests but actually is part of our enemy’s interests.
It’s such a reductive way of ignoring all of the years of effort that has gone in to US regime change planning and preparation and leaves us with the totally incorrect understanding that if only we elected someone else that none of this would be happening. It’s entirely possible that it wouldn’t be happening in precisely this way, with the particular PR, rhetoric, and media spin. But these operations span administrations and the president is operating, as all presidents generally do, on the basis of recommendations from the JCOS.
Yeah, you are definitely projecting it on to me that I am someone that would disagree with that, the US needing to bomb Iran is one of the more rabid devotions of US foreign policy over many decades and administrations.
That doesn’t mean Putin isn’t Trump’s daddy?
Stop trying to lecture me about a belief I don’t hold, I don’t at all think the fucked up relationship the US has towards Iran started with Trump or is the result of some Russian conspiracy.
Nope, it is just there are two shit sandwhiches here aligning in the sky above us in a total eclipse of rationality.
So if you understand the role the conflict plays in the continuity of US policy, attempting to analyze whether it will or won’t happen on the basis of Trump being owned by Putin is mostly useless. If the national security apparatus is still functioning enough to maintain this level of continuity, then how did it allow for a known adversary to take the presidency. If a known adversary took the presidency, why are his actions still continuous with the last several decades of foreign policy?
Who said the ruling class of the US are really the enemies of Russia? Like kind of, but in reality it is more about money and making deals than anything else so yeah… om my answer to the above quote is very easily, all it took was buckets of incompetence, collusion and people saying “not my problem!”.
So then are you saying Trump is a puppet of Russia or are you saying that the ruling class of the USA is and has been collaborating with Russia for some time, in which case, Trump is not a puppet but rather just another bog standard member of the ruling class?
Both to a degree.
What you are asking is how could the current situation be probable given my estimation of the motivations behind the important actors involved, relying on some kind of Newtonian perfect estimation of how one thing will bounce off another and I am saying these people are unbelievably incompetent, they absolutely would and did elect a complete traitor to have power over them. They make existentially conflicting strategic choices all of the damn time. You can’t evaluate the shitshow that is US power politics without adding in a massive dose of idiot juice, otherwise it will endlessly confound you that sometimes the decisions that are made don’t even seem to benefit the people who are in power making them.
Putin is Trump’s daddy, that doesn’t mean I am attributing the follies of US foreign policy all to some elaborate Russian conspiracy, I am just stating the obvious, Putin is Trump’s daddy, it is clear from his behavior.
No doubt Russia will move if a regional war kicks off, maybe even China. Which is no doubt why the Russian agents are getting so much pushback against attacking Iran.
The timing of the nuclear sabre rattling from the Kremlin is suspicious too.
Total crackpot armchair hypothesis: is this what it would look like if Russia’s plan was to escalate the war against Ukraine and Europe, and to do it while the United States is too occupied with other problems?
I don’t think Russia can meaningfully escalate without just resorting to nuclear bombs, but I think that would be a red line for China if it was just done arbitrarily as an escalation.
In every other respect Russia is near complete exhaustion militarily and any addition actions they take have to be done with elements triaged from other military efforts at the front… and as we are seeing Ukraine does not simply let Russia quietly remove intensity from its offensive without immediately punishing them in devastating localized counterattacks.
What Russia is doing here is trying to project limitless strength at the point they are at near exhaustion, they can’t really meaningfully tip the scales either way with Iran in my opinion, at least not to the degree the world seems to by default assume they can because they are a “military superpower”. Russia needs hostilities to pause in the Ukraine war soon or the problems at the frontline for them will begin to accelerate non-linearly. They also need to be given all of the defensive lines that Ukraine built in a shitty diplomatic deal because they don’t even remotely have the strength and vigor to power through them in the years long battle it would take to do so.
Iran wouldn’t blow through a serious fraction of US air defense. The main threats from Iran would be torpedo’s and water based mines from hidden/small launch sites. Their drone attacks would probably land a couple hits early on, due to sheer volume, but they wouldn’t get to launch waves like Russia is able to in Ukraine. There wouldn’t be enough launch sites remaining after the first two weeks.
The bigger issues would be what other countries do in reaction. China and Russia at the top of that list.
Iran already did in the 12 day war with Israel? What? Are you kidding? Air defense missile production capacity in the west was shown to be completely incapable of sustaining a complete blanket defense against a barrage of Iranian missiles and it has been a discussion since about how to address that. The air defenses work, clearly, but they run out quick.
In order to continue challenging air defenses, there has to be someplace left to launch an air attack from. And since Iran has nothing to stop US air attacks, that becomes an issue long before US air defense runs out.